There’s a good offer for the gamer on a budget over at Box right now. The Asus TUF Dash F15 comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 for £800, and that’s a step-up over the RTX 3050 Ti machines we’re used to seeing around this price.
That extra GPU power is going to pay dividends in hitting the 144Hz refresh rate on the F15, and that should be capable with a good few modern games at 1080p. There’s also the option of enabling Nvidia’s DLSS upscaler with this GPU, and that will make a huge difference to performance. It shouldn’t drop overall fidelity noticeably on the F15’s 15-inch screen, either.
The RTX 3060 found in laptops is also offers a handful more CUDA Cores than its desktop counterpart, which helps it keep up a little better with the desktop model when in a power or thermally constrained laptop chassis.
A laptop is more than its GPU, however, and with this laptop there have been some concessions to hit that pretty price tag.
The Intel Core i5 11300H is a quad-core processor, which is a little behind the six-core and eight-core chips we’re more used to seeing nowadays. That said, for gaming alone it should deliver enough speed to keep up with the RTX 3060 in most games, it’s just something to be wary of if you’re looking to do more with your laptop.
Then there’s the RAM, of which there is just 8GB. That’s again a little slim, but at least with the RAM there’s an upgrade path. The innards of the F15 can be easily exposed with a few screws and the RAM capacity upgraded.
The SSD can also be switched out or another one added, but being an NVMe M.2 SSD with a 512GB capacity as standard, it may be just enough to get by with for the time being.
You also get Thunderbolt connectivity and WiFi 6, as standard. So that’s a plus.
No doubt the F15 has sacrificed some of the specs we’d like to see on a gaming laptop, though in a pinch it’s a seriously good proposition at this price. As a machine to kick off a PC gaming habit, with a view to perhaps upgrade the SSD and RAM down the line, it’s certainly cut out for the job of 1080p gaming.
Most of all, it’s an RTX 3060 for the price of an RTX 3050 Ti. That GPU really does count for a lot in today’s constrained market.
