Asus TUF A14 Review: Portable and Affordable Gaming Power

It sits in Asus’ more affordable TUF gaming tier, but the Asus TUF A14 brings a surprising level of gaming fun to the party.

Pros	Cons
Compact size makes it good for games or more serious work	Plastic body is a touch rattly
Good general gaming performance	Plain design

Score: 4/5

In this review

Asus TUF A14 Specifications
Asus TUF A14 Design
Asus TUF A14 Performance
Asus TUF A14 Battery
Asus TUF A14 Conclusion

For the longest time, a “budget” gaming laptop was an oxymoron; saying you wanted a gaming laptop to any laptop maker was rather like saying that you wanted that cake for a wedding, because you were always going to pay more as a result.

In recent years though there’s been a lot of attention paid to lower-cost gaming-capable laptops. They’re typically a question of which corners you cut in order to meet a price point, and what that does to both performance and overall appeal.

With very few exceptions, the Asus TUF A14 manages that balancing act beautifully, providing ample gaming power in a compact and appealing form.

It won’t exactly blow your competition away with how much you’ve spent or quite how dominating it looks – but at the same time your wallet will feel a whole lot happier as a result than it would with other gaming systems.

Design

Asus’ TUF brand (The Ultimate Force, if you care) is its budget offering, sitting beneath the more premium-priced ROG (Republic Of Gamers) branded machines. That’s apparent the moment you pick the Asus TUF A14 up, because its plastic frame is very apparent, from the slightly-flexible display to the slight extra rattle of the keys.

The external shell bears a slightly militaristic TUF logo – I’m not a fan, but it’s not super apparent, so it’s livable with – while the internal body of the laptop has a simple backlit keyboard within.

The keyboard works nicely with good key travel and response as well as an essentially silent action. It sits beneath a 14 inch 2560x1600 pixel 165Hz capable panel – not quite as bright or sharp as the OLED panels that you get with some gaming laptops, but adequate enough, and another way that the Asus TUF A14 keeps its pricing moderate for a gaming system.

One other way that Asus has kept the pricing of the Asus TUF A14 down is by opting not to have RGB backlit keys. Is it really a gaming laptop without keys that can induce epileptic fits in those sensitive to flashing lights?

It probably still is, and personally I prefer this approach. The Asus TUF A14 eschews the classic “gaming laptop” look that so many opt for, which means it could very easily do double duty as your everyday working or study laptop without appearing too frivolous.

At 31.1x22.7x1.69cm and 1.46kg, it is also nicely portable, though it’s far from the lightest laptop you can buy. It’s also got a mixed set of external ports, covering dual USB 3.2 type A ports – one each side of the laptop – dual USB-C (one USB 4, one USB 3.2), full size HDMI 2.1, combo 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card reader.

Not a lot of ports, but enough for most gaming (and work) uses.

Is microSD enough, or should this be full sized SD card instead?

I’m not entirely sold on the utility of just having a microSD card reader rather than a full-sized one there, but it's otherwise reasonably equipped for external peripherals.

Performance

The Asus TUF A14 is built around AMD’s AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with either an 8GB NVIDIA RTX 4060 or 6GB RTX 4050 GPU providing graphics grunt.

RAM on the model as tested was 32GB, although online research does suggest that there are 16GB models in some markets as well. It’s worth checking, because the RAM appears to be soldered onto the board, so whatever you get is all it’s ever going to have. On the storage front, it’s equipped with a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.

All of this adds up to a decent performer given its asking price. Asus isn’t looking to replace the ROG brand as its premiere offering, but it’s certainly providing a solid little gaming machine here.

Here’s how the Asus TUF A14 compared across PCMark 10 and 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks against a range of other laptops:

The Zenbook S 16 most certainly isn’t pitched as a gaming machine, but I’ve included it in that roundup because it’s running the same AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 under the hood – but the TUF A14 is making a fair bit more of it, no doubt aided by the inclusion of the discrete NVIDIA GPU on the TUF model.

On the software side, the Asus TUF A14 runs Windows 11 Home, and predictably, Asus Armory Crate is along for the ride, but there’s not too much other preinstalled software to deal with. I do prefer it when laptop makers let me make the decisions around what software I want running on my machine.

Of course, you can’t properly review a gaming laptop without playing games on it. The Asus TUF A14 isn’t the highest-powered gaming laptop you can buy, but it’s more than adequate for most titles without significant issues.

Larger gaming laptops are often fun gaming beasts, but they’re a pain to carry around or even just balance on your lap, and this just isn’t an issue here. Me being me, I also spent some time (ahem) “testing” the Asus TUF A14 with the PC version of Earth Defense Force 6. I’m nothing if not committed to my reviewing craft, people!

Battery

14 inch gaming laptops have a challenge ahead of them, because a smaller frame gives you less overall space to pack in batteries. Add to that the demands of most AAA games, and you’re talking a recipe for minimal battery life.

Asus drops a 73wHr Lithium Ion battery into the Asus TUF A14, but it doesn’t make any specific claims around battery life. That’s kind of smart for a gaming laptop, ultimately, because the demands of different titles can lead to very different power outcomes.

To get a comparative picture of the Asus TUF A14’s battery endurance, I ran my two standard tests past it; the first is a simple video playback test to get a picture of battery usage under light loads, while the secondary PCMark 10 Gaming test puts the screws to the battery to see how it handles heavier processing loads. Here’s how the Asus TUF A14 compared:

While you’re still only looking at just shy of two hours of battery life for gaming – and in reality, for some titles I’ve hit quite a lot less – this is still a very good result given the relative level of power the Asus TUF A14 has to bring to your gaming landscape. That higher than expected video figure also points to a machine that should be able to handle more regular and boring work related situations without too much fuss as well.

On the charging front, Asus provides one of its own custom chargers that looks similar to, but isn’t USB-C along with a chunky 200W power adaptor. It will charge over USB-C PD if you’re in a pinch, but both Windows and Asus’ Armory Crate will whinge at you about slow charging speeds if you try.

Asus TUF A14: Alex’s Verdict

With pricing starting at $2,499, the Asus TUF A14 isn’t the lowest cost notebook you can buy, but in the gaming space, this is more moderate pricing – but it’s great to see that for the most part it’s not matched with more moderate power. I didn’t expect to like the Asus TUF A14 quite as much as I did, because this is a fun little gaming rig.

That being said, there’s a lot of competition in the gaming laptop space and bargains aren’t hard to come by, so it’s still wise at that kind of price to shop around. If factors such as the plastic frame or lack of a 4K display matter to you, you might be able to find those for similar prices in slightly older laptop stock.