It’s been a hot minute since the ASUS TUF Gaming A14 hit the shelves, but we’re rather fine being a bit late to this wild party. COMPUTEX 2024 had this portable bad boy on display, and best believe we were glad to make its acquaintance. Packing the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, and the capability to fit into most rugged envelopes, it’s safe to say it garnered our interest–and grasped our attention. As one of the headliners set to rival its elder, beefier siblings in the Republic of Gamers, the ASUS TUF Gaming A14 had a tall task ahead of it.
After having it on hand for a decent amount of time–and bringing it overseas, we’ve had a taste of what it could do both in terms of productivity and its main purpose–some hardcore gaming. We’ll be dedicating a separate feature for the laptop’s out-of-town adventure; which mostly involved work, but we’ll be diving into the nitty gritty in this particular review. Worry not, for small as this device may be, there’s definitely a lot to go around.
So, just how powerful is this portable, AI-driven ASUS machine? Read on to find out.
Geeksthetic
Stealth is the name of the game here–and we’re so happy that’s the case. It’s become quite the trend across the ASUS gaming lineup. No longer do we have to gaze upon the loud, garish gamer-geared aesthetic, as a more subtle, muted design has come into play. Make no mistake, though. You’re still made aware that this is, indeed, TUF-er than most.
The grey chassis is sleek, and smooth to the touch–garnering just a few fingerprints, should your hands be a tad too greasy. At 1.46 kg heavy, and just 1.99 cm thin when snapped shut, it’s not something you’d call unwieldy. Given the specs it’s packing, this is a pretty good size and weight. Speaking of snapping shut, the hinge allows it to open up a full 180 degrees, which is nice if you plan to mount it anywhere.
Along the sides, you get a good amount of ports, namely a 3.5mm combo jack–which is great, an HDMI 2.1 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, and and another Type-C USB 4–both with support for DisplayPort. Last, but not least, a microSD card reader. The latter was a very welcome surprise. To the back, you get some large exhausts which would be contributing to some decent ventilation and thermals.
Aside from the 14-inch, 2.5K IPS display–which we’ll be tackling later, the laptop scores decent points in the looks department. It’s nothing revolutionary, but its presentation as a gaming laptop that can hide in plain sight is pretty damn good. If you like colors and RGB, you this won’t be your cup of tea. If you want to sneak into a business meeting with a gaming rig, continue reading.
Binge Watching Factor
Now, going back to that gorgeous 14-inch display, you’re in for a treat. The TUF Gaming A14 packs a 2.5K IPS-level display with a 2560 x 1600 resolution. Considering the 16:10 aspect ratio and 165Hz max refresh rate, you can expect a really good viewing experience here. Colors are vibrant and contrast is great, even when you’re viewing some otherwise darker material–both in color and theme.
Regardless of whether you’re into animation or live-action, you’ll get smooth visuals and crisp quality. At least, in our experience, we didn’t get any blurring or pixelation–even when watching videos above 1080p.
Most of our viewing pleasure came from Youtube, and it was great to be able to watch all those videos in their highest quality, no sweat. Sure, the 14-inches may have limited our enjoyment to some extent, but the quality more than makes up for this little setback.
Sound Trip
As for audio, you get a two-speaker system and Dolby Atmos support–an absolute boon to anyone who wants to tweak their aural experience. The AI noise-canceling technology and Hi-Res certification for headphones is also pretty good, regardless of the cans that you choose to slap on. We tried it using studio headphones and cheaper wireless earbuds. Experience enhanced.
Whether it was using headphones, or simply blasting our speakers at 100%, the option to tailor your audio through presets was always great. Certain media call for certain auditory feels, so you’d best believe we’d use them all whenever we could.
Typing Experience
Slapping on a full-sized keyboard into a laptop isn’t always a good thing. Personally, we’d have less keys for more key travel. Thankfully, that’s exactly the case for the ASUS TUF Gaming A14, which lacks a numpad. too bad for RTS gamers, though.
We get a single-light, backlit chiclet keyboard which has all the necessary function keys, and then some. Just like its other COMPUTEX brethren, the A14 has a dedicated Copilot key. As for the overall experience while typing, it’s decent enough. Keys didn’t feel mushy, didn’t have much flex, and were easy enough to adjust to.
The Armory Crate software can modify how your keyboard light up, but you can’t change the colors. No RGB for you gamers out there. You can choose from a few presets, but keeping it at “static” is what we preferred.
It’s a rather simple keyboard that gets the job done–whether you’re simply typing on spreadsheets or going HAM on your in-game enemies. Which brings us to the best part.
Gaming Prowess
Here lies the crowning glory of the ASUS TUF Gaming A14. It’s in the name, after all. Also, don’t mind how the website compresses our photos. The graphical quality you’ll be getting is great. We’ll be going in-depth later on, but as mentioned earlier, you have the unholy wombo combo of an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6.
On paper, it should tell you that you’ll be able to run something more demanding than Genshin Impact. In practice, that’s exactly the case.
Now, when it comes to the actual gaming, we just threw caution to the wind. But instead of maxing everything out, we just chose the best presets to showcase the hardware capabilities. Red Dead Redemption 2 might be an older title, but it can still make lesser GPUs cry.
As for Cyberpunk 2077, it never fails to warm our hearts–and our laptops’ overall temperature. However, in the case of the TUF Gaming A14, we were able to go wild. It’s an RTX GPU with ray tracing and DLSS, and unlike lower-tiered RTX graphics cards, you can actually utilize both. What more could you ask for?
It also helps that ASUS Armory Crate–aside from allowing keyboard presets, also gives you a wat to fine-tune your gaming. It can be hassle switching between presets, as it requires you to restart every time. But it does affect your gameplay, to some extent, if you’re not running on battery power.
While we’d love to show more gameplay, you’ll have to take out word for it–mostly because after taking a photo, we simply get lost in Saint Denis and Night City until we forget why we were there in the first place. It also doesn’t help that the buttery smooth 165Hz refresh rate and G-Sync just heighten the overall gaming experience.
It’s worth noting that this laptop has a MUX Switch and NVIDIA Advanced Optimus. Right out of the box, it’s switched on. So, it’s up to you if you wish to proceed with your gaming without it.
Overall, you can’t expect the ASUS TUF Gaming A14 to go above and beyond the more monstrous PC or even laptop setups with a Ryzen 9 9950X or an RTX 4090. However, you can definitely count on a device that’s just about the same size as a sheet of paper to run any game in your library, and run it sufficiently.
Under The Hood
Now, it’s time to dig a bit deeper into those specs. It’s not as bombastic of a topic, but it’s still nice to see what goes on within the confines of your device. Just to recap we’re rocking a 2-gigahertz AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Processor. This is a newer CPU, introduced alongside this year’s ASUS AI-powered lineup. That being said, it fare pretty well in practice. Just to put things into perspective, we decided to do a few benchmarks, just to see how it stacks up.
This puts it just above a few of its Ryzen 9 brethren and in line with some other high-powered last-generation processors. It also performs better with single-core usage.
As for graphical needs, we’re packing an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. It’s a decent GPU for running pretty much game at max settings. As for its Geekbench rankings, it pretty much puts it smack in the middle of a non-laptop RTX 3060 and RTX 2060 Super. Of course, this is more from a cursory understanding. But given the numbers and our overall experience, you really shouldn’t worry.
Of course, we can’t forget that this is, in essence, an AI PC. For that, we get an AMD XDNA NPU. This neural processor contributes to any AI-related processes, namely your usage of any chatbots or the proprietary Copilot–which you can very easily access. This technology is pretty new, and it’s still tough to see how it performs outside of machine learning processes. That being said, it does a fine job within its niche.
Everyday Reliability
Now, this is definitely a gaming laptop. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be your daily driver. Like we said earlier, this is still essentially an AI-driven Copilot PC, but on steroids. Not only do you get some pretty good machine learning, but you get top-shelf software. Spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations are nothing.
Copilot is definitely a great feature to have, whether you’re simply doing research of crafting something a bit more detailed. It really does contribute to making life much easier in the workplace, and is definitely a supplementary tool that you should consider using if you haven’t already.
Now, you probably thought we forgot, but instead we decided to talk about memory and storage in this part, as these components have pretty much been the workhorses when it comes to productivity, and less so in gaming. The two sticks of 8GB LPDDR5X 7500 RAM will make multi-tasking a breeze. Open tabs, close tabs, open another program, no problem. We never had any problems with the laptop jittering or freezing. Thank goodness for dual-channel RAM in 2o24.
As for all the apps and games you’ll be downloading, a speedy and hefty 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD is pretty much the solution to all your problems. Should you have even bigger problems, you have an extra slot to use.
As for battery life and longevity, we had no problem going 6 to 8 hours with light use. This means, mostly work tasks without any lollygagging. This is thanks to the laptop’s 73 WHr battery. Of course, you can cut those hours in half once you start gaming. It really can’t be helped. Once you need to recharge, the 200W AC adapter should get you back to 100% in an hour or so. To rectify these problems, we mostly kept ourselves plugged in.
Final Geek Lifestyle Verdict
The ASUS TUF Gaming A14 may be marketed mostly towards gamers, but you’ll be surprised with its all-around capabilities. From its looks, to its specs, to the quality of life features that its bringing to the table, just about anyone can pick it up and use it on a daily basis.
It may be a tad small for a desktop replacement, but if you’re the type who enjoys working outside–away from all the earthly, homely distractions, this is a compelling choice. Especially if you have a stacked Steam library that you’ve left untouched–simply because your dedicated work laptop can’t game.
As for us, we enjoyed our time with this handy dandy, badass device. Its size and portability coupled with its great specs make it a worthy contender that can just about go toe-to-toe with its ROG siblings. Speaking of going toe-to-toe, it does pretty much match them in pricing.
The ASUS TUF Gaming A14 FA401WV-RG024W comes in with an MSRP of PHP 104,995. That’s a pretty hefty price tag compared to the earlier TUF iterations. That being said, it does come with top-shelf components and some new technology that can only improve over time. If you’re in the market for a laptop that can pretty much do it all, and you can afford it, we’d highly recommend it.
ASUS TUF Gaming A14 (2024) Specs:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen Al 9 HX 370
- Neural Processor: AMD XDNA NPU up to 50TOPS
- Installed Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X 7500
- Operating System: Windows 11 Home
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6
- Storage: 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD
- Display: 14-inch, 2.5K (2560 x 1600, WQXGA), 165Hz, G-Sync, MUX Switch + NVIDIA Advanced Optimus
- Ports:
- 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack
- 1x HDMI 2.1 FRL
- 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (data speed up to 10Gbps)
- 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with support for DisplayPort (data speed up to 10Gbps)
- 1x Type-C USB 4 with support for DisplayPort / power delivery (data speed up to 40Gbps)
- 1x card reader (microSD) (UHS-II)