Laptop deals for Prime Day tend to be less dramatic than for other kinds of PC hardware; knock off 50% from the cost of any PC for a day or two, and it’ll sell out in a flash. Thus, this Asus TUG Gaming model may look forgettable at first glance—it may seem like a ho-hum deal based on its raw specs, versus what you might be hunting for. But it’s actually a bit of a groundbreaking value at the moment, in its Prime Day guise.
Why is that? You’ll seldom see a compact gaming laptop for anything less than $1,300 or so, and this one is at $899.99 right now.
Let’s start with the specs that may make your eyes glaze over. Yes, the graphics chip is a slightly snoozy GeForce RTX 4050. That’s Nvidia’s last-gen, lowest-end GPU for laptops. The GeForce RTX 5050 just debuted a few weeks ago, so the RTX 4050 can’t even lay claim to being the cutting edge of the low end anymore. And the CPU is not one of AMD’s spanking-new Ryzen AI 300 series “Strix Point” chips. Rather, it’s a last-generation Ryzen 8000 series.
But take those points and park them aside for a moment. First of all, by definition, a gaming laptop must have a discrete graphics chip, and this is by far the least expensive gaming machine with a 14-inch screen on the market being sold as a current, new model. You always pay a premium for a gaming laptop to be small (look at Razer’s Blade 14 and its rivals), and by small, we mean anything below a 15.6-inch screen size. The TUF Gaming A14 is non-trivially smaller than that, and weighs just 3.2 pounds.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Look again at the GPU. The RTX 4050 is no powerhouse, but it’ll get you into mainstream gaming at 1080p with no problem. For under $1,000, buyers can’t expect more than that, and the TUF Gaming A14 should deliver frames in spades at 1080p. The CPU, too, is better than it may look at first glance. The AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS actually employs a decent 16 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU) on-chip, which gives this laptop the ability to crunch some of Microsoft’s Windows 11-resident AI features locally. That is far from a given with gaming laptops; most current models have weak or no NPUs. Plus, in a gaming laptop under $900, you’re usually getting a Ryzen 5, or an Intel Core i5—not a Ryzen 7 or Core i7-class chip.
The other specs are perfectly satisfactory for a model at this price. The 16GB of RAM is the sweet spot for a budget gaming laptop, and while I would like the 512GB SSD to be a bit larger, judicious use of the space should suffice for budget shoppers. The 14-inch panel itself is a 165Hz screen that’s higher than 1080p (2,560 by 1,600 pixels, or WQXGA), so you have a nice, sharp resolution for when you’re not gaming. (Given the RTX 4050, we recommend dialing down to 1080p with demanding games.)
If you’re looking for a gaming laptop that you can actually carry around without grief, this looks to be your best bet if you’re hunting the Prime Day sales aisle. There’s a very noticeable difference between a 15.6-inch laptop and a 14-inch laptop when you have to haul it around every day. Your shoulders will tell you.
We reviewed a version of the TUF Gaming A14 with the RTX 4060, which will obviously perform a bit better than the RTX 4050 in the $899 deal here. But definitely check out our review to get a sense of the design and feature set, and enjoy the pricing while it lasts. Our RTX 4060 test model was a lustier $1,399 when we reviewed it last summer. That $500 difference will buy a lot of PC games, and even a cheap external SSD to hold your game library, if you need more space for ’em.
Also, be sure to check out more top Prime Day Deal picks from our sibling brands: CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, and ZDNET.
