ASUS TUF Dash 15.6" TUF516PE-AB73 Eclipse grey 2021

A thin and light chassis that's begging for a better processor. Buy it only if portability is your absolute top priority and you find it for a steal.

The RTX 3050 Ti here is a 60W variant, which is fine for esports titles and older AAA games at medium settings, but don't expect miracles. What really surprised us, and not in a good way, is how that Intel i7-11370H bottlenecks things. It's a 4-core chip in a world where 6-cores are the minimum for a smooth experience, and it lands in a disappointing 29th percentile in our database. You'll feel it in CPU-heavy games and multitasking. The 144Hz screen is smooth, but good luck pushing those frames in anything demanding without dropping settings to low.

The real fight is between this and something like a Lenovo Legion 5 or an Acer Nitro 5 from the same era. Those laptops are thicker and heavier, but they pack full-power GPUs and 6-core CPUs that don't choke. The TUF Dash wins on portability, no contest. But if you're buying a gaming laptop to actually game, the Legion's performance advantage is massive. Even a MacBook Pro M5 Pro, while not a gaming machine, will feel infinitely faster in day-to-day creative work and has battery life that embarrasses the ASUS.

Pricing is all over the map, from $798 to a ridiculous $25,484, so you have to shop smart. At the low end, if you can snag this for under $800 and you're comfortable immediately spending another $30 on a stick of RAM, it's a decent budget thin-and-light. But once you cross the $900 mark, you're in territory where you can get a laptop with a proper 6-core CPU and an RTX 3060, which will run circles around this thing.

The ASUS TUF Dash 15 is a laptop that looks like it should be a killer deal on paper, but the spec sheet hides a couple of landmines. You get a thin, military-grade chassis with a 144Hz screen and an RTX 3050 Ti, which sounds great for a portable gaming rig. The problem is that 4-core CPU and the measly 8GB of RAM in the base config hold it back hard. It's a laptop that's easy to carry but frustrating to live with if you don't immediately crack it open for upgrades.

If you're looking for a no-compromises gaming experience or need a laptop for CPU-heavy work like video editing, this isn't it. Go get a Lenovo Legion 5 with a Ryzen 7 or a 6-core Intel chip instead. You'll trade some thinness for a massive leap in actual performance that won't leave you frustrated a year from now.

The ASUS TUF Dash 15 is a laptop with an identity crisis. It's built for portability but equipped with a CPU that makes it a poor long-term investment. Unless you find a screaming deal and plan to use it mostly as a portable work machine that can do some light gaming on the side, you should look elsewhere. The base 8GB model is a non-starter, and even with 16GB, that processor is a ticking clock for obsolescence.