Back in stock for shipping. Just ordered one and will arrive next week. This was a
+151 deal a couple months ago and it's been out of stock for shipping ever since.
https://www.staples.com/asus-tuf-...t_24632447
SPECS:
- AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS 6-core, 12-threads (3.3Ghz Base / 4.6GHz Boost) Processor
- 15.6" FHD 300-nits 100% sRGB IPS-level Anti-Glare 144Hz Matte Display
- 16GB DDR5-4800 RAM Memory
- 512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive Storage
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
- Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax 2x2 MU-MIMO + Bluetooth 5.3
- 720p HD Camera
- Chiclet Backlit Keyboard 1-Zone RGB
-
Ports:
......1x HDMI 2.1 FRL
......1x USB-C 4 (support for DisplayPort, 40Gbps)
......1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2
......2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1
......1x RJ45 Ethernet
......1x Headphone / microphone combo jack (3.5mm)
- Windows 11
- 90Wh Li-ion 4-Cell Battery w/ 240W AC Power Adapter
- 13.94 x 9.88 x 0.98" (4.85 lbs)
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Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank BeigeRoad455
Moving on to the laptop itself, here's an edited/updated version of the comment I made on one of the previous iterations of this deal:
This is likely still the best deal on a new midrange (slipping more towards lower-midrange as time goes by) gaming laptop there's been in a little while, though this laptop does have a couple caveats. The cpu is mediocre, but it has a full power mobile rtx 4060 (the current value nvidia sweetspot), and a decent screen (though with poor brightness). The chassis is decent, and 16gb of ddr5 is acceptable for this price point. Having only a 512gb ssd is a bit of a bummer, but realistically you generally want to upgrade your laptops ssd anyways (and this laptop has two m.2 slots).
The primary downside to this laptop is the cpu, the 7535HS is a 6-core cpu using the one and a half generation old zen3+ architecture (basically zen3 cores with an improved memory controller and additional pcie capabilities). It has the rather weak rdna2 based 660m for an igpu. In terms of raw cpu performance, expect it to perform slightly better than the old 6600hs. It will be meaningfully slower than the newer generation zen4 and 5 cpus in higher end laptops, and likewise for newer than 12th gen "h" sku intel cpus. Having only 6 cores may also start becoming a bottleneck in a couple of years, but it's sufficient for even upper-midrange gaming currently. Likewise, while the zen3+ cores aren't terribly powerful by modern standards, the mobile rtx 4060 isn't powerful enough for the cpu to be a major bottleneck in most games.
The mobile rtx 4060 is unfortunately still the current value sweetspot, it's the cheapest nvidia mobile gpu that has 8gb of vram (the absolute bare minimum for modern 1080p gaming), and options with more than 8gb are drastically more expensive. An analysis of vram limitations in gaming laptops can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ric7yb1
The 4060 in this laptop is the full power 140w variant, though keep in mind performance scaling heavily drops off past 100w. While the mobile rtx 4070 is around 20% faster, the 8gb of vram remains the primary constraint, and it's nowhere near worth the price premium. The same goes for the current gen mobile rtx 5060 and rtx 5070 laptop gpus, which both also only have 8gb of vram and command a large price premium. Blackwell is basically a refresh of ada lovelace without any major improvements, and you'd need to purchase a mobile rtx 5070ti or higher to get more than 8gb of vram. Multi frame generation (3x fg or higher), the primary upgrade of the rtx 5000 series over the 4000 series, is also basically pointless if your monitor has below a 180hz refresh rate (and 4x mode isn't viable without at least a 240hz refresh rate). The next step up, the mobile rtx 4080 or rtx 5070ti, are enormously faster and have 12gb of vram, but you'll pay at least twice as much for even a refurbished 4080 or 5070ti laptop. Amd competitors in this price range are rare, and at 1080p supporting dlss rather than only fsr is a major advantage. This has changed somewhat with fsr4, particularly if you're willing to do lots of manual modding using tools like optiscaler, but the rdna3 gpus in the few competing amd laptops don't support current iterations of fsr4 (they'll likely support an inferior int8 version in the future). I would've previously said nvidia's drivers are also a meaningful advantage, but nvidia's drivers since the 50 series launch have been rather poor. If you get this laptop and experience gpu related issues, I'd recommend rolling back to nvidia game ready driver 566.36, which is the most recent known stable driver (which is really sad considering it's almost a year old). There have been deals of the asus tuf a16 with the rx 7700s instead at a relatively similar price in the past, but that laptop hasn't been in this price range for a little while to the best of my knowledge.
The screen on this laptop has very good specs for a laptop of this price in all metrics except brightness. The brightness is only 250 nits which is the bare minimum, if you primarily use your laptops in bright environments or outside this is a major downside. Otherwise, the screen is 1080p (standard at this price, and you wouldn't want higher resolution with the rtx4060), 144hz refresh rate (decent for midrange gaming), 100%srgb gamut coverage (good for this price point), supports G-Sync (very unusual at this price), and has a MUX Switch + Advanced Optimus. If this screen was 300nit+ it'd be incredible at under $700, but with a brightness of 250nits it's still pretty good. Worth noting is the sample notebookcheck tested was 270nit, so the screen may be slightly brighter than advertised.
This laptop has a rather large 90whr battery which is very good for the price. While the zen3+ cpu isn't exceptionally efficient, I'd still expect fairly good battery life for a gaming laptop.
This laptop comes with 16gb (2x8gb) of ddr5 4800 in a dual channel configuration (16gb is decent for the price), this cpu doesn't support ddr5 faster than 4800mt/s. There are two user accessible ram slots, officially supporting up to 32gb ddr5 4800 (64gb likely possible). There are two user accessible m.2 slots, one of which is occupied by the 512gb gen 4 ssd.
The array of ports is quite decent, there's no thunderbolt (obviously), but it has hdmi 2.1 frl, 1x usb3.2 supporting power delivery and displayport output (with gsync, 10gbps)), a usb4 port (40gbps), 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (5gbps), and a RJ45 LAN port. The wifi is only gen 6, which is slightly disappointing but ultimately not terribly consequential. The keyboard is backlit.
This laptop is fairly heavy at 2.20 Kg (4.85 lbs).
As a side note, some asus laptops have had a firmware flaw that causes stutters under certain conditions. A technical breakdown can be found here: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-R...-Deep-Dive
Asus has responded, claiming they'll be releasing a bios update for "all affected models" October (this month): https://x.com/ASUS_ROGNA/status/1...6339646645
I'm unsure if this particular tuf model is affected, but if you purchase this laptop I'd keep an eye out for bios updates.
Overall, if the mediocre cpu and low screen brightness aren't dealbreakers for you, this is still a rather good deal.
Moving on to the laptop itself, here's an edited/updated version of the comment I made on one of the previous iterations of this deal:
This is likely still the best deal on a new midrange (slipping more towards lower-midrange as time goes by) gaming laptop there's been in a little while, though this laptop does have a couple caveats. The cpu is mediocre, but it has a full power mobile rtx 4060 (the current value nvidia sweetspot), and a decent screen (though with poor brightness). The chassis is decent, and 16gb of ddr5 is acceptable for this price point. Having only a 512gb ssd is a bit of a bummer, but realistically you generally want to upgrade your laptops ssd anyways (and this laptop has two m.2 slots).
The primary downside to this laptop is the cpu, the 7535HS is a 6-core cpu using the one and a half generation old zen3+ architecture (basically zen3 cores with an improved memory controller and additional pcie capabilities). It has the rather weak rdna2 based 660m for an igpu. In terms of raw cpu performance, expect it to perform slightly better than the old 6600hs. It will be meaningfully slower than the newer generation zen4 and 5 cpus in higher end laptops, and likewise for newer than 12th gen "h" sku intel cpus. Having only 6 cores may also start becoming a bottleneck in a couple of years, but it's sufficient for even upper-midrange gaming currently. Likewise, while the zen3+ cores aren't terribly powerful by modern standards, the mobile rtx 4060 isn't powerful enough for the cpu to be a major bottleneck in most games.
The mobile rtx 4060 is unfortunately still the current value sweetspot, it's the cheapest nvidia mobile gpu that has 8gb of vram (the absolute bare minimum for modern 1080p gaming), and options with more than 8gb are drastically more expensive. An analysis of vram limitations in gaming laptops can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ric7yb1
The 4060 in this laptop is the full power 140w variant, though keep in mind performance scaling heavily drops off past 100w. While the mobile rtx 4070 is around 20% faster, the 8gb of vram remains the primary constraint, and it's nowhere near worth the price premium. The same goes for the current gen mobile rtx 5060 and rtx 5070 laptop gpus, which both also only have 8gb of vram and command a large price premium. Blackwell is basically a refresh of ada lovelace without any major improvements, and you'd need to purchase a mobile rtx 5070ti or higher to get more than 8gb of vram. Multi frame generation (3x fg or higher), the primary upgrade of the rtx 5000 series over the 4000 series, is also basically pointless if your monitor has below a 180hz refresh rate (and 4x mode isn't viable without at least a 240hz refresh rate). The next step up, the mobile rtx 4080 or rtx 5070ti, are enormously faster and have 12gb of vram, but you'll pay at least twice as much for even a refurbished 4080 or 5070ti laptop. Amd competitors in this price range are rare, and at 1080p supporting dlss rather than only fsr is a major advantage. This has changed somewhat with fsr4, particularly if you're willing to do lots of manual modding using tools like optiscaler, but the rdna3 gpus in the few competing amd laptops don't support current iterations of fsr4 (they'll likely support an inferior int8 version in the future). I would've previously said nvidia's drivers are also a meaningful advantage, but nvidia's drivers since the 50 series launch have been rather poor. If you get this laptop and experience gpu related issues, I'd recommend rolling back to nvidia game ready driver 566.36, which is the most recent known stable driver (which is really sad considering it's almost a year old). There have been deals of the asus tuf a16 with the rx 7700s instead at a relatively similar price in the past, but that laptop hasn't been in this price range for a little while to the best of my knowledge.
The screen on this laptop has very good specs for a laptop of this price in all metrics except brightness. The brightness is only 250 nits which is the bare minimum, if you primarily use your laptops in bright environments or outside this is a major downside. Otherwise, the screen is 1080p (standard at this price, and you wouldn't want higher resolution with the rtx4060), 144hz refresh rate (decent for midrange gaming), 100%srgb gamut coverage (good for this price point), supports G-Sync (very unusual at this price), and has a MUX Switch + Advanced Optimus. If this screen was 300nit+ it'd be incredible at under $700, but with a brightness of 250nits it's still pretty good. Worth noting is the sample notebookcheck tested was 270nit, so the screen may be slightly brighter than advertised.
This laptop has a rather large 90whr battery which is very good for the price. While the zen3+ cpu isn't exceptionally efficient, I'd still expect fairly good battery life for a gaming laptop.
This laptop comes with 16gb (2x8gb) of ddr5 4800 in a dual channel configuration (16gb is decent for the price), this cpu doesn't support ddr5 faster than 4800mt/s. There are two user accessible ram slots, officially supporting up to 32gb ddr5 4800 (64gb likely possible). There are two user accessible m.2 slots, one of which is occupied by the 512gb gen 4 ssd.
The array of ports is quite decent, there's no thunderbolt (obviously), but it has hdmi 2.1 frl, 1x usb3.2 supporting power delivery and displayport output (with gsync, 10gbps)), a usb4 port (40gbps), 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (5gbps), and a RJ45 LAN port. The wifi is only gen 6, which is slightly disappointing but ultimately not terribly consequential. The keyboard is backlit.
This laptop is fairly heavy at 2.20 Kg (4.85 lbs).
As a side note, some asus laptops have had a firmware flaw that causes stutters under certain conditions. A technical breakdown can be found here: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-R...-Deep-Dive
Asus has responded, claiming they'll be releasing a bios update for "all affected models" October (this month): https://x.com/ASUS_ROGNA/status/1...6339646645
I'm unsure if this particular tuf model is affected, but if you purchase this laptop I'd keep an eye out for bios updates.
Overall, if the mediocre cpu and low screen brightness aren't dealbreakers for you, this is still a rather good deal.
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