ASUS - TUF Gaming 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i5 - 8GB DDR4 Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti - 512GB SSD - Eclipse Grey

As a PC Gamer, if you want portability, you need a Gaming Laptop. While a desktop gaming PC will give you the best results, you can't take a desktop on the road. The ASUS TUF Gaming gives you modest specs in a portable gaming setup. At 17" it might be on the borderline of portable, but the size does have benefits - a bigger screen and more space for cooling. Out of the box, the ASUS TUF is a nice looking unit. It looks a little more rugged than your typical gaming laptop. Although the external surfaces are a bit of a finger print magnet. I like that the ASUS TUF has a proper Ethernet and HDMI port. The former is a lifesaver because out of the box there were a lot of Microsoft Windows 11 updates. What was a surprise though is that the ASUS Armoury Crate software (controls RGB, etc) claimed it was not compatible with the laptop until the software updates. So make sure you update everything before you put it through its paces. You can't talk about a gaming laptop without mentioning RGB. The ASUS TUF RGBs are bright. The WASD keys are translucent, not sure about that choice as on some RGB color schemes that is SUPER bright (see picture, taken in daylight). You can edit the colors using the ASUS Armoury Crate software or there are keyboard shortcuts using the arrow keys. Key travel is good, the touchpad though is not so good. I am not a fan of the touchpad, I actively dislike it. It's the first touchpad I have used in a long time that has mouse buttons that are a physical press and they have a lot of travel (too much really). It's just icky and I am not a fan. In fact, the touchpad is a reason I took away a star, as it's that bad. I would really plan to use the ASUS TUF with an external gaming mouse. The i5 and RTX3050TI mean you can play most recent games on lower settings with great results. You can push to medium, but gaming laptop thermals are always not a fan of medium-high settings. I didn't notice the ASUS TUF getting too hot to touch, the fans are efficient and were not too noisy. At idle, I didn't have the fans kick in, but I have a well ventilated desk. Gaming, I tested the ASUS TUF on Overwatch and Elden Ring. On Overwatch, I got 112fps, on Elden Ring 33fps. Elden Ring really got the fans going, but the game was playable and the 144HZ screen produces excellent picture. In UserBenchmark tests, the results show what you would expect which is a good not great performance. You could push this a little harder by adding RAM and a faster SSD. Worth knowing, the ASUS TUF has room for an extra SSD which is a nice touch for this price point. FYI, the ASUS TUF is powered by a 180W charger. Would I recommend the ASUS TUF? At this price point it is great value. ASUS make reliable laptops and have good gaming pedigree. If you're using this with an external mouse, it's a great laptop. It's good for the entry to mid-level PC gamer, looks the part, and recent games are playable. At the price point, it's great value and you will get 2-3 years out of it. If you're a hard core gamer, you would probably want something better spec'd, but it's such a trade off with laptops and personally, I would rather buy this ASUS TUF than a higher spec'd laptop because you get to a price point where you might be better with a desktop. PS. There are some ASUS TUF stickers included in the box, not sure why... but there you go.

With my son heading off to start his college career this fall, I was looking for a budget-friendly laptop that would both serve to keep him well equipped to tackle all of the tasks his studies and classes demanded, and give him an outlet to get online and hit pick-up games with his friends once classes were done. He is an avid gamer with a pretty decent desktop build currently at home, but we aren’t sure what type of real estate he will have in the dorms, and need to presume for now that the portability of the laptop will have to suffice. We both love gaming and desktop building, and ASUS products have been the backbone of both of our most recent builds- the Maximus X Code ROG motherboard is the foundation of my rig, and a ROG Strix motherboard at the heart of his. The brand has been core to our builds over the years and hasn’t disappointed yet- a streak that continues with this latest laptop offering. The ASUS TUF Gaming F17 laptop seems to hit the perfect balance of build quality, aesthetic, power and value. There are a lot of cool features and touchpoints that channel that gaming feel, starting out of the box with a chassis that follows the classic TUF formula – that cool industrial design with angled edges all around, and topped with a fingerprint-resistant matte-grey metal lid sporting a bold ‘TUF’ logo across a third of the surface. Definitely more substantial feeling than many of the sleek/slick razer thin laptops. The underside has a cool honeycomb design with some visible venting (in addition to some top and side vents) to provide airflow for heat-dissipation. The sides are equipped with a few USB ports, power connection, ethernet connection, an HDMI port, a Type C USB thunderbolt port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It is all plastic outside of the lid, but that is expected at the price point, and doesn’t detract from anything. Open the lid, and you are greeted with a 17.3” full HD 144Hz IPS panel providing a great viewing experience at 1920 x 1080. Colors are really vibrant and the picture is vivid, whether streaming high resolution video or gaming, with pretty decent viewing angles and a warmth that isn’t overly bright or hard on the eyes. The deck itself holds your standard keypad setup with separate number pad, as well as the touchpad and left/right buttons all awash in single-zone RGB which can be controlled using both the Aura Sync and Armoury Crate software. I love the keys in particular as I am a huge fan of low-profile keys that run in stealth mode (no tactile clicking). These deliver fantastically, with clear-capped WASD keys and an overall grip to the key surface that feels comfortable and quick at the same time. Power button is up and away on the right, which will please anyone who went for the F12 button and mistakenly shut down the machine mid-game. At the heart of it all and driving the bus is an Intel 11th gen Core i5-11260H processer, capable of 3.9GHz, and n NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti discrete graphics card. It is a pretty strong setup for the money, and can handle. My son plays a lot of different titles that span the graphical gamut, from indie 8bit titles to most of the current triple A titles. Not kidding, Minecraft will be on for an hour, and he dives into Warzone or Apex Legends. You will have to tweak some of your settings depending on how demanding the title is, but you can achieve pretty consistent FPS of 50 or better on the more intensive games with stock settings, and can get it up to anywhere between 80-100 FPS if you dial down some of the graphic settings. Through a few bench tests with games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Warzone and some of the Halo suite, FPS kept up well and north of 55 in the mid-range settings. Depending on the game, I could dial it up a little higher with a tweak here or there. All in all, the laptop absolutely delivers a great gaming experience at the price point. The only real improvement I could ask for at the cost is memory. The DDR 3200 speed 8GB stick it comes with is more than fine for browsing, streaming or desktop work, and it can manage gaming okay….but you remove any doubt of throttle and really raise the ceiling of the unit if you bump it up to 16g of dual channel RAM. At current memory costs, it’s a no-brainer to make this upgrade yourself, as the laptop is equipped with dual slots that can accommodate up to 64g total. Speaking of expandability, the laptop as configured comes with a 512GB PCI-e SSD, as well as additional slot for an additional PCI-e drive, and what looks like an open bay for a SATA SSD as well. I personally have already thrown the new RAM in, and dependent on how my son wants to manage his storage (remote or internal), there are plenty of solutions for him to grow there as well. ASUS remains the standard-bearer in our house for computing, very excited about how this newest member will help my son grow (and have fun) as he starts his new chapter in the fall.

Great gaming laptop and for content creating! I use it to game every now and then, I also use it for music production running FL Studio 20. Works great! Very smooth I upgraded the RAM to 16GB.

All in all a real nice machine. It has some really good points but also a few drawbacks. If you're looking for a (relatively) inexpensive gaming laptop, this one may work for you but it will depend on what type of games you like to play. I do like this laptop. It's a sleek a beautiful machine on the outside. The angular cutouts are unique and give this machine a modern and fun look. I appreciate the small handle on the display edge that helps to open it. The angular motif continues on the inside with angles and rises that give it a very interesting look. The small, indiscreet LED's that show power, battery, hard drive access and airplane mode are a welcome addition. I find that a lot of, especially laptops, today don't bother including them, which I feel is a shame. The power button has a red LED in it so you can always find it when you need to. Ports on the outside include three USB 3.2 jacks, a USB C jack, an HDMI jack an RJ45 network jack and a mini headphone jack. The keyboard is has good action but is not overly impressive. I like the single zone RGB back lighting, and it highlights the W, A, S and D keys with clear keys. I really like the touchpad and the separate mechanical buttons are very welcome. I'm sick of hunting around on a touchpad for the integrated buttons, why did we start pulling away from that design? Separate buttons are by far the way to go. The brushed metal look on the keyboard deck is striking and well done. The machine comes pre-loaded with Windows 11. The Intel corei5 is a solid processor and the machine never lagged a bit when using it. Overall I like this machine, but there are a few deficiencies that make me question the term “gaming” laptop. The most noticeable is the display. The overall appearance seems somewhat washed out and not crisp. It's a bit on the dim side as well (even with the brightness all the way up). The maximum resolution is 1920 x 1080. Not bad, but as a lot of what you're paying for in a gaming grade machine is video quality, it could be better. Video is also hampered by the anemic amount of graphics memory. If you like to play PC video games in full screen mode, you may need to squash down the available video settings in order to do it. When playing Doom Eternal, I had to put the display settings down to 1600 x 900 to be able to play in full screen mode. Arguably, if you don't play a lot of first person shooters, you may be fine but the small amount of dedicated video memory really strangles the possibility of high quality video game play. You may also want to know that HDR video is not supported. Not a game changer for most people but it is something else you don't get on the video side of things. While 8G of memory is fine for most machines, it would have been nice to see that it included 16G. My game play was smooth, but at some point you're going to run into a game that wants more. I also never had any other program running while I was playing so I'm sure that helped. In it's defense, it comes with two memory card slots and only uses one, so if you wanted to, you could upgrade the memory all the way up to 32G. The machine does run pretty cool. I have used other machines that get blazing hot when playing games. One thing to note, part of the heat exhaust is on the right side, so if your mouse is on the right side, you do feel the heated air blowing out on your mouse hand. Left handed mice people will not be affected by this. It's not overly annoying, but I did notice it. I also appreciated how quiet this machine is, even when gaming. I've used some machines that had such loud fans it was hard to hear the game itself. Asus includes their Armoury Crate control panel for fine tuning things like fan speed, setting up profiles for different games, changing the keyboard lighting effect and color, etc.. It also shows all your CPU and GPU stats. Some other bonus features that are included are a 512GB SSD, DTS audio system, and a 720p camera. Overall, a very nice machine. Really, the only thing missing from this gaming laptop is a higher quality video display. Depending on what you're used to gaming on or the type of games you like to play, you may be fine with it. I certainly think for a machine at this level, it does give you quite a lot for the money.

I am very disappointed. I bought this computer about 4 weeks ago, the third time I turned it on, the computer started having problems. It opened dozens of pages at the same time and blended the colors until it turned off completely. I went to Best buy to change my computer, they said they didn't have it in the store and then they would send a NEW ONE to me. I received THE SAME computer with the same problem last Tuesday (before i even type my email it already showed up, and everything else too) . I'm returning once more. I want my money back.

Asus makes great quality gaming devices and their newest laptop, the Asus TUF is no exception. First off this is a mid level gaming laptop, in terms of price and specs, what that means is it that it will not play newer AAA titles at the highest settings but can play them at the lowest settings depending on the game. It can however play pretty much any older game or games that are not too graphically demanding just fine. Screen: 17.3 inches in size, A very big screen for a laptop, features FHD (full high definition) with a resolution 1920x1080. Those number‘s might seem impressive but it is outdated by today’s standards and its the absolute minimum you should buy. With all that being saying, The screen looks clear enough and good enough to not only play games but also run other applications like Microsoft Word or just simply browsing the web. At 144Hz refresh rate, the screen will always run silky smooth Processor: Intel Core i5, A mid level processor that is more than capable to run any program and most games just fine. Ram: 8GB, this is the absolute minimum a modern gaming laptop should have, so this is a little disappointing, most games nowadays require at least 8GB for the game to be able to run, so this is definitely not future proof. More Ram will have to be added in the future to keep it up-to-date. Graphics card: NVIDIA geforce RTX3050 Ti. Perhaps the single best component of this laptop, this graphics card has enough power to play pretty much any game at the highest settings. Memory: 512GB SSD, No issues here, and pretty self-explanatory. SSD is always the way to go. Comes pre-installed with Windows 10 operating system, Windows 11 is out now and all you have to do is download a free update. Ports: this laptop has them all, 3xUSB Type-A, 1xUSB Type C with DisplayPort, 1x3.5 Audio Jack and 1xRJ45 LAN Port, and of course the charging port. Wireless and wired connectivity and more. Conclusion: this laptop is on the larger heavier side than most laptops in the market, but that’s because it’s considered a gaming laptop, and well, it fits a lot within its frame. More than capable of playing most games at the highest settings like World of Warcraft, Roblox, and most Xbox Game Pass games, as well as most games on Steam. And technically it’s able to play games like Apex Legends, Halo Infinite and Warzone at the lowest settings. This laptop does not meet the requirements to play the new Elden Ring. I think as people know what to expect, and for the price range, this is a pretty good mid level gaming laptop, it’s a little disappointing that this laptop doesn’t have at least 12GB of RAM, and maybe a 1440P display would’ve been nice, but overall you get exactly what you pay for, a good quality mid level gaming laptop by one of the best Brands.

I love the screen, the picture is great, the sound is decent, but it's not the best in games. It does ok, and I guess it's pretty good for the price, but its best for mostly casual games, or older games that don't need a lot of graphics horse power. The RGB lighting is pretty, and can be adjusted to multiple factory settings, and it can also be adjusted to custom settings if you go into the menu system a little bit. The track pad does an excellent job, and I like that I can double tap, click and hold, or use the dedicated left and right click buttons below the pad. As I mentioned the screen is pretty good. It's not OLED or anything, but it doesn't have very much bleed through, and the blacks are nice and dark with good contrast. I didn't play with any of the picture adjustment settings as I was pretty happy with it right out of the box on both Games and surfing the web. There are a few things I don't like about this laptop though. I wasn't able to turn up the eye candy, or even turn on some of the features at all in newer games because it just doesn't have enough power to get acceptable frame rates. Even in the Asus Armoury Crate turning everything up to Turbo, high performance, and disabling power save etc. I did notice that the internal graphics card gets shut off and the laptop uses the graphics on the processor instead. I tried running several different Benchmark programs and every one of them only ran the integrated GPU instead of the dedicated. I tried multiple things, including disabling the IGPU in the Control Panel Device manager, Setting the Nvidia card as the default GPU. I tried using the Nvidia control panel, the Windows Control Panel, and the Asus Armory Crate control panel, and nothing I did would make the Nvidia card the default GPU. I got online and did some research and the internet is full of people with the same issues, but I was unable to find a solution. Another thing I don't like about this laptop, is that while gaming with a mouse, the hot exhaust blows directly onto my mouse hand. It's not hot enough to burn, but it's hot enough to be uncomfortable and it's really annoying. I also am not a fan of Windows 11 and it's super annoying way that it tries to force Microsoft Edge down my throat. As to weather or not I recommend this laptop or not, it depends on what you want to use it for. I think it would be just fine for Casual Gaming, and it looks really nice, and is well built. The I5 processor is plenty beefy, the screen and speakers are really decent as well. If you're looking to run the newest games with a lot of eye candy, you will want to look into something more powerful.

Great value gamer That is exactly what this is. Is it the fastest processer? No, but it has enough horses for most gaming. I use this mostly for a popular OS companies flight simulator and it does fine. The memory is 512 gig SSD so it''s plenty snappy. Do I wish it was a 1 TB? Well yes, bigger is always better but it is not necessarily "required" and it is a relatively cheap and easy upgrade were I to decide. The same is true of RAM. This bad boy steps into the ring with 8 gig, but for most (I stress most) gaming that I do, 8 is a solid start. It is also an easy upgrade so back to this being a value gamer, yeah, it's fine. As for the screen, well, the older my old eyes get, the more I appreciate the 17" platform. It's 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) so great for most any purpose. Is 4K "better", well yeah at the margains, sure but I can tell very little difference between this and the 4K gamer that I use. And not to beat a dead pillow, but this is a value gamer. Another item I like is the addition of the 10 key keypad. It's a nice addition for when I am using this PC for other purposes. Speaking of the keyboard, the back-lighting is cool and adjustable. Excellent for those late nights when it's a never-ending "just one more game". We've all been there! End of the day, great value, easily upgradeable and good choice for the casusal to to mid gamer. I would (and have) recommend to a friend!