ASUS TUF Dash F15 Review: An all well-rounded notebook for both gaming and work

Note: This review was first published on 13 June 2021.

Intel’s struggles in the refinement of its chip-manufacturing process have been well documented Repeated manufacturing problems in recent years have delayed its ability to shrink its chips through several different sizes of process node, eroding its technological lead. This has allowed rivals, chiefly AMD, to leapfrog Intel in both the consumer desktop and mobile processor space.

Taking gaming notebooks for instance. Many notebook makers have chosen AMD parts over Intel when launching their flagship models because the Ryzen 5000 mobile series are processors that genuinely offers great performance and battery life – such as the ROG Strix Scar 15 that I reviewed a little while back, and even the Lenovo Legion 7 (my review of it will also be up shortly). Essentially speaking, Intel has a lot to catch up with AMD, but their new 11th Gen Tiger Lake H-series do have a handful of high-powered quad-core processors for thin and light gaming notebooks that could give the top-line Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs a run for their performance.

That brings us to the ASUS TUF Dash F15, which is one of the first gaming notebook to come with the Intel 11th Gen Core i7-11370H, a Tiger Lake-based H-series processor. This means it's not a low-powered processor that's normally found in thin and light notebooks and it's made for content creators and gamers. This 35W TDP quad-core mobile processor packs a punch with a high base clock frequency of 3.3GHz and it can max with a 4.8GHz turbo frequency. It’s also the first gaming notebook to come with NVIDIA’s newest RTX 30-Series mobile GPU, the choice of either a GeForce RTX 3070 or the newer but entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 Ti (with a 60W rated TGP). Having these high-end parts is interesting, because it uplifts the TUF brand into a whole new category. For once in recent years, ASUS has a non-ROG branded 15-inch gaming notebook in its line-up that can aim to be powerful, slim and lightweight.

The Design

For me personally, I’ve always found that the older TUF notebooks tend to look garish in comparison to the sleeker models from ROG. One could say that “you pay for what you get”, but apart from components and materials where the costs are tangible, there’s simply no excuse to terrible designs. Even entry-level products can look good and classy. With the TUF Dash F15 (let’s just call it the TUF F15 henceforth) however, ASUS have opted for a complete revamp that gives its new chassis design a more refined look than last year’s TUF A15 gaming notebook. The TUF F15 has a slimmer and more confident look than its predecessors ever had. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the older ROG Zephyrus series of notebooks. The lid is gunmetal grey with a nice and polished feel to it, while the inside is black and made from an all-plastic mould.

Click-a-Bait

If there’s any doubt that the TUF F15 is a gaming notebook, then the keyboard is a dead giveaway. While the previous TUF A15 sported an odd backlit orange-red colourway for it “WASD” keys, the ones on the TUF F15 sport a more neutral greenish-white colour choice that I thought are more subtle. The effect is more subtle than it seems and can be turned off or the brightness adjusted. It’s actually kind of cool to see the light shine through the transparent WASD keys and serve as a practical guide for you to find those all-important keys if you are the sort that likes to play games in darkly lit areas. The keys themselves feel good in terms of feedback, and I was able to quickly get used to typing on the TUF F15 since the keys are well spaced out.

For cooling, the TUF F15 comes with exhaust vents on the back and sides. With the vents taking a fair bit of space on the left and right sides, the I/O ports have been moved further down. These are standard ports including an Ethernet, USB Type-A, USB-C, HDMI ports and a mic combo jack, which should cover your connectivity adequately.

What about the Display?

The TUF F15 review unit that I got from ASUS Singapore comes with a FHD (aka 1080p) IPS-panel with a 144Hz refresh rate, along with Adaptive Sync. While not quite speedy as displays that comes with a faster 240Hz or 300Hz refresh rates, 144Hz is fluid enough for even most professional esports players. What’s really worth noting is that the display offers good colour and contrast performance with 100% coverage of sRGB, which is somewhat of a rare feature for notebooks of this class.

ASUS has also trimmed the side and top bezels of the screen, but that has come at the expense of a built-in webcam. In the current “new” normal where most of us have adapted to a work-from-home arrangement, I thought this was a curious miss by ASUS. At least with the ROG range of notebooks for 2021, most of which also comes without a built-in webcam, an external (and a pretty good one) webcam is bundled instead. Not so for the TUF F15 though. You’re pretty much left to your own to purchase one separately. Let's not forget if you join video chats often from the comfort of your notebook, the missing webcam is a troublesome sore point that requires an external fix.

Benchmarks and Performance

To compare the ASUS TUF Dash F15 at hand, I have opted to refer these 15-inch notebooks :

• ROG Zephyrus S15
• MSI Prestige 14
• ROG Strix Scar 15 (G533)

From a specification’s perspective, the comparison is lopsided as the competing notebooks used all in an assortment of specifications. But the TUF F15 is also our first gaming notebook built with Intel's 11th Gen Core i7 processor alongside NVIDIA's latest mobile GPU, and it would be interesting to see not just how it performs, but where it stands against these models.

These are the games and benchmarks used:

• PCMark 10
• 3DMark
• SYSmark 25
• MobileMark 2018
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

How good is it for work?

PCMark 10 Extended evaluates systems based on workloads that can be categorized into four distinct groups, comprising Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, and Gaming. This includes tests such as app start-up times, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, photo and video editing, and rendering and visualization tasks. Finally, gaming performance is evaluated using the Fire Strike benchmark that's part of 3DMark. 

That the ASUS TUF F15 can't quite matched up to the ROG gaming notebooks in the Gaming and Digital Content Creation categories is to be expected. After all, both the Zephyrus S15 and Strix Scar 15 are powered by superior GPUs. But if we look at the Productivity category, then it's quite evident that the TUF F15 performed better when it comes to "everyday office applications" stimulated tests. It's not even that far off in the Essentials test, which like Productivity, emphasised more on CPU performance - more on this below.

Unlike PCMark 10, which is a synthetic benchmark tool and the results are great as a reference point of a computer’s performance, SYSMark 25 is an application-based benchmark that reflects “real world” usage patterns of business users in the areas of Productivity, Creativity and Responsiveness. This means using popular Microsoft and even Adobe applications rather than less obscure options used in PCMark 10. 

Creative Performance takes into account the notebook's GPU prowess so, like what we have seen earlier in PC Mark, the ASUS TUF F15 is not going to give you zippy performance when doing content creation-related tasks. That's not to say it isn't capable, but if you're a serious video editor then it makes more practical sense to go for a notebook with a better graphics card. What I would have been interested to find out is if ASUS had bumped up the TUF F15's memory to 32GB, could it have performed even better in the Productivity Performance (where single-core speed plays biggest factor) test? It seems highly plausible. We are already seeing here that Intel's claims that its new 11th Gen H-series processors offer the fastest single-threaded performance of any mobile chip has some credibility to it.

How about play?

The RTX 3050 Ti powering the notebook is also NVIDIA’s entry-level mobile GPU, and its performance is comparable to the old RTX 2060 and therefore most suited for 1080p gaming with medium to high detail settings, as seen in our 3D Mark and suite of games benchmark results. The RTX 3050 Ti is not sufficiently powerful enough to enable ray-tracing though, but the available Tensor cores can be used for DLSS support in some games (and get a performance boost)

Performance on Battery mode

MobileMark 2018 runs a similar set of tasks as SYSMark 25, but using the notebook's battery. This helps to measure the gaming notebook performance when not connected to a power source, which is important to understand as notebook and processor optimisation differ when unplugged from the wall socket. All the notebooks were set to 100 per cent display brightness and had Wi-Fi enabled. Battery mode was also set to default, and no overclocking was done. The keyboard backlight was also left on as well. 

For a gaming notebook, The TUF F15 achieving more than 8 hours of battery life in MobileMark is impressive. The notebook's 76Whr battery capacity and GPU's low TGP (60W under normal load) certainly helped too. That should give you more than enough time to get productivity-related and even content creation work done while on the go.

Conclusion

The TUF Dash F15 is an interesting offering by ASUS. Our review model comes with a price tag of S$2,198, and the aptest way for me to describe it is a high-end notebook in the budget gaming category. And I say this with a tinge of fondness because I don't think there's another competitive notebook in the market now that offers a good balance between performance and portability. The TUF F15 is easy to carry around, has an impressive battery life, decent gaming performance, great productivity performance and actually feels kind of premium too. I've never looked at the TUF series with disdain (God bless me) but I've always thought that past TUF models' designs were too unrefined for my liking. The TUF Dash F15 though, has certainly got my attention.

It's not without its weak points though. For one, the lack of a built-in webcam is a serious compromise, especially in today's widespread work-or-study-from-home practices. It's a decent gaming notebook at best, so if you're looking for high-end gaming performance then there are obviously better, and more expensive choices. But if these don't matter, then the ASUS TUF Dash F15 could make for a worthy mobile gaming companion for you.

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