If you’re looking at the Asus TUF Gaming A14 this time of year, you’re probably getting the early jump on back-to-school shopping. Or maybe you need something as compact as a MacBook for work but would like to do a little gaming on it. The trick is finding something easy to carry with enough power to do the “hard tasks” like coding or 3D modeling while also being able to sneak in a few rounds of Valorant when no one is looking. 

The Asus TUF Gaming A14 has a slim profile and no-frills design, but it’s a powerful device under the hood. The new AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 chip easily beats Intel’s Meteor Lake lineup from earlier this year.  It’s brought down by a lack of upgradability and limited spec options, but it makes up for it by being a smooth operator. It feels more like an ultrabook than a gaming laptop. It weighs just a bit more than 3 pounds, and while the keyboard backlight is bright, it’s not overt. It runs quietly, even under stress, and can still play graphics-intensive games at fair framerates. 

The laptop starts at $1,400 for an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU with a less capable neural processor, though you’ll need to pay $100 more for that AI-centric chip. That’s stretching its “budget” nature, especially without the usual gaming accouterments. Asus’ own 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14 with an OLED display starts at $1,600, or you could spend closer to $2,000 for 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 4070.  

In its press materials, Asus claims the A14 can have up to 32 GB of RAM, though my review unit contained the standard 16 GB. The version with larger RAM is only available through ANT for $1,800 MSRP (though currently on sale for $1,650). The sticking point is that you can’t upgrade the memory in this machine. You’re stuck with the base 16 GB. That’s good enough for most tasks and gaming, but I imagine many scenarios when you’ll want more. 

As its name suggests, this is one tough little laptop. The aluminum frame doesn’t buckle or bend too much despite the pressure of my hands and fingers. The palm rests were sturdy and never grew too warm, even under strain. It’s the kind of laptop that feels like it will suffer scrapes and scratches and still come out perfectly workable.

It weighs 3.2 pounds, and its compact size makes it easy to carry around or pack into a petite-sized bag. And it will still look pretty presentable after you handle it. My grubby hands left plenty of prints on the inside of the case, but I’m surprised by how the outside shell was never as marred.

The keyboard’s weighty feel of its keys for a relatively cheap laptop surprised me. It’s not going to trick you into thinking you’re using a mechanical keyboard, but there’s enough travel to have a presence when you press down on the keys. The trackpad, meanwhile, is just fine. It’s not a skating rink or a gravel patch. At the very least, I had minimal issues with palm rejection on my medium-sized hands. There are just enough ports on this laptop size for daily use to make it usable for work or gaming. You have two USB-A, two USB-C (only one supports power), one HDMI 2.1, and an extra microSD card slot. 

The PC is quiet on performance settings, but switching to turbo mode will be loud enough to turn some heads in a quiet room. It never gets too hot on the surface, but when gaming, the fans blow most of the heat down through the bottom of the PC, which may make it uncomfortable if you want to play in bed with the laptop on your lap.

The 14-inch laptop has an IPS LCD with a max refresh rate of 165 Hz. It’s decidedly good enough, but with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, you’re not getting the premium visual quality of laptops that cost a few hundred bucks more.

The display hit 236 nits peak brightness at 25% of the screen. It’s not incredible, but I wasn’t expecting too much from a budget laptop. It’s bright enough for most tasks and should work well enough so long as it’s not in direct sunlight with the sun peering down at the screen.

The only thing marring this design is its lack of upgradability. The RAM is tied to the device, though you can change out the 1 TB SSD for something larger if you’re afraid you’ll be full. The PC comes with two SSD slots.

Based on our tests, AMD’s Strix Point CPU with GeForce RTX 40-series is a potent combination. The Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 outperformed the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H cleanly throughout all our benchmarks. It also stacks against the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite powering Microsoft’s AI-centric Copilot+ PCs. 

Our Geekbench 6 benchmarks with TUF’s CPU show it beats an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in laptops like the Dell XPS 14 by more than 500 points in single-core and a little less than 1,000 points in multi-core settings. It’s a similar story across Cinebench benchmarks. The chip outperforms Intel’s mid-range laptop chip by sizable margins. We’re waiting for Intel’s Lunar Lake drop in just a few short months, but right now, AMD’s x64 chips for small PCs reign supreme, even if you ignore all the AI capabilities stemming from the NPU.

In our Blender benchmark, where we ask the PC to render a scene of a BMW, it took just two minutes and 15 seconds to work on the CPU. That’s more than a minute faster than the Intel Core Ultra 7. However, it was slower than a MacBook Air with M3 on our Handbrake test, where we time how long it takes to transcode a 4K movie to 1080p. All that being said, this PC is strong at mundane work tasks, but it’s also a strong gaming PC.

With the PC plugged in on the highest settings, the TUF A14 got playable framerates on multiple game benchmarks, though it won’t beat other laptops with higher-end chips. I hit 36 FPS with low ray tracing on Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks and just under 60 FPS with DLSS. Assassins Creed: Valhalla benchmarked at 93 FPS on ultra-high settings.

In Baldur’s Gate III, I hit 70 FPS on high and ultra settings without DLSS in interior scenes and a stable 50 FPS in exterior environments in Chapter 1. With the same settings in the dense city of Chapter 3, I was edging closer to 40, but with DLSS settings on Quality, I was managing closer to 55. 

In several more recent games, I managed to get it to 60 FPS with high settings. In Black Myth: Wukong, I was able to make it to a solid framerate on universal high settings without frame generation on Turbo Mode through Armoury Crate, but in quieter performance mode, you do need to set DLSS to performance and add in frame generation. In a game like Horizon: Forbidden West, I could make it to the fabled 60 without much fuss or even DLSS in Armoury Crate’s performance mode.

We’ve learned not to expect much longevity from gaming laptops, even the most expensive of their kind. The TUF A14 isn’t exactly breaking any ground with its battery life, but I found it was fair, especially considering its price. With a 73 Whr battery, you won’t be doing unplugged gaming sessions of more than two hours, but you can’t get some work done when you’re off the plug.

The TUF A14 will net you a four-hour battery life when doing regular productivity tasks on Windows and Armoury Crate’s balanced modes. It was consistent during browsing, writing, or taking video calls. I was surprised how consistently the battery drained at just a few decimal points off 25% per hour. That wasn’t doing anything too strenuous, and the battery drains significantly faster with any activity that takes more power. 

It’s not great, but it’s not the worst you would get for a gaming laptop, especially one that’s so good at pretending to be a primary productivity machine. For gaming, you’re lucky to get a little more hour out of the device in performance mode in a game like Cyberpunk. It’s what you can expect from this type of machine at this size, but you might get a slightly better life out of a machine that costs just a few hundred dollars more or opt for a bigger body than a 14-inch.

There’s definitely a use case for larger gaming PCs like Alienware’s m16 R2 with its so-called “stealth mode” that disables the RGB lighting and makes everything run more quietly. But come on, we all know it’s a big gaming laptop with that large Alienware logo on it. 

The TUF Gaming A14  is such a surprising beast in its unassuming package. It manages everything I could throw at it, and still, the only thing anybody will notice from the back is four small blinking LEDs. That “TUF” logo is so hidden on the backplate that most people can’t read it except in direct light.

It’s a strong contender at $1,500. Still, you could get a more capable, better-looking gaming laptop from Asus’ ROG slate for only a few hundred bucks more. There’s also the issue with upgradability and the limited RAM you get on-device. If you hope to make the A14 your everyday laptop, you must also deal with the limited battery life. Hopefully, you’re working where you can access a plug because you’ll need it. Just remember to turn the fans down in class if you’re ever—ahem—taking very intense lecture notes.