Oh man that's a great RTX 4060-beating AMD gaming laptop for $700

The TUF Gaming A16 top down on a blue background
(Image credit: Asus)
Asus TUF A16 | Ryzen 7 7735HS | Radeon RX 7700S | 16-inch | 1200p | 165 Hz | 16 GB DDR5-4800 | 512 GB SSD | $1,099.99 $699.99 at Best Buy (save $400)

Asus TUF A16 | Ryzen 7 7735HS | Radeon RX 7700S | 16-inch | 1200p | 165 Hz | 16 GB DDR5-4800 | 512 GB SSD | $1,099.99 $699.99 at Best Buy (save $400)
If it wasn't for the 512 GB SSD being a bit small, I would have nothing negative to say about this budget gaming laptop. At just $700 it's a great price for a machine that will generally outperform an RTX 4060-based laptop. The miserly storage isn't much of an issue as there's a second M.2 slot inside for you to add an SSD and instantly bump up the game-holding capacity. The Ryzen CPU is an eight-core, 16-thread job, and the Radeon chip may not cope too well with ray traced games, but then neither does an RTX 4060 even with DLSS as a crutch.

Don't sit there and tell me you don't want a gaming laptop. If you're reading this you've been after one for ages, I bet, and this is it. This is the big discount you've been waiting for to get your foot in the portable gaming door: the 16-inch Asus TUF A16 for just $700. That's a saving of $400 against its usual price of $1,100, and it's a darn sight more gaming chops than I'd normally expect for this kind of price.

At $700 you wouldn't usually get a dedicated GPU in a laptop, let alone one that consistently outperforms Nvidia's low-end RTX 4060.

Packing a Radeon RX 7700S GPU and Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU combo, this all-AMD machine will see you through nicely at mid to low graphics settings. It's not going to top any benchmark charts, but this is one dangerous little laptop for the price. On top of its mean interior, there's a 165 Hz gaming panel that should keep everything nice and smooth when you're hitting those high frame rates in competitive online gaming. 

Of course it's not all peaches and cream at this price: You're looking at 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory which isn't the speediest DDR5 on the market, but at least both RAM slots are fully accessible so you can upgrade it if you feel so inclined. Same goes for the slightly disappointing 512GB included SSD. But thankfully Asus has had the common decency to give us a whole extra M.2 slot for adding more storage. That was kind of them. Still, at just $700 I would probably have let that one slide. If you feel so inclined, maybe grab an NVMe SSD in the sales just in case. 

This one should do:

WD Black SN850X | 1 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300 MB/s read | 6,300 MB/s write | $114.99 $74.99 at Amazon (save $37)

WD Black SN850X | 1 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300 MB/s read | 6,300 MB/s write | $114.99 $74.99 at Amazon (save $37)
This is still our favorite SSD for gaming right now. Unlike the cheaper SN770, the SN850X encapsulates the best PCIe 4.0 offers in terms of performance (check out our review). That makes it a great fit for a boot drive with space to spare for your game library, and at this price, we're happy to pay the premium for its higher speed.

Price check: Best Buy $120.99 

Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.

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