BEING able to game wherever you like is a big attraction of a gaming laptop, and having one that you don’t have to be worried about knocking around a bit is an even bigger attraction.
That’s pretty much the point of the Asus Tuf range of laptops – built to US Military MIL-STD-810H specs for durability, they’re designed to actually be carried around and used, featuring a rugged plastic and metal construction.
The subject of this review, the Asus TUF Dash F15, is no exception.
According to Asus, as part of the MIL-STD-810H testing, “test devices are exposed to drops, vibration, humidity, and extreme temperatures to ensure reliability” and as a result, the Dash F15 is “dependable even in the harshest conditions” and “more than capable of withstanding accidental bumps and knocks on the move” – all things
While the last Tuf laptop I reviewed – the A15 – was OK but not great, the Asus Tuf Dash F15 is light-years ahead of it and a brilliant all-round gaming-focussed laptop, with a high-refresh display, solid graphics card and – the pièce de résistance – a really, really long battery life.
First, the techie specs.
The review model featured a 3.3Ghz Intel “Tiger Lake” i7-11370H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 15.6in 1080p 240Hz screen with a 3ms refresh, powered by an Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU.
Measuring 360mm wide x 252mm deep and 19.9mm thin when closed, the Dash F15 weighs 2kg and is wonderfully portable as a result – it’s easy to put in pretty much any backpack (or even a large shoulder bag) and away you go.
The system was more than capable from a gaming perspective – everything I played on it, from Control to Borderlands 3 to Lego Builder’s Journey ran just as you’d expect. It’s a solid mid-high end system and for most people who aren’t obsessed with frame rates or getting the absolute max resolution, it’s going to provide a very satisfactory gaming experience indeed.
The cooling system also works very well and I didn’t encounter any issues with excessive heating, which my lap appreciated.
A 3DMark test returned a very respectable 7328 on the Time Spy benchmark, which is about where you’d expect a system of this configuration to be. The SSD, meanwhile, returned excellent results of 3530MB/s read and 3113MB/s write speeds via Crystal Disk Mark 8.
Where the Tuf Dash F15 really stood out is its legitimately long battery life under real-world conditions. Most gaming laptops I’ve reviewed are pushing two hours, maybe a bit longer for non-gaming use, but the Tuf Dash 15 easily ran for eight hours off a single charge while being used for e-mail, word processing, internet browsing, and streaming video watching.
Asus say the battery will last up to 16.6 hours and while I wasn’t able to get there in my own tests, I absolutely believe the unit can get up that way with a few power use tweaks. The standard options in the taskbar menu provided an effective way to slide between gaming power and productivity power levels.
The Dash F15 has by far the longest “real world use” battery life of any laptop I can recall reviewing and I cannot understate just how useful it is to be able to legitimately go an entire workday without frantically trying to find a power point.
Attractively, the unit also features a Thunderbolt connection, enabling it to be powered and recharged (when in standby) from something like the WD Black D50 Game Dock.
The backlit chiclet keys are surprisingly comfortable to type and game with and aren’t noisy or distracting, either. As with most backlit gaming keyboards, the lighting scheme can be customised or even just turned off if you want to keep things understated.
The Asus Tuf Dash F15 sits right at the epicentre of the Venn Diagram of “Reasonably Priced”, “Good Quality” and “Legit Gaming Performance” and has thoroughly impressed me with what it has to offer.
This is a beautifully well-rounded system and I have no hesitation at all in highly recommending it to anyone who travels a lot (especially if they work FIFO or are outdoors a lot) and wants a respectable gaming computer that can stand up to the rigours of being outside and away from power point for extended periods.
