I like liking things. It's one of my favourite parts of this job. I like picking up a new piece of hardware that's not needlessly hobbled by marketing constraints, not blown out by some sort of misplaced egotism, not over-designed to the pain point of distraction. Just good, well-made, performant pieces of hardware. Those are a genuine pleasure.
Now, at this point my review of the Asus TUF A14 gaming laptop could go either way. I could throw up some Tory boi Clarkson-esque, gravel-voiced switchback, with a "...but that's not what we get here" style zinger, or I could be setting up a glowing rundown of all the reasons why I think this is one of the best 14-inch gaming laptops I've ever tested.
But you've seen the score up there 👆 so you know it's the latter.
The new TUF A14 follows Asus' recent line of gaming laptops in the Zephyrus G-series, taking many of the design notes into this, its more affordable range of notebooks. And it really works. Previously TUF laptops have been well-priced, relatively chonky, kinda ugly slabs that still performed well for the money.
They were effective, affordable, but ultimately not particularly desirable. That's all changed with this wee beauty. The new TUF A14 look is far more pared back than other TUF machines I've tested, keeping the clean lines of the Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G16 laptops we've loved so well. And it's impressively svelte in terms of the diminutive 14-inch chassis, too.
Proportionally, it's very well designed, with a slim bezel around the 1600p display and a keyboard that delivers far more space around each individual key than I would normally expect. I'm typing this review on it at the moment, and while the key response doesn't massively excite me, it's still an effective unit and I'm not suffering from any miss-strikes. It's unicolour, too, with white being the only key illumination on offer. And, honestly, I'm fine with that—I'd only make it pink otherwise.
And there's a Copilot button. Y'know, for AI-ing. For… all… those… things… we… gamers… use… AI… for.... Yeah, I'll admit, I don't know, either. Just know there are some TOPs here, whether you're going direct from the AMD NPU or the Nvidia GPU.
The trackpad's pretty great as well; a really nice-feeling glass option, which takes up more than a third of the space below the keyboard. It's responsive, slippy, and obviously a greasy fingerprint magnet. Such is life. I will also say the physical response of pressing either corner of the trackpad to engage the left or right-click function feels slightly gritty. It's the only place where it feels anything other than perfectly machined, as out of the box it feels like it's rubbing against the frame around it.
It doesn't get too annoyingly loud when you are making that Nvidia GPU do its work.
On the whole, though, it feels far more premium than its $1,500 price tag might otherwise suggest. I would also note that, while this feels a lot for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop at the tail-end of 2024, the 14-inch form factor generally garners a higher price that its larger compatriots, and the Asus TUF range is also one that's prone to a healthy discount, too. We regularly see TUF laptops on sale around the big retailers, so I would expect the TUF A14 to drop in price pretty quickly.
Now, somehow I've gotten this far through the review without actually mentioning what's powering this thing. And that's another place where the TUF A14 feels premium. As the 'A' designation signifies, this is an AMD-powered Asus machine, sporting the latest AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. That gives you both an excellent Zen 5 processor—with four full Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c cores—and the most powerful iGPU you can buy today.
That means you've got an impressive amount of raw processing/productivity power in this little laptop, as well as some genuinely good 1080p gaming performance from just the Radeon 890M silicon alone. That will get you the pleasing mix of both good frame rates and decent battery life when you're away from a plug socket.
For when you're not, however, you also have a 100 W TGP RTX 4060 available. That's able to deliver over and above what you'll get out of the iGPU, enabling you to bump up to 1440p or the native 1600p resolution and still get a playable frame rate out of your system.
And, unlike a lot of gaming laptops I've tested, it doesn't get too annoyingly loud when you are making that Nvidia GPU do its work. Sure, when you stick Armoury Crate onto Turbo settings with Ultimate GPU mode enabled, you're going to hear those fans spin up, but such is the tuned pitch that it doesn't feel oppressive, and isn't going to bleed into your consciousness through a gaming headset, either.
Alongside those two primary PC gamer concerns—the GPU and CPU—-you're getting up to 32 GB LPDDR5 and up to a 2 TB SSD in the package. Impressively, you also get a spare M.2 slot for you to drop in a secondary SSD down the line. And it's not a freaking trial trying to get the back off the TUF A14, either; Asus makes it mercifully simple to pull the rear off and access the insides.
Though that is purely for SSD management as its RAM is soldered, which also means you need to be confident the amount of memory you start with will be enough for your needs for the foreseeable future, cos it ain't going to change.
✅ You want an affordable, small gaming laptop: Normally those things are mutually exclusive, but this latest Asus is both of those things and more.
✅ You want good battery life: It's rare to get more than an hour of gaming out of an RTX 4060 gaming laptop, but the TUF A14 performs better than any other similar system we've tested. And if you switched to the powerful iGPU you will get even longer gaming time away from the plug.
✅ You're after a stealth gaming laptop: You would be forgiven for thinking this svelte machine was just an office notebook from its external appearance, meaning you could happily take it into meetings and/or lectures and not blind everyone with luminant RGB displays.
❌ You want peak gaming performance: The TUF A14 taps out at the RTX 4060 level, which means you're not going to get the highest gaming frame rates a top-end Nvidia GPU could deliver. But the GPU you do get, however, matches the chassis and cooling perfectly.
I'm into the overall port selection, too. There's a full width venting system on the back of the device to help achieve the machine's cooling, which leaves either side free for the port connections. That means USB Type-C and Type-A ports on both sides, though there's only a 40 Gbps Type-C connection with PD on the left hand side. That's where the diminutive power socket, HDMI, and 3.5 mm audio jacks are, too, while on the right hand side you also get an SD card slot alongside the two 10 Gbps USB Type-A and Type-C ports.
For me, there really aren't a ton of gaming laptops that feel this well put together. That feel like they can fit into your whole life and not just that part of you which loves to slap down bugs in Helldivers 2, commune with Illithids in Baldur's Gate 3, or manage the vagaries of fate and young millionaires in Football Manager. And, honestly, right now it's almost exclusively Asus laptops that are doing that. The Zephyrus G14 is the one which springs to mind, but the new TUF A14 is just as capable of fulfilling a dual role as gaming companion and office/school machine with equal aplomb.
I do still have a soft spot for the HP Transcend 14, but that machine's Meteor Lake core lets it down in comparison with the mighty Ryzen AI 9 APU, and the build quality isn't up to the same standard as this Asus lappy, either.
It's sturdy, surprisingly thin and light, impressively well-specced, and as performant as you could wish from a 14-inch RTX 4060 gaming laptop. It's the sort of machine I can throw into a bag and know it will adapt to whatever situation I'm using it in.
So, yeah, you can colour me impressed with the latest Asus TUF A14, it's been one of my favourite things to like this year.
