There I was, having a little look around for new gaming laptop deals, not expecting to find anything that exciting given the doldrums between October’s Prime Day shenanigans and Black Friday, and up pops this RTX 4070 machine that’s cheaper than a bunch of RTX 4060 laptops I’ve seen recently.
The Asus TUF F15 is available for just $1,000 at Best Buy right now. That’s a saving of $400, and cheaper than it’s ever been even over at Amazon. I thought it was a good price when they knocked $300 off the sticker price, now it’s a stellar price for an RTX 4070-toting gaming laptop, and it’s not even like it’s a low-power budget variant, either.
This is a 140W RTX 4070 GPU in there, which is the same as the chip used in the Razer Blade 14. Now, I’m only equating these two laptops on the point of potential GPU performance, because they are very different machines. For one, the Razer is near three times the price, but is also a slimline little system, and a premium one at that.
When we were putting together our guide on the how to not overpay for a Black Friday gaming laptop deal we were genuinely expecting to only see RTX 4060 machines dropping below the $1,000 mark, with RTX 4070 systems likely to remain around the $1,300 point under discount. This Asus TUF F15, however, has blown all that out of the water.
The Asus TUF range represents a far more value-oriented group of gaming laptops. But they’re still providing an excellent baseline spec, and will deliver a notebook capable of offering excellent gaming performance in the latest games as the machine’s native 1920 x 1080 resolution. For a little last-gen reference, the 140W RTX 4070 is a little quicker than an RTX 3080 from the Ampere generation.
The chassis is going to be on the chonkier side compared with anything from Razer, or even the ROG stablemates from Asus. But I’ve used TUF machines, and while the chassis are a little plasticky, we’re not talking about the massive budget notebook of old. It’s still a nice-looking, well appointed laptop for the money.
Where Asus has compromised is in the last-gen combination of 12th Gen Intel Core i7 12700H CPU and DDR4-3200 memory. But, in reality, neither of those choices are going to materially impact the gaming performance you’ll get out of the RTX 4070 with its Ada GPU, DLSS 3.5 upscaling, and the magic of Frame Generation (in the admittedly few games that yet support it).
That Intel chip is still a 14-core, 20-thread processor, and not long ago that would have been considered a workstation spec. You are also getting the full 16GB of DDR4 memory, so capacity isn’t an issue. Nor is it on the storage side, either, where the 1TB SSD will be large enough for your games on the go.
So yeah, while it’s not some super svelte premium aluminium-clad gaming ultrabook, the Asus TUF F15 is a solid, well-specced, and incredibly well-priced laptop.
