Cons
- The SD card reader is missing
- CPU slow in games
- Bad screen
We recently published a review of three laptops with an RTX 3080 video card from ASUS, BTO and Razer. The ASUS came out on top in the test and that had to do with the processor, among other things. The Ryzen 9 5900HX made mincemeat of the Intel laptops that were still equipped with CPUs of the tenth generation. Its successor, Tiger Lake H, had already been announced at that time .
Meanwhile, we have tested our first laptop with Tiger Lake H processor. The laptop in question is an ASUS F15 from the TUF series. TUF is ASUS’ cheaper game brand, which is positioned below ROG and has been around for several years. We’ve reviewed TUF laptops in various guises before, such as the TUF Dash in February and the TUF A15 in April’s Laptop Best Buy Guide. ASUS model numbers are a bit complicated; the model in this review is also called FX506 , but the box says ‘TUF Gaming F15’ in big letters.
The appearance of the F15 is very similar to that of the A15, although the back of the screen does not consist of a metal plate, as on the A15, but is made entirely of plastic. That plastic looks and feels cheap; you can easily let the housing collapse under pressure and if you grab the corners of the screen, you can easily warp it.In terms of quality, you might expect more for 1400 euros, but in this case you mainly pay for the hardware. The F15 is equipped with a Core i7-11800H processor with eight cores and an RTX 3060 video card. A look at the Pricewatch shows that the ASUS is the cheapest laptop that combines this specific CPU and GPU at the time of writing.
In this short review, we mainly focus on the performance of the new i7 processor, which is why we briefly discuss the other features of the laptop, such as the keyboard, touchpad and connectivity options.
As far as connectivity options are concerned, the laptop is reasonably well equipped. There are three USB-A connections, which have a maximum transfer speed of 5Gbit/s. The USB-C connection has support for Thunderbolt 4 and can therefore also be used to connect external screens. Charging via USB-C is not possible. A USB-C charger can currently deliver a maximum of 100W and that is not enough to replace the supplied 200W charger. However, if you forgot your charger, you can’t top up with a generic USB-C charger. There is also Ethernet available based on a Realtek Gigabit controller. The wireless network card, quite unusually, has a Mediatek controller and supports Wi-Fi 6. The HDMI connection supports version 2.0 of the protocol, which is sufficient to drive 4k screens at 60Hz.
We also get along well with the keyboard. The keys offer a nice amount of travel and a clear touch. The backlight can be set in all colors of the rainbow, but not separately per key, for which you will have to purchase a more expensive ROG laptop. The touchpad works as it should and responds well to touches with more than one finger. The surface is not particularly large and is also limited because the buttons are not hidden under it, but are placed loosely in the housing.
benchmarking
Announced in mid-May, the eleventh-generation Intel processors are Intel’s first 45W laptop processors made at 10nm. Compared to the predecessors at 14nm, the maximum turbo clock speed is slightly lower: 5.0 instead of 5.3GHz, but the Tiger Lake architecture is faster per clock tick than its predecessor Comet Lake. We’ve known that for a while, because Intel released this architecture in the fall of 2020, but then it was about 15W processors.
To begin with, we unleash Cinebench on the new Intel CPU. By default, the ASUS laptop is set to the performance profile, but you can also set it to turbo in the supplied Armory Crate software . That doesn’t matter much for the CPU, but it does make the GPU a lot faster. More about that later in this review, of course. In Cinebench, the eleventh generation processor immediately scores a lot better than its predecessors of the tenth generation. This applies both to the load on all eight cores and to single-core performance. Quite a bit of energy is consumed in doing so; although the cpu has a tdp of 45W, it taps the 95W while running this benchmark and the consumption of the cpu packagenot below 76W. In terms of performance, the CPU is at the same level as AMD’s Zen3 processors with the same number of cores, but the consumption of those processors is generally lower.
We see that in Resolve too; we haven’t run Resolve on all gaming laptops in the past, but performance is close to the Ryzen 7 5800H, which also has eight cores, and is significantly better than the i9 and i7 processors in the HP Envy and Gigabyte Aero 17. So far, the CPU is performing well, there is also no throttling based on temperature, because the laptop knows how to dissipate the heat properly. That appears to change when we start running games.
Game Benchmarks
The most important thing about this laptop is the performance in games. How much do we get along with the i7 processor in games? As mentioned, we tested the laptop on the Turbo profile, which yields a 22 percent higher score in the 3DMark Fire Strike graphics test. The TUF F15’s 3060 GPU has a TGP of 90 watts, with an additional 5 watts of dynamic boost. With that, despite the good 3DMark score, you can already predict that this will not be the fastest 3060 laptop. For example, the Legion 5 Pro, which we reviewed earlier, has a maximum TGP of 130 watts. If you are allowed to consume more and can also dissipate that heat properly, you are by definition faster, because your GPU will continue to run at a higher clock speed.
3DMark not only looks at the speed of the GPU, but also that of the CPU, which is used in the Physics test. The 11800H in the ASUS appears to be disappointing. It’s no faster than 10th generation Intel CPU in some other gaming laptops. He also appears to be unable to beat the fastest AMD CPUs. In the game benchmarks below, we’ve tested games at different resolutions. At low resolutions and at low settings, the bottleneck for the frame rate is mainly the processor. At higher resolutions and detail settings, the GPU in particular is the bottleneck. We start with a game that has been around for a long time, but can cause a considerable CPU load: GTA V.
In GTA V, as in 3DMark, we see that the 11800H is unable to beat its predecessors from the tenth generation. On Medium settings at 1080p resolution, it is precisely the older Intel processors that manage to run the game more smoothly. If we turn the graphics settings up to Ultra and set the resolution to 4k, the 3060 video card is just as fast as the 3070 video card in the ASUS Dash F15. That is because the 3070 was set up quite economically, or had a low tgp of only 85W. The 95W of the 3060 video card in the F15 therefore appears to be just as fast. We already predicted that it can be even faster with an RTX 3060; the Legion 5 Pro with its tgp of 130W is another 12 percent faster in this test.
We next look at a game that was released a little less long ago: Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In that respect, the 11800H, when we look at the results at 1080p resolution and Medium settings, doesn’t really impress. The difference seems even worse than with GTA V, because in this test a Medion laptop with an i5 processor and an RTX 3060 is even faster than the F15. At higher resolutions and graphics settings, the F15 performs as you would expect. Suppose you have an external 1440p screen, then the game can be played smoothly.
However, the performance at low settings, where the CPU has to do a lot of work, is not spectacular and does not seem to match the results of Cinebench and Resolve, where the 11800H was actually faster than its tenth-generation predecessors. The explanation appears to lie in the amount of power that the CPU and GPU are allowed to absorb. Although the CPU has a tdp of 45W, there is a maximum of 105W. That also happens in practice, because in Cinebench we already saw that the CPU taps 95W. The maximum of the GPU is 95W, which gives a maximum of 200W for the CPU and GPU together. That is as much as the supplied adapter can deliver. However, the laptop must also provide its screen, working memory and all other hardware with energy from that 200W. The laptop then turns out to be adjusted in such a way that the CPU consumes a lot less power during games than with a task in which the GPU remains untouched, such as Cinebench. The effect of this differs per graphics setting and per game.
A final game, to unlearn it, is Metro: Exodus and we also see a similar picture there. At high settings, the performance is good, but at lower settings, the Medion with i5 processor is smoother again.
Screen and battery life
We wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t also pay attention to the screen. The F15 has a 144Hz screen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and uses an IPS-like panel with a matte coating.
That sounds good on paper, but the panel, which is made by Chi Mei, is not of the best quality. If we measure itwith our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and Calman software, the maximum brightness appears to be low, the contrast disappointing and only about 60 percent of the sRGB gamut is displayed. In short, it is not a screen on which you want to do image-critical work or that you want to use when there is a lot of ambient light. In principle, poor color reproduction is not a disaster for a gaming laptop; after all, you don’t need precise colors if you’re just playing games. What you do need, especially for fast shooters, is a screen that can display the images smoothly, but the panel also falls short on that point. To show 144 frames per second without ghosting, the panel must have a response time of 6.9ms, which is not achieved in any of our four tests. The screen is therefore not recommended at any point.
A long battery life is a nice bonus for a gaming laptop, but we don’t think it’s a requirement. The F15 has a hefty 90Wh battery, but the battery life we get in our tests is mediocre and certainly not as good as the more expensive models from the same manufacturer, such as the Scar 15 we tested recently.
Conclusion
The TUF F15 is the first laptop with a 45W processor from Intel’s Tiger Lake generation that we have tested to date. The performance of the new CPU is still somewhat difficult to interpret, because it strongly depends on the power that the chip can absorb. In tasks in which only the CPU is used, the F15 performs well and the new Intel chip is faster than its predecessors. If the GPU also gets hungry for energy, especially in games, both chips have to share the limited amount of energy and then the cpu turns out not to be that fast anymore. That is not necessarily due to the CPU, but rather the way ASUS designed the laptop; it does not know how to get the most out of the 11800H.
That design is aimed at the gamer who wants a lot of hardware for his money and that looks good on paper. For 1400 euros you get a laptop with a Core i7-11800H processor, 16GB memory, a 512GB SSD and an RTX 3060 video card. There is also a 144Hz screen and a large battery of 90Wh. Unfortunately, there is something to criticize about all those specifications. The CPU isn’t as fast in games as you’d like, and the 3060 has competitors with a higher TGP. The 90Wh battery is large, but the battery life is not special and we cannot recommend the screen in any way.
You may not expect more than this for 1400 euros given the specifications, but in our opinion this is a good reason to continue saving for a more expensive gaming laptop. Oh yes, as mentioned it also lacks a card reader, but that probably won’t be the biggest deal breaker for most.