ASUS - TUF DASH 15.6" Gaming Laptop - Intel 11th Gen i7 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 - 1TB M.2 PCIEG3 SSD - Eclipse Gray

I had high hopes for this laptop due to the price for what specs it contained. I ended up returning it because it felt cheap and had many issues. My main complaint is the track pad which felt terrible and was hard to use. Also the GPU was way slower than expected and when I compared it to other laptops with the same GPU.

Very nice performing laptop for the price can run most games at 4k just under 60fps and has easy performance management with ARMOURY Crate app. Modern and slim design makes it nice as a discreet desktop at home combined with a monitor or as a powerhouse on the go that fits in a small laptop backpack. 240 hz on laptop screen is beautiful especially with ray tracing the 1080p max resolution on laptop screen does not matter.

Very nice laptop for price and comparison. Only regret is that it gets hot fast so I would recommend getting a cooking pad. Do not use this for mining as GPU reaches a threshold that cuts monitor off as PSU cannot handle it. Mines came with the TAB key partially off and it becomes annoying having to press it back in as one of the white connectors under the key is broken OOB. Overall the 3070 coupled with the i7 gen 11 is nice however if you could get an i9 I would recommend. I also purchased a G502 Lightspeed Mouse to compliment it considering you save a lot with a price point of $1500 or less….Highly recommend if you can find an open box one at your local Best Buy for $1199 you won’t beat this performance with any other like this….The main key to this device is scalability in upgrading, performance, and price.

The latest series of gaming laptops packed with the new nVidia GeForce RTX-3000 series graphics cards have probably been the most anticipated in quite some time. It's incredible that there are models that fit most budgets. The ASUS TUF series is considered the budget friendly series of the ASUS component and laptop offerings. With the RTX-3000 series graphics cards being impossible to find it seems the best chance of getting to that level of performance is to grab a laptop sporting one of those cards. The ASUS TUF Dash F15 is a great budget friendly laptop with great specs at a decent $1449 pricetag. Sporting the latest Intel i7-11370H CPU, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, a 1TB M.2 SSD and a GeForce RTX-3070 it's got enough horsepower to tackle just about anything you throw at it. The 15.6" display is 1920 x 1080 running at 240hz with a 3ms refresh rate which should help with any eSports and FPS games. Specs also include Wifi 6 connectivity and Thunderbolt 4 port. It's lightweight and thin. The IO is pretty decent as well with a full size HDMI port, an Ethernet jack, a headphone jack, 3 type A USB ports and 1 type C USB port. However there are a couple of things missing... no SD card slot, not even a micro-SD slot. Also missing is a webcam. The subtle styling of the TUF would make it a great all purpose laptop but with more and more remote learning, work, etc a built in webcam is a necessity. Unfortunately ASUS is pushing the gaming laptop lines without what I would call a required feature. I'm not thrilled about having to pack a separate webcam in my backpack. The whole point of a thin and light is to make it more portable. The keyboard has a great feel to it. There is no clicking, travel of the keys is smooth and pleasing. I can type all day on this keyboard. There is no fancy RGB lighting but the backlighting is great. Not bright white but rather a moonlight white, maybe a slight green tint. Of course brightness is controllable and the uniqueness is the WASD keys are translucent making them stand out even in a bright room. The track pad has a good feel to it and the buttons provide enough tactile feedback you know you are pressing a button. ASUS' Armory Crate software is activated by a dedicated button above the regular keys. Armory Crate allows you to tweak performance, fan profiles, and install ASUS updates. Enough about under the hood, how does it run? I played AC Valhala and Division 2 on high quality graphics and it never skipped a beat. No stutter, no lag, impressively smooth play. I would expect nothing less from a RTX-3070. By no means is it the fastest thing out there, with AMD tearing Intel to pieces of late I'm somewhat surprised that ASUS didn't stuff a Ryzen 9 into it. I've got a ROG G14 with Ryzen and it screams but it has only a RTX-2070 and runs really hot not to mention the fan noise. At least the TUF runs considerably quieter than my G14 and doesn't get near as hot. FYI - I've included some screenshots of Cinebench results on CPU on multi-core and single core performance. So, at the end of the day it's hard to argue with grabbing one of these laptops. Performance on a budget. Great build quality, upgradable, price under $1500. What's not to love. Time to retire my AW M17. This is my new daily all purpose laptop and oh... it screams playing games.

Asus has a new laptop out, the TUF DASH F15, and I wanted to see how it stacks up against my desktop system. Unboxing and first impressions: The TUF DASH F15 “referred to as F15 from now on”, came in a basic brown box with a logo printed on it, nothing really fancy and no foam cradling it, just cardboard. It’s more than enough protection though and this laptop is advertised as being military tough anyway. Inside the box are the laptop, power adapter, power cord, and a quick start guide, that’s it. The laptop itself looks really nice and feels very sturdy there isn’t any type of flex to it like I’ve felt with other laptops in this range and the aluminum lid looks a lot better than most plastic ones I’ve seen, and with it having a metal lid the screen seems to have little flex to it. It’s hard to believe they can put this much power into a laptop that when closed is just over ¾ of an inch thick and weighs only 4.4lbs. The keyboard is centered as there isn’t a keypad “something I’m not used to seeing or using” and the keys all are full sized except for the direction/arrow keys, they are so tiny. There are also 4 dedicated control buttons above and to the left of the keyboard for mute, volume up/down and one to launch the Armory Crate software. The palm rest area is all plastic and there’s a nice sized touchpad also centered in the middle. Around the left side is a heat vent, power port, “about in the middle”, an Ethernet port, HDMI, USB, USB C/Thunderbolt port and a single audio jack that combines audio and microphone. On the right side there are two USB ports and a security lock port along with a heat vent. There’s nothing on the front and two heat vents on the back. Use: After going through the windows setup and Asus registration process the built in Asus maintenance software advised me that there were updates to the system. I let it go ahead and update what was on its list and ended up with two BIOS updates and one for VBIOS. There were also a bunch of Windows updates, so I let everything finish before doing much else. This also took a few reboots to get done so you can’t just walk away and think it will do it all on its own, you have to confirm the reboot a few times. After all that was finished it was time to install Steam and download a few games to give this new laptop a good workout. I also installed Geekbench 5 and Crystal Diskmark to give the system a good workout before gaming. The keyboard is nice to type on but it’s taking me a bit to get used to the centered keyboard. Since there isn’t a dedicated keypad “which I do prefer having” the whole keyboard and touch pad are centered in the middle of the palm rest. This reminds me of some of my older IBM Thinkpad laptops and I actually had a hard time getting used to my first laptop that had a keypad since the keyboard was off centered; now I’m having to relearn the other direction. I really don’t have any complaints with typing on the keyboard, the keys for me feel fine, and I’ve used so many different keyboards over the years I can pretty much type on anything without any difficulty. The keyboard is also backlit, and only has one single color a lite blue teal shade to it. The color is pleasant and very easy on the eyes. Luckily you can adjust brightness by three levels or just turn it off. The WASD keys are clear and stand out against the black keys for the rest of the keyboard. My only real complaints with this unit is the location of the power port, in the middle on the left side is a little inconvenient but I’ve seen this type of location on a few other competing brands. At least the power jack is at a 90 degree angle so the cord can be kept out of the way. My other complaint is the location of the right hand heat vent. If you are using a mouse to game with “which I do as well as everyone else I know that games with a laptop” the heat blows right on your hand if you don’t keep the laptop far enough away so you can place the mouse away from it, you end up with a very warm mouse and right hand, “not very comfortable gaming with a hot sweaty hand :| “. Performance: Gaming performance is surprisingly good even though the processor is only a quad core it’s plenty fast and my Geekbench 5 results were amazingly good. My desktop system is a I7 9700 with 32gb of DDR4 memory, and a Nvidia RTX 2070 OC, it’s Geekbench 5 results were 1239 single core, 7138 multicore, and 90934 compute score. The F15 scored a 1575 single core, 5167 multi core, and an 112527 compute score, “very impressive results”. This thin light laptop is actually quite fast comparing it to my desktop that’s not that old. I ran Crystal Diskmark on the F15 and compared it to my Samsung EVO 970 in my desktop and surprisingly the F15 came out on top most of the time, “you can see those results in my attached images”. Now for gaming, I’ve been running Borderlands 3, and The Witcher 3, the frame rates are right up there with my RTX2070 OC that’s in my desktop. And at times it’s actually faster depending on the settings. In BL3 at set at 1080 and high graphic settings I was getting 110fps, with my desktop at the same settings it gets 115fps average. Changing both to Ultra high settings the F15 was getting 96fps and the desktop was 106, both are pretty close, and on a 15” screen there’s really no need to have the graphic settings set on ultra anyway, it is noticeable on my desktop system as I have a 32” gaming monitor for it. I also wanted to try the laptop on an external monitor so I hooked it up to the one connected to my desktop. It’s a 32” curved 165hz screen and it worked perfectly with the F15 hooked up to it and set at the full 1440P resolution of the external monitor. Comparing the two with a high graphic setting at 1440p the F15 was getting 91fps with the desktop hitting 65fps and then setting the graphics to ultra the F15 was hitting 77fps and the desktop averaged 60fps. That’s pretty amazing that the F15 was pretty much beating my desktop system with the 2070 with the external monitor hooked up and higher / ultra graphics settings, it looks like it’s faster running 1440p resolution on an external monitor “I’ll have to do a lot of gaming to test this out :) . I didn’t do any comparison benchmarking with Witcher 3 but I was getting around 120fps with graphics set on high “1080 internal monitor” and about 80fps on ultra. That’s excellent for a thin light gaming laptop. I also found that if you tweak the settings just a little in BL3 under ultra and turned down Atrophic filtering from 16 to 4 and turned down a couple of the ultra detail settings “like shadow” to high I could get 82fps on the 1440 monitor set at 1440p. I also used the Armory Crate software, “access this by pressing the last button of the dedicated keys above the keyboard. The software is pretty nice as you can easily tweak your performance settings from heavy gaming to basic web browsing and watching movies. For gaming I always had it set on “Turbo” mode, otherwise I would set it to silent. Heat/Noise: As far as heat goes this laptop does get warm, very warm, but fortunately the way the fans are located “you can actually feel air moving around the WASD keys” the WASD keys stay quite cool. You can see in my thermal images where the heat is located. And I sure wouldn’t be gaming with this on my laps without a solid tray underneath it. A cooling pad would help out the heat quite a bit; I just don’t have one to try that out. The fans themselves do crank up a good bit while gaming but they aren’t that bad, and it’s not a high pitched annoying whine. I have a professional sound meter and with the sensor placed within an inch of the loudest exhaust port, during a good gaming session, it was reading about 60db, but once you moved away the sound dropped considerably off. Screen: The 240hz screen is really nice, for me it’s plenty bright as I rarely use any of my systems in a bright environment. And during gaming even though I never maxed out “or came close” to 240fps the screen was always smooth and clear. Color “for me” is great, and seems very accurate, with colors not being dull like I’ve seen on so many other laptops I’ve owned. Viewing angles are also excellent with very little fading from side to side or up and down. Conclusion: This Asus TUF Dash F15 laptop is great for gaming, it’s thin, light and easily portable. I only put the battery to short tests but it held up much better than my other gaming laptops, and if you use the Armory Crate settings to tweak the system for what you are using it for then you can get quite a few hours out of it just watching movies or web surfing. All the components can be accessed by removing the bottom panel, and one nice touch is a single captive screw “lower right corner” that when you loosen it “removing all other screws first” helps pop the corner of the cover up so you can get underneath it to remove. The only thing you have to be careful of is Asus used two different screw lengths on the bottom, just be careful where those go. Once the cover is removed you can add another M.2 drive, there’s one open slot, or upgrade the memory. There’s only one 8gb stick that’s removable so you’ll only be able to add more by replacing that one module. My only negatives are minimal, they are the location of the power port, and the right hand vent, “and maybe missing the keypad” but that’s about it. It’s also odd that Asus eliminated the web camera, but maybe they couldn’t fit it in the lid being it’s as thin as it is. I can live without it as I have dedicated webcams but it’s something you’ll have to keep in mind when buying this one. If you are looking for a pretty powerful, fast and light laptop for gaming on the go this would be a great one to get.

Good performance for the value. Screen is perfect with 240 hertz. What ı dont like is speakers. Without headphone ı cant understand when ı watch some movie ı think its too less volume for the speakers. And once laptop is crashed ı dont know why but just once it happened no more. And also there is strange sound coming from the upper part of the keyboard its like sonic.

Amazing laptop with great power efficiency. It has an amazing screen and GPU. The price makes it the cheapest RTX 3070 Laptop and it just is great for gaming. Yes, any laptop can do office work just fine no matter what you pay. But if you want to game, you need a powerful laptop like this.

My first impression out of the box is how thin the TUF Dash F15 is. I’m so used to my 2018 HP Omen 15 weight and thickness. I was taken by surprise by how light and thin it was when I took it out of the box. Summary of the Specs: 11th Gen i7 4 Core 8 Threads CPU. RTX 3070 GPU w/ 8GB of VRAM running at 80w (up to 85w boost). 1TB SSD in addition to an empty m2 slot for additional storage. 16GB of Dual Channel DDR4 3200mhz RAM. 8GB are soldered. 240hz refresh rate, 3ms response display with 100% sRBG color Thunderbolt 4 USB Type C charging (requires 100w PD charger) 200w charger up to 50% charged under 30mins WiFi 6 Support Design and Build Quality: For 2021 Asus made some slight design changes to the TUF lineup. Overall size and weight have been reduced resulting in a much cleaner looking laptop with flat sharp edges. The laptop lid is made out of metal but the rest of the build is made of solid plastic. I did not experience any creaks even when carrying it around single handily. It’s a nice-looking laptop without the over-the-top gaming laptop aesthetics that gaming laptops are known for. You can definitely take it with you to work and not have to worry about drawing too much attention. Performance: So far I have no complaints. I was a little worry going from a 6 core CPU to a 4 core CPU. But the performance has been awesome so far. As far as gaming goes I would say that games are at least 35-40% better performance in higher quality settings. Having much better performance with a thinner chassis is a win in my book. Some of the games I tested were Fortnite (avg 120fps epic settings, Forza 4 (max settings @1080p 94fps). As for the temps they stay around 80°C only one time I notice it went above 90°C. For the most part, it does run cool compared to my Omen gaming laptop that would constantly stay around 90°C. Even though it runs cooler I highly suggest getting a laptop cooler to help keep it running cooler during your gaming sessions. Not only does it run cooler due to the lower wattage CPU, but you also gain some battery life. With my previous Omen 15 2018, I would average around 5hrs of battery usage. With the TUF Dash F15, I get right around 8-10hrs of battery life on mixed usage like web browsing, YouTube, and streaming Netflix. Keep in mind since Nvidia no longer uses the Max Q to differentiate their GPUs is now about the max wattage. The Asus TUF-F15 RTX 3070 GPU operates at 80watt but can boost up to 85watt. Another laptop with the same GPU but running at a much higher wattage will have better performance compared to this one. The higher the wattage the higher the thermal load is, and in order for the cooling system to be able to keep things from overheating the thickness of the laptop chassis is usually thicker. Overall it depends if you’re looking for a thin laptop that can game the Asus TUF-F15 is a solid choice. But if you’re looking for the best performance I suggest considering a model that can run their GPU at a much higher wattage. Display: It’s bright, colorful, and smooth as butter. It’s a joy each time I get to use this display for gaming or consuming video content. With 100% sRGB colors it’s a good display for content creators. Going from my previous 60hz screen to this is a night and day difference. Backlight bleed is minimal is pretty much evenly lit. Keyboard: As for the keyboard I have no complaints. It has a good amount of travel depth and feedback. The keys are backlit with a teal-like color. There no other options to change the color but you can change the light animation from static to breathing or strobing. I also like how the WASD keys stand out with the clear see-through keys cover. It’s a good keyboard to type on and game on too if you wanted. As for the touchpad, it has a smooth surface to easily slide your finger on. It’s also a clickable touchpad so no individual left or right buttons. Gestures worked fine like using two fingers to scroll and 3 fingers to go back to the home screen or return back to the previous open app. Summary: I think Asus nailed it with how much performance you can get out of this thin chassis. It has a strong battery life that I feel comfortable enough to leave the charger behind. It’s not the top-performing RTX 3070 laptop out there but still provided a good gaming experience. If you’re someone in need of a portable light gaming machine considered the Asus TUF-F15 to fulfill that role. “Reviewers in this invitation-only program are provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews.”