Asus TUF Dash F15: Mixes pleasure with work, but a bit heavy

Asus offers a range of laptops – Zenbook, Vivobook and Chromebooks, and two distinct ones called the ROG series and the TUF series. The ROG and the TUF – short for Republic of Gamers and The Ultimate Force, respectively – are gaming laptops. While the ROG is the gold standard in gaming, the TUF series is for people who love gaming and also want a relatively affordable laptop for daily usage. The latest in the market is the TUF Dash F15.

What defines its design?
Visualise the Iron Man walking into a boardroom holding the TUF Dash F15, and the laptop won’t look out of place. It has a design inspired by the Japanese mecha (humanoid walking vehicles or robots). It’s available in off-black and moonlight white colour options. Overall, it looks and feels tough and durable.

The CPU is the 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12650H and the GPU is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070. RAM is 16GB (with support for up to 32GB) and storage is 512GB/1TB. These specifications let you shift on the fly between gaming, streaming and general productivity tasks.

Gaming laptops generally use dedicated graphics chips for high performance, but most route those frames through the CPU’s integrated graphics. This offers better battery life but bottlenecks the GPU from delivering best performance. The TUF Dash F15, however, has the MUX (multiplexer) switch, using which you can switch to the direct GPU mode that reduces latency and boosts performance. But when I used the MUX switch, it appeared to drain the battery quite fast, and so it is best used when you are playing an AAA game and the charger is plugged in.

Is it good for daily usage?
You may be a video-gaming enthusiast, but you could definitely use the TUF Dash F15 for watching films, office work, or simply for browsing. For all these tasks, the TUF Dash F15 is as good as any mid-range laptop. Its screen is crystal clear and the colours reproduced are just right. It gets Type-C charging (up to 100W) that lets you charge the laptop from portable power packs, and that is a convenient feature in case you are at a place where it is tough to find a socket. It also has fast charging capability, and in just 30 minutes you can charge 50% of the battery. The battery life is good—it lasted me about 7 hours on mixed usage.

Lastly, the TUF Dash F15 is just 19.95-mm thin, and so it can easily slip into backpacks, though at 2 kg in weight it is a bit on the heavier side. Prices start at Rs 90,990, which is both affordable and expensive; affordable because it gives you ROG-like performance at a lower price point; and expensive because if gaming is something you do once in a while, there are many other more affordable choices in the market.

SPECIFICATIONS

Screen size: 15.6 inches
CPU: 12th Gen Intel Core i5/i7
GPU: Nvidia RTX
Memory: 16GB (supports 32GB RAM)
Storage: 512GB/1TB
Battery: 76 Whr, 4-cell Li-ion
Weight: 2 kg
Estimated street price: Rs 90,990

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