At the time of writing this review, I have about 2 months of occasional use on the laptop (I work mainly on a desktop PC) and a week-long trip abroad. I'll start with gaming, since this is a gaming laptop after all, the performance is just right for an RTX 5060 - I would usually recommend the RTX 5050 model at normal prices, but I snagged this at a good discount. The Ryzen AI 350 processor may only have 8 cores (and 4 of those are "small"), but it's often better for gaming than the higher-end Ryzen AI HX 370, since it's a single 8-core CCX, while the HX 370 is 4+8, which games don't like very much (same reason why desktop 12-core Ryzen is usually slower than 8-core - 6+6 vs 8).
In Asus ArmoryCrate you can set CPU power profiles up to 80W (why? 40W is already too much) and graphics from 40W to 90W - the 5060 will need 70W for more demanding games, but for many games even 40W will be enough, and in this configuration the laptop is quiet enough that I could play it on the train and no one would bother (but beware! train sockets are usually only 50W, don't blow the fuses! ). Overall, I'm very surprised what Asus has done with the cooling. Then for normal use - the ability to completely disable dedicated graphics is something amazing. In ArmoryCrate you switch the GPU profile to ECO Mode and the RTX 5060 ceases to exist, you have an ultrabook out of it, you don't have to worry about some app deciding to light up that RTX 5060 and cut the battery life in half, even NVIDIA drivers will tell you that you don't have NVIDIA graphics. And best of all, there's no need to restart your laptop! Yes, it's a few extra clicks, but if you only play on your laptop occasionally, it's a great option, as even when the graphics aren't in use and are only in sleep/standby, they draw some 2W, which is a lot for a laptop. Combined with the MUX Switch you basically have all the combinations - switching the diplay directly to dedicated graphics can be up to +30% FPS in my testing, depending on the game, so it's a pretty important feature. Last but not least, I want to point out the great implementation of sleep mode, the laptop just clicks and immediately goes to sleep, in which it consumes about 2-4% of the battery every 10 hours, and after some time (about a day? ) when the laptop is asleep, it automatically goes into hibernation. I've had ultrabooks, gaming laptops, 2in1 laptops, I even have a working Snapdragon X Elite Thinkpad and with all of those, this Asus TUF A14 has the best standby implementation and lowest sleep consumption. A bit of a shame that Asus has made it worse again on the 2026 models, as they will have Ryzen AI 10-core, which has the same issues as the 2024 model with the HX 370 12-core - gaming performance will be weird due to the two CCX and consumption will also be a bit worse. And that Ryzen AI Max+ 392 model is going to be even worse, as it absolutely won't match the GPU ECO mode in power consumption, but that one at least has the big memory argument for graphics. Overall, I can highly recommend this notebook, but only if you use it "properly" - if you want to exclusively play, so buy a more powerful notebook for half, on the price / performance ratio this TUF A14 classic gaming notebooks will not beat. If you want an ultrabook so also buy a similar one cheaper (better for the same price I would not be so sure, those keyboards and dipleje are not much better). But if you want an ultrabook that can also play games when it needs to, or accelerate a small AI model, or edit video, I think it's an unbeatable laptop, it's just, like all high-end laptops, quite overpriced, so I recommend waiting for discounts.