Asus TUF Gaming A16 review: A heavyweight in the world of gaming laptops

Design Gaming It is assumed to go unnoticed. True to the TUF identity, the lines of this A16 are angular and imposing, but distinct from the previous model. Ventilation, previously located on the top, now moves to the rear of the machine, creating a characteristic vent. The system LEDs are also placed there, an unusual choice although not too annoying in practice.

The 2024 vintage keyboard has been redesigned and has wide margins all around. This layout results in a more compact keyboard than expected on a 16-inch chassis, which can be confusing. The arrow keys overlap the left shift key, cutting it in half. If experience. Gaming Remains comfortable – thanks to the practical numeric keypad, especially for MMORPGs – traditional typing requires an adaptation period. The coating on the keys and internal chassis unfortunately attracts fingerprints, which are especially visible in direct light. The touchpad offers a decent experience without being exceptional.

The usual strong point of a laptop GamingConnectivity is complete with two USB-C ports (3.2 and 4), two USB-A 3.2 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an RJ45 LAN port and a headphone jack. Apart from the USB-A port on the right side, most of the connectors are grouped on the left edge. In terms of wireless connectivity, the A16 remains modest with Bluetooth 5.3 and a MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E chip (1800 Mb/s), limiting its durability once Wi-Fi 7 arrives.

Serenity impresses here. Even during extreme tasks, such as video compression or benchmarks raytracingthe fan pair remains discreet: 37 dB(A) in turbo mode, 32 dB(A) in balanced mode and 30.2 dB(A) in silent mode. This performance compensates for the occasional slight hum during normal office tasks.

Temperature is controlled under load. The chassis maintains a temperature of around 40°C from the top rows to the center, making it comfortable to use. The ventilation zones logically form the hottest point with a maximum measurement of 45.4°C.

The Asus TUF A16 (2024) features an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with four Zen5 performance cores (up to 5.1 GHz at boost) and eight low-power Zen5c cores (up to 3.3 GHz), which are already present in the A14 model. . . A high-performance chipset with up to 50 cores of NPU computing power for artificial intelligence tasks.

Concretely, this latest-generation processor ensures flawless fluidity for office tasks and content consumption – at least if we put up with its average panel, as we’ll explain later. On the other side of the mirror, content creators will be able to offer their services thanks to the good performance in video export on Adobe Premiere Pro, but also in 3D modeling with Blender. Results that necessarily improve with combined (and winning) use of the GPU.

As for the SSD, the Micron NVMe and its 2 TB of storage deliver completely average performance, with 4931 Mb/s read speeds and 3540 Mb/s write speeds. Nothing too impressive, but nothing dramatic either.

With a 4070 under the hood, our expectations were understandably high. The machine does not disappoint us with enough performance for the session. Gaming On our range of benchmark games, 1080p resolution performed optimally with all graphics options turned on. Unnecessary topics like Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc Assassin’s Creed Mirage Logically start tickling the 100 frames per second (fps) mark or higher.

On some more demanding and compatible games, e.g Cyberpunk 2077Using DLSS 3 (Frame Gen) from Nvidia’s 40 series works wonders. returnFor example, 140 fps is reached. famous Cyberpunk 2077 It benefits from that too, clocking in at 33 fps. raytracing Active, while open world CD Project Red Shoots up to 82 fps with DLSS 3. Concretely, only recent Dark Myth: Wukong Caused real problems, barely within 60 fps raytracing Enabled with DLSS 3. It must be said that this recent action game still has room for improvement for its PC port.

The Asus TUF 16 is logically on par with, or even slightly superior to, other competing machines with similar graphics cards and voltages. Thus, the GPU performance index of MSI Raider GE68HX and Alienware M16 R2 is very close, Asus machine has been able to extract more from the mobile GPU. Yet it’s a far cry from the same brand’s ROG Strix Scar 18 and its highly efficient 4080 Mobile… for a price difference that isn’t necessarily that significant.