This is the gaming laptop that convinced me there

This gaming laptop is ideal for those who want to be able to take their laptop around with them and use it for more than just gaming. Its subtle design and form factor make it very portable, and its RTX 5060 GPU has surprisingly strong gaming chops, especially with frame gen enabled. You can probably get a little better performance for cheaper, but probably not in such a great form factor and premium chassis.

This laptop feels like it was made specifically for me, and those like me. Its lush brushed metal and slightly curved but still square design, plus comfy typing, is exactly what I want for a work and travel machine. But on top of that, you’re also getting decent gaming performance and great battery life, all packaged in a lovely 14-inch form factor. There we go, that’s the review done… alright, there’s a little more to it than that.

The Asus TUF A14 (2025)I have in front of me right now is easily the best gaming laptop I’ve used, and you know what? I don’t think I’d swap it out for a single other laptop—unless Asus starts offering an RTX 5070 or RTX 5080 version, of course.

That’s because all these design choices speak to me very specifically as someone who spends just as much time working and travelling as I do gaming. This laptop seems tailor-made to people with just such use cases, provided the ‘work’ isn’t very resource-intensive. For me, it’s just typing in Chrome with a few tabs and a couple of different apps open, so the TUF suits just fine.

As a pure gaming laptop, there are certainly better choices for the admittedly very steep price this is going for. At the time of writing, for instance, you can actually get an RTX 5070 Ti laptop for a little less. And while I’d expect this RTX 5060-touting TUF A14 will go on sale too, at some point, I don’t doubt that you’ll still be able to get better-performing laptops for cheaper than it even then.

Part of the reason for this is because it’s a 14-inch laptop and you usually have to pay a premium for this dinky (but still very usable) form factor. The other part is that it’s just an incredibly well-made laptop all around. Nothing about it feels accidental or half-assed. You almost get that MacBook feeling when you hold it, which is saying something for a gaming machine, and especially one not in Asus’ premium ROG brand.

I’m gonna keep on talking about the design for a while longer, actually, because it really is worth highlighting.

Our Dave tried the 2024 version of the TUF A14 and found the same as I did with this one: It’s lovely. Not much has changed in the design since then because not much needed changing. That slightly annoying touchpad grit, when pressed in the corners, seems to have been fixed, too.

The laptop exterior looks very subtly premium, which helps when bringing it out and about in public—none of that garish ‘I’M A GAMER’ nonsense. It’s pretty light at 3.22 lbs, too, and of course it’s nice and dinky, so it’s an incredibly portable and publicly usable laptop in all respects. The 16:10 aspect screen helps in that respect, too, though bear in mind that aspect ratio can make you lose out on a little field of view in some games, which might be an issue for the most competitive of gamers, but not for the vast majority, myself included (and I do like competitive shooters).

That screen is a 2560 x 1600, 165 Hz IPS affair, which looks plenty vibrant to my eyes. It would have been nice to see an OLED on this, like you get with the Transcend 14, but I’ll take a great IPS with few complaints. I suppose I might not like to see how much an OLED version of this laptop would cost.

The keyboard is a genuine pleasure to type on. I still prefer my mechanical Keychron, but for a chiclet laptop keeb it’s great. Ditto the trackpad, which is large and centred.

The speakers are clear and loud, though not particularly bassy, as you would generally expect from little laptop units. There is one annoying thing about them, however. On a flat surface they’re fine, but because they’re located underneath the laptop, a little on the side, if you use it on your lap it can muffle the sound, which is a shame.

Not only is its chassis and overall design lovely but its internals feel perfectly tailored. One might look at the specs list and feel a little underwhelmed by the CPU, GPU, and RAM, but I think they make perfect sense for this laptop. The processor is certainly not aimed at productivity, but for gaming it’s great. Likewise, 16 GB of RAM is fine for gaming and light work. Even the cooling fans sound great as they have a surprisingly pleasant timbre.

Most importantly, I found the RTX 5060 GPU in the TUF A14 to perform much better than I expected. Admittedly I’m coming from a desktop with a now-ageing RTX 3060 Ti inside, so there’s definitely a little frame gen wow factor at play for that reason alone. But still, that aside, I reckon it’s a mighty capable chip for 1080p and native 1600p gaming, provided you’re happy enabling upscaling and maybe 2X frame gen in more demanding games. You could enable 4X frame gen, but the results and latency can vary massively game to game.

You want a decent starting frame rate to reduce input latency when frame gen is enabled. Sadly, I couldn’t always attain that here. Thankfully, you should be able to start out with a decent enough frame rate with upscaling enabled in most games.

That’s thanks to the RTX 5060. I can honestly say this laptop GPU generation feels like the first time I’ve been able to say that gaming on a (somewhat) affordable laptop GPU is a genuinely great gaming experience. I’m no fan of Nvidia trying to convince us all that generated frames are just the same as real frames, but hey, better those than none as far as I’m concerned.

I really didn’t think I’d feel like that about 4X frame gen, either. But after trying it for hour after hour (after hour) in Killing Floor 3, I’m on board. I was able to whip that UE5 game on high settings at 1440p or 1600p and get a comfortable mid-high-100s frame rate with 4X frame gen enabled, and the latency was perfectly playable.

The fact is, I consistently chose to play the game on my laptop (usually on my external monitor) rather than on my RTX 3060 Ti desktop, and it wasn’t even a tough decision. I ran into some issues with the hybrid GPU setup switching between AMD and Nvidia on my external display and crashing, however, this stopped with some tinkering. It didn’t happen much in the first place, and at any rate seems to be an issue that you’d get with any AMD-Nvidia hybrid system.

Now, if I turn UE5’s lighting system Lumen on and crank some other settings up, latency becomes a problem, but the fact is I’m able to play a great-looking UE5 game at 165 Hz with the frames to match and practically unnoticeable latency.

Admittedly, frame gen is a mixed bag and very game-dependent, but that it’s worth it even some of the time is no small thing. I’d still recommend the laptop without it—just look at those non-frame gen frame rates, they’re perfectly reasonable—but with it? You bet.

And then there’s Turbo mode. Most of my testing was done at the highest performance settings Windows offers, but I thought I should try Turbo mode in Asus Armoury Crate, too, and that surprised me. By boosting the amount of power fed to the CPU and GPU (from 68 W average power draw during a Metro Exodus run up to 98 W average power draw, in the case of the latter), you can see from the 1080p benchmarks above that frame rates increased significantly in all but one of the games I tried. In fact, it even starts to approach an RTX 5070 laptop level of performance—perhaps RTX 5060 Ti mobile performance, if there were such a chip.

That being said, I’d personally opt to drop those few frames and keep it in the usual performance mode, because the fans do kick into overdrive in Turbo. It’s not a grating sound—the timbre and pitch of the fans is surprisingly pleasant, like a standing fan on a warm summer’s day—but it is loud. I had them running at full Turbo whack in a work meeting not long ago and I struggled to hear what people were saying. For such a sleek laptop as this, that Turbo mode is best left for closed-back headphone sessions only. Even then, I might still opt to leave it on the standard performance mode.

Moving in the opposite direction, in addition to the usual silent/eco mode gubbins, remember you also have the option to ditch the Nvidia GPU for gaming entirely and just use the iGPU. With just a little fiddling in the Windows settings, I set Risk of Rain 2 to use just the Radeon 860M in the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU, and it worked just fine. It was perfectly playable at 1920 x 1200, and saved a lot of power and therefore battery life. I’d definitely recommend doing this for less intensive games.

Saying that, though, the TUF A14 (2025)’s battery life even when using the RTX 5060 is fantastic, which is surprising considering it’s only rated to 73 Wh. But we’ve already seen that RTX 50-series laptops are incredibly capable in the efficiency department, thanks to a new generation of MaxQ tech that involves such fancy shmancy things as memory voltage optimisations, fast frequency switching, advanced power gating, quicker entry into low-power states, and so on.

The details don’t matter as much as the results, really, and these speak for themselves with the TUF A14 (2025). I actually didn’t believe the results at first, but after triple-checking all my settings and running the battery life test another two times and checking it was indeed running the test on the RTX 5060 rather than the iGPU, I can confirm: This 73 Wh battery can really stretch itself far. Over two hours and thirty minutes during the PCMark 10 gaming test is very impressive, even if that is in large part because the RTX 5060 wasn’t guzzling much power at default Windows performance settings.

Outside of gaming and day-to-day work/browsing, you shouldn’t expect much, however. The Ryzen processor in this is actually a downgrade over last year’s RTX 4060 version. As you can see, it performs worse at productivity tasks than higher-end Ryzen AI 300-series chips. Not massively so, but not unnoticeably so, either. And it certainly won’t compare with a full-fat 13th or 14th Gen Core i7 or Core i9.

But for a gaming and light workload machine, that’s a sacrifice I’m more than willing to make. In fact, it’s not really a sacrifice when you consider the gains in efficiency. That’s why I said this machine feels perfectly tailored.

I’m under no illusions, though—I know that while this is perfectly tailored to someone like me, it might not be for everyone. Not for its MSRP, anyway. That’s because, as I stated at the beginning, there are cheaper options that perform better. If you’re just looking for the best performance for your buck, this isn’t it.

But if, like me, you’re happy sacrificing a little performance—in the knowledge that it’s still good current-gen performance nonetheless—for wonderful design, form factor, and battery life, then I don’t hesitate in recommending it. If I were only using my laptop for gaming at home, I might look for an RTX 5070 or RTX 5080 machine, but if I want to travel and/or use my laptop for other things, this Asus TUF A14 (2025) is without a doubt the laptop I’m looking for.

Asus TUF A14 (2025)

This gaming laptop is ideal for those who want to be able to take their laptop around with them and use it for more than just gaming. Its subtle design and form factor make it very portable, and its RTX 5060 GPU has surprisingly strong gaming chops, especially with frame gen enabled. You can probably get a little better performance for cheaper, but probably not in such a great form factor and premium chassis.

Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob’s led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world’s #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It’s definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.

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