ASUS TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition (2023) Laptop Review

The ASUS TUF A16 is available in a Black or Sandstorm (silver with a warm beige tone) color. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The ASUS TUF A16's build quality is excellent. The chassis is aluminum on top and plastic on the bottom. It feels sturdy, exhibiting only a small amount of flex on the lid, display, and keyboard deck. The finish doesn't scratch easily but picks up fingerprints, especially on the lid and touchpad.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the laptop and is very stable. There’s only a tiny amount of screen wobble when typing aggressively. The hinge has a lot of resistance. You can still open the laptop with one hand; the resistance just makes fine adjustments more challenging.

The ASUS TUF A16 Advantage Edition's serviceability is great. Accessing the internals is straightforward; you only need to remove some Philips screws to take the bottom panel off. The screws are of different lengths, so it's best to keep them organized to make the reassembly easier.

See the service manual here.

• 240W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

Note: Models with an AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU have a 280W power adapter.

The ASUS TUF A16 is available with the following displays:

• 16" IPS 1920 x 1200 165Hz
• 16" IPS 2560 x 1600 240Hz

The FHD+ display looks decently sharp on a 16-inch screen. You can see individual pixels up close, but that isn't an issue at typical viewing distances. Naturally, the QHD+ panel looks sharper with a pixel density of 190 PPI. Its increased sharpness makes it a better option for atmospheric and RPG games where you have time to fully appreciate the graphics or for productivity tasks. The 16:10 aspect ratio is becoming more common. It gives you slightly more vertical space than a 16:9 screen, which has little effect on gaming but helps with productivity because you can see more information at once when reading a document, reducing the need to scroll.

The ASUS TUF A16 is available with a 165Hz or 240Hz display. The 165Hz panel has a fast response time, resulting in a clear image with minimal ghosting in fast-moving scenes. Upgrading to the 240Hz display will provide better responsiveness; however, the difference isn't night and day and might not be immediately noticeable to some people. Both displays support variable refresh rate to reduce screen tearing.

The 165Hz FHD+ display has a good contrast ratio for an IPS panel. It's still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings. The 240Hz QHD+ likely has the same contrast ratio.

The 165Hz FHD+ display doesn't get very bright. It's fine for indoor settings, but you may still have visibility issues if there's a lot of ambient lighting or if lights are directly shining on the screen. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, though, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain. The 240Hz QHD+ is much brighter, with an advertised brightness of 500 cd/m².

The display's reflection handling is good. Its matte coating works well in diffusing and reducing the intensity of bright light sources. Viewing light-color content isn't a problem; it's dark-color content that's hard to see, especially when there's a bright light shining directly on the screen.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is passable. The image dims and washes out fairly quickly as you move to the side. You have to be more or less directly in front of the screen to see an accurate image.

The display's vertical viewing angle is passable. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above and below.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is outstanding. The white balance and color inaccuracies are extremely minor and hard to spot with the naked eye. The gamma sticks to an almost flat 2.2, making dark scenes too dark and bright scenes too bright.

The 165Hz FHD+ display is an sRGB panel, meaning it only has full coverage of the sRGB color space. Its coverage of the wider Adobe RGB and DCI P3 is too low for print photography and HDR video production. The 240Hz QHD+ has full DCI P3 coverage.

The ASUS TUF A16 has a great keyboard. Its layout feels spacious and is relatively easy to get used to. The keys are stable, have a decent amount of travel, and require little force to actuate. They have a clear tactile bump to indicate the actuation but feel mushy when you bottom out. The backlighting is white, leaning on the cooler side. You can adjust the brightness and apply a lighting effect (static, breathing, strobing) using the F2, F3, and F4 hotkeys.

The touchpad is large and smooth. It tracks all movements and gestures well, though zooming in and out images doesn't always feel smooth. Palm rejection works with no issue. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad; the buttons feel mushy.

The ASUS TUF A16's speakers don't get very loud. They're best suited for spoken content, as they sound pretty basic and crude, with an unnatural timbre and no bass.

The webcam is sub-par. The image looks soft, noisy, and overexposed. Voices sound relatively clear but nasal, accompanied by some background static noise.

The ASUS TUF A16 Advantage Edition has a great port selection. The USB-A ports support USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. Both USB-Cs support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed (up to 10Gbps) and DisplayPort; the only difference is that the one closest to the USB-A port supports Power Delivery, which lets you fast charge the laptop and other PD-compatible devices connected to the port. The HDMI is a true HDMI 2.1 port capable of outputting a 4k @ 120Hz signal.

The ASUS TUF Gaming A16's wireless adapter is a RealTek 8852BE. Some models have a MediaTek MT7921 adapter.

The ASUS TUF A16 is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 4.7GHz, 16MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.2GHz, 16MB L3 cache)

Both are technically high-performance CPUs but run at a lower wattage of 35W, so while they can handle fairly demanding workloads, they aren't as fast as the 45-watt H-series CPUs typically found in workstations and gaming laptops with more robust cooling systems. The Ryzen 9 7940HS is, on average, 15% faster than the Ryzen 7 7735HS and up to 30% faster in some workloads. The choice of the CPU depends on your usage and the games you play; the difference is minimal in GPU-limited games.

The ASUS TUF A16 is available with the following GPUs:

• AMD Radeon RX 7600S 8GB GDDR6 VRAM (95W TGP)
• AMD Radeon RX 7700S 8GB GDDR6 VRAM (120W TGP)

Both are mid-range GPUs designed for 1080p and 1440p gaming. Performance-wise, the RX 7600S is close to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, while the 7700S is closer to an RTX 3070 Laptop, performing up to 10% faster than the 7600S. There's a MUX (multiplexer) switch to allow the GPU to send information directly to the display without going through the integrated GPU, meaning you'll see dramatically better performance than on laptops that lack this feature. The performance difference can be anywhere from 10% to 25%, or more in some cases. To conserve battery, the system switches to the integrated GPUs during lighter workloads. The Ryzen 7735HS CPU has a Radeon 760M iGPU, while the 7940HS has a Radeon 780M. If you prefer a gaming laptop with NVIDIA GPUs, check out the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024)

You can configure this laptop with 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The memory is user-replaceable.

You can get this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The storage is user-replaceable; there are two M.2 2280 slots.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU’s performance is good but not great, which isn't surprising, as it's essentially a refresh of the older AMD Ryzen 7 6800H. It can handle general productivity tasks and some demanding workloads; just know that there are significantly faster processors on the market, like the AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX in the Dell Alienware m18 (2023) and Apple's M3 Max SoC in the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M3, 2023). As for the GPU, the AMD Radeon RX 7600S’s score is great, with performance roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, a lower mid-range graphics processor.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU performs well in Cinebench R23. Its multi-thread performance is where we expect it to be—better than the low-power U-series processors but not as fast as the more power-hungry H-series CPUs. It can handle demanding workloads, but again, there are significantly faster processors on the market.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU performs well in Blender; however, if you need to render images professionally, rendering with a discrete GPU is best. Even an entry-level discrete GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 can render images faster. Unfortunately, Blender doesn't give the option to render with the AMD Radeon RX 7600S GPU in this laptop.

The AMD Radeon RX 7600S scores well in the Basemark GPU benchmark. Its performance is roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060; however, it can perform better in some games, particularly AMD-sponsored titles, bringing it closer to an RTX 3070 or 3070 Ti. This means it's mainly for 1080p gaming but can handle some titles at 1440p if you lower the graphical settings or use FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), a performance-boosting feature similar to NVIDIA's DLSS. The AMD Radeon RX 7700S is about 10% faster in most games.

We ran this benchmark in the Ultimate performance mode because the Standard mode automatically switches to the integrated GPU, resulting in a score of 23,857.

Models with an AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU and a QHD+ display likely have a shorter battery life.

Borderlands 3 runs well on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 7600S GPU. The gameplay is smooth, with only occasional stutters. You can even play this game at 1440p and still get over 60 fps with minimal tweaks in the settings.

The performance in Civilization VI is excellent. Regardless of the GPU configuration, frame rate isn't really a problem since this isn't a particularly GPU-intensive game. You can play this game at 1440p with no issue. Upgrading to the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS won't noticeably improve the turn time.

Counter-Strike 2 runs very smoothly at 1080p with high settings. You can play this game at 1440p with no issue.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs well on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 at 1080p. The gameplay is smooth, with almost no stutters, despite what the graph and results show. You can play this game at 1440p with no issue. The frametime spikes are scene changes and aren't representative of the performance.

The ASUS TUF A16's keyboard deck gets pretty hot under load. However, the hot spots are at the top and right side of the keyboard, so it's not too bad if you only use WASD and the surrounding keys when gaming. While loud, the fans aren't overly annoying or distracting.

The ASUS A16 has a few pre-installed software applications, including:

• ASUS Armory Crate: Lets you monitor the system status and control the fan and power profiles.
• Dolby Access: Adds Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision support. It also lets you change the sound and picture profile or create a custom sound profile through EQ.
• McAfee: Antivirus and anti-malware application. Requires subscription.
• MyASUS: Contains system and warranty information.
• Spotify: App for the music streaming service.