It’s a rare thing indeed to find an all-AMD gaming laptop. Rarer still to find one that costs less than $800 with the latest generation of red team hardware inside it. Enter Asus with this 16-inch TUF A16 machine for just $750 at Best Buy.
The Radeon RX 7600S is a Navi 33 GPU with 1792 shaders and 28 compute units, but the raw performance sees its average 3DMark Time Spy score sitting just below an RTX 4060 and confidently above an RTX 4050.
Right now, there’s only one RTX 4050 rig in our Black Friday gaming laptop deals roundup. You’d save $150 if you go with the MSI, but I’d still be recommend this red team machine. It’s not even just the GPU which punches above its weight; the Ryzen 7 7735HS is a quality little bit of Zen 4 silicon.
It’s an eight-core, 16-thread chip that will boost up to 4.75GHz and offers a healthy amount of multi-threaded performance for the money. It’s comparatively light on the cache front compared with the mighty Ryzen 7 7840U you’ll find in the latest Framework AMD Mainboard, and doesn’t have the latest integrated graphics chip, but when you’ve got a decent dedicated GPU doing the pixel-pushing you’re unlikely to feel the difference.
The 16-inch scale of the Asus TUF A16 also allows it to deliver a higher resolution screen than you normally find at this price point. The 1920 x 1200 panel means you get the 16:10 aspect ratio that sings on the desktop, and actually gives a little extra in-game, too, and it also comes with a 165Hz refresh rate.
And because of that slightly wider framing the bezel is relatively small and you get a numpad in the keyboard… should you care about such things. I never use alt-codes, so I don’t know what the fuss is all about, but hey.
The 16GB of DDR5 memory is pretty much standard, and about the minimum you should be after today. But that 512GB SSD is a disappointment—though the only one I’ve found with this machine—with storage pricing being what it is, even on a budget laptop you should get a 1TB drive. That said, you can pick up a good 1TB drive yourself of under $50 in the current Black Friday SSD deals, and that still keeps the cost of this laptop below $800.
The Asus TUF brand is certainly a more cost-effective range than its ROG Strix or Zephyrus laptops, and is definitely a little chonkier, too. But the TUF machines are still well-made machines that deliver a great spec for a good price. And when they’re discounted to this level they’re hard to ignore.
