Asus TUF Dash F15

The RTX 3070 Mobile will bring big benefits, but the MSI Pulse is our pick of this month's gaming laptops

- 

If the MSI Pulse wins for value - and it most definitely does between the two gaming laptops on test - then the Asus TUF Dash F15 wins for fit and finish. By comparison, it screams luxury, whether that's through a delightful soft-touch keyboard (complete with highlighted WASD keys) or the top-quality trackpad with its super-smooth finish. We suspect you'll enjoy using the TUF Dash if you buy it.

While the screen didn't excel in our technical tests, there's much to like from a gamer's point of view: support for adaptive sync and a 144Hz refresh rate make it a fine choice for the powerful gaming components inside. Chief among these is Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile chip, which includes 8GB of memory, and that more or less guarantees playable frame rates at the screen's native 1080p in even the most demanding games. That isn't true for the GTX 3050 Ti in MSI's cheaper system.

As we noted in the review of the MSI Pulse, however, that laptop's superior processor helped push up frame rates in CPU-limited games such as Metro: Last Light. The TUF Dash F15 must also make do with a mere four cores, which is what held it back - comparatively - in media-focused benchmarks such as PC Pro's and the PCMark 10 Digital Creation test (see the graphs on p92). Still, the TUF Dash is a powerful system by almost any metric.