Asus ROG TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition Review: Brains With Brawn

Most people in the world don’t know how good Asus has become at making notebooks. Its exploits are legendary, and it can easily be counted as one of the most inventive hardware brands in the world. And its “Republic Of Gamers” line is a personification of that ability. Its latest ROG TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition notebook may be geared as something for gamers. Still, it will be excellent for anyone looking for a heavy-duty desktop replacement laptop. I’d go as far as to say in the 16” notebook category, it is one of the best in the world, considering the amount of power it packs in a package that costs Rs 139,999.

Built Like A Tank

The A16 Advantage Edition is built like a tank and is adorned in a stealthy black and grey. Sure, it is not riddled with aluminium that looks suave and is cold to touch like a MacBook, but it is warm, tactile and heavy like a tank. That is a deadpan giveaway to its beast-like demeanour, which also means it isn’t the most nimble notebook to carry around. It is 2.2 kg, but the good news is there is no semblance of flex in the frame. You are also talking about a machine that packs a 90 Whr battery, a full keyboard with a number pad, a 16” IPS screen that has a matte finish and 165Hz refresh rate, and a total of 7 ports, which grants it the flexibility every creator or mobile gamer could imagine when they are on the go.

And that keyboard is delightful to type upon. Coming from the Magic Keyboard of the Mac, getting used to the lush and colourful keys of the TUF took some getting used to, but once I was locked in, I was punching out articles for Acko Drive at warp speed. I even wrote a chunk of this review in the notebook within Google Docs, and the experience was excellent. 

The massive trackpad was among the best I used on a Windows notebook. It responded to gestures almost with the immediacy of a MacBook trackpad, which is admirable and difficult to achieve.

The screen was colour-accurate, but it seemed slightly lacking in brightness levels. I only felt that when I used it in the US under the direct sunlight that often shines through in the Bay Area. But for indoor use, it was excellent. The high refresh rate display helped when I played games like Flight Simulator and Forza Motorsport on Xbox GamePass.

The screen was also delightful for watching films on Netflix or doing general work, like reading articles or writing documents. The area where I felt it was slightly weak was on the audio front, which is an issue with most Windows notebooks. Its 2-speaker Dolby Atmos-enabled sound system sounded anaemic and was only usable for video calls. That being said, the 720p web camera provided excellent image quality, and one will not be looking for a third-party camera in case zoom calls are critical, which has become the norm since the pandemic.

It's Like A High-Performance SUV On A Budget

The only car-related analogy fitting for this device is with something like the Ford F-150 Raptor, the fastest pickup truck in the world. Armed with AMD’s latest Ryzen 9 7940HS chip, it is formidable in terms of performance. This 8-core chip has 16 threads and a maximum clock speed of 5.2GHz. On top of this, there is the Radeon RX 7600S GPU, which can run up to 95W thanks to AMD’s smart shift technology with 8GB integrated video RAM. Overall, there is 16GB RAM in the device via twin 8GB DDR5 DIMMs expandable to 32GB RAM. It also has 1TB of PCIE 4 NVMe storage to keep things chipper.

There is not only potential for stonking performance, it actually delivers. 

Now, you could be a gamer or a creative professional who uses it to edit photos, videos, or even music. You could be an architect and use specialised tools only working on Windows. Or you could be like me, who wants a great laptop with a big screen and superb keyboard and can turn things up when needed in that 1% just-in-case scenario.

I tested a bunch of games via my Xbox GamePass subscription. If you don’t have that, you get three months free with this device. I played games like Elden Ring, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Forza Horizon, Fifa 2022 and Flight Simulator. The graphics across the board were beautiful, to say the least. Games held up at more than 60 frames per second rather consistently, and they delivered an experience that was at a high fidelity. This was a lot of fun, considering I come from a Mac, which is a ghost town for triple-A games. This also means I cannot play most of my console games on the go-on, something which I can. While testing this notebook, I gamed more than I have in the last six months. 

Of course, when the notebook wasn’t plugged in, this was where the loss in performance occurred. But you’d probably want this type of machine plugged in most of the time.

I edited a bunch of 4K videos for Reels and YouTube using Adobe Premiere Pro, which is fairly well-optimised for AMD’s hardware. I found that the performance was up there with the M2 Pro MacBook Pro, which starts at more than INR 50,000. Mind you, apart from the battery life of that notebook, there are many things the A16 Advantage Edition managed that were better. 

The amazing thing about this notebook was that I barely heard its fans through my extensive review period of a few months. It also never really got super warm, but that is something that its workload will determine.

I handed the notebook to a music producer friend of mine who loaded up some stems of a track he was working on. Using Ableton Live, it was revealed that the performance of the machine was excellent and even better than a MacBook Pro for a far lower cost.

Not As Good When Not Plugged In

While the battery life was never expected to last until the end of time, this is a maximum of a 90-minute laptop even if you are browsing on Chrome or Microsoft Edge with 15 tabs open and WhatsApp on the other side. You game on it or edit video, that time gets reduced further by 30%. 

It also loses a big chunk of its performance. It is almost like a V12 Supercharged engine that has lost four cylinders. But that is quite normal with Intel and AMD chipsets and is perhaps a vestige of my being a hardcore Mac user, which does deliver sustained performance.

Verdict

Just keep in mind that it is heavy and perhaps is not the roadrunner, with battery life being its strongest suit. But if you are the type of person who needs to get serious work done or needs to play games from wherever you are, the ASUS ROG TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition is a serious operator that combines a simple and functional design with beastly performance and while also yielding a cost advantage on most creator focused notebooks available right now in India. At Rs 139,999, it is a steal, so much so this will be my go-to recommendation for someone now looking for an affordable notebook for video editing.