Asus TUF Laptop Totally Lives Up To Its Name

A budget gaming laptop bought at Walmart and used daily by several kids has performed excellently for over three years. My family’s Asus TUF Gaming F15 (2021) is holding up well. Coming from an M1 MacBook Air to game on a PC, the Asus TUF is an interesting piece of tech hardware.

Hardware

The difference between my MacBook and the TUF is more than comparing apples and oranges. They’re not even in the same class of laptop. The former is what you’d call an “Ultrabook.” It’s slim, sleek, light, elegant, and minimal with a soft white backlit keyboard. The latter is made for gaming: big, thick, hefty, and edgy with numerous grills, ports, and a vibrant RGB backlit deck of keycaps.

The MacBook is a BMW; the Asus TUF is the Batmobile. Or If you’re into Star Wars, the Mac is a lightsaber, a more elegant device for a civilized computing age. The Asus is a handy blaster at your side, ready to zap-zap laser beams, kid.

Seriously though, as Apple is known for high-quality hardware, you might think that anything else is inferior junk, a waste of your hard-earned cash. But you’d be surprised like me.

When we bought the Asus in 2021, I didn’t know anything about it or even the gaming laptop market in general. I just knew the specs seemed good for the sale price. And the main selling point about it, among similar options, was its toughness. After all, this thing was meant to be shared by my five sons. This marketing sold me:

MILITARY GRADE ENDURANCE – True to its TUF Gaming name, the A15 must successfully survive a rigorous battery of MIL-STD-810H tests. Test devices are exposed to drops, vibration, humidity, and extreme temperatures to ensure reliability.

My sons have shared the Asus TUF F15 for over three years, taking it to school sometimes. The lid has opened and closed countless times; the hinges are still in perfect working order. The keyboard deck doesn’t flex, the trackpad still works smoothly, all the ports work, and  the display is still crisp — no dead pixels. Moreover, not a single keycap has ever popped off! Thankfully, my kids adhere to a food and beverage-free zone with the laptop.

This gaming machine gets very warm so the fans spin up while gaming. But honestly, the fan noise isn’t too loud and the laptop has never overheated. I’ve had concerns, naturally, but somehow there’s been zero failure to perform.

Performance

Speaking of performance, the TUF came specced with just 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That was fine until my kids — using Unity, Blender, and playing several games — quickly filled the SSD. So we upgraded the laptop, which is totally NOT at thing any Apple MacBook can do. A few quick and easy screws removed, I added an additional 8GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Now this thing flies and has room to grow.

While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 with 4GB of VRAM is for entry-level gaming, it’s far better than Intel’s integrated GPU. Most games run well for 1080p gaming on a 15.6” full-HD display. It helps that most of the titles we prefer are simple enough, like indie games or casual stuff (Minecraft, Age of Empires, Stardew Valley…). The most demanding one we have is Cities: Skylines II, which recommends at least 10GB of VRAM.

Also, the Asus firmware (BIOS) and Windows 11 software have worked well over the life of the TUF so far. It’s fueled by an 11th-gen core i5 CPU. And we’ve played games from the Windows Store, Steam, Epic, and GOG without issues as I recall.

The point is, despite being a budget gaming laptop, the Asus TUF from 2021 still runs great today, playing most games well-enough, after more than three years of extensive, battle-tested, kid-endured usage. That means grubby fingers and many sneezes have not been able to take down the TUF. It has held up so well that I’m inclined to buy another one for myself.

Maybe we got lucky with a good laptop that works as advertised. Some folks do encounter hardware problems with Asus TUFs or any laptop for that matter. But those, I think, are the rare exceptions to the rule. Most of the time, most tech products work reliably. That’s what you’d expect from a TUF laptop. And that’s what we got. Seems tough enough to me.