ASUS TUF Dash F15 Review w/ Tiger Lake H35

The ASUS TUF Dash F15 is a decent laptop that has a specification that will appeal to gamers, however we advise you to approach with caution.

The RTX 3070 graphics and 240Hz display panel do a decent job, although we would have preferred them to be housed in a smaller chassis than the 15.6-inch unit chosen by ASUS. The X and Y dimensions are pretty much determined by the 15.6-inch screen so it would be nice if ASUS had slimmed down the bezels slightly, however that is a small detail in a relatively budget laptop.

It's the Z dimension where we have our issues as 19.9mm thickness is something we associate with an 8-core 10th Gen Intel CPU with a conventional heat pipe cooling system. If you step up to a vapour chamber cooler you could slim the chassis down to 17mm but in that scenario you are talking about a higher bill of materials. With the ASUS TUF Dash F15 we have a chassis that can certainly cool a 6-core 10th Gen CPU and most likely an 8-core, but with 11th Gen Tiger Lake we are looking at a lowly quad core, albeit one running at high clock speeds. It is clear to us that ASUS has played it safe and specified a chassis that can handle the thermals of the CPU and GPU without any clever or expensive engineering and the upshot is that the ASUS TUF Dash F15 feels rather large and slightly heavy.

The single M.2 slot provides 1TB of fast storage, you have a vacant M.2 slot ready for upgrades, and the 16GB of dual channel DDR4 RAM provides sufficient zip and zing.

And then we come to the Tiger Lake CPU that is supposed to be the star of the show but which, instead, is the Achilles' Heel.

The four cores run at a decent speed but require much more power than you would expect, and this clearly demonstrates that Intel cannot get the desired clock speed from their 10nm CPUs in an elegant manner so instead they resort to brute force. In the very near future we expect to see Tiger Lake Core i9 CPUs with eight cores, and while there is the outside chance they will deliver the goods we predict that Tiger Lake Core i9 is going to suffer when compared to mobile AMD Ryzens.

ASUS has done a perfectly competent job packaging the various pieces of hardware in this laptop which sells at a mainstream price, however the overall experience left us rather unimpressed.

We were unable to find our exact model on sale, but you can buy the ASUS TUF Dash F15 with 512GB SSD and 144Hz panel for £1299.95 from Overclockers UK HERE.

Pros:

• RTX 3070 provides plenty of graphics grunt.
• Tiger Lake CPU is snappy and responsive.
• Decent battery life.
• The 240Hz display will appeal to gamers.

Cons:

• The power required to drive the CPU to 4.3GHz is outrageous.
• A quad core CPU is barely adequate in 2021.
• The 15.6-inch form factor seems large considering the choice of processor.

KitGuru says: Intel desperately needs a better process for its mobile CPUs so they can match the low power draw of AMD Ryzen.

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