Back in the day, flicking through the Argos catalogue was like stepping into a wonderland of joy and excitement. Now the physical book may be gone, but perhaps you can still get excited to look through Argos' wares again today. There's heaps of gaming hardware from Asus on sale with a 10% discount over on the Argos online store, mostly monitors and laptops.
That includes the gaming laptop I'd like to spotlight today: the Asus TUF Dash F15. A well-respected machine in its price bracket, it comes with an Intel Core i7 11370H and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 6GB, stuffed inside a neat black chassis. All for £810 at Argos with code ASUS10.
Asus charges £1,135 for this on its own UK webstore, which is definitely on the high-end for this sort of model, but still you'd be picking it up for £325 cheaper overall with this deal over at Argos.
We've had hands-on time with the slightly beefier Asus TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop, instead with RTX 3070. In our review of that RTX 3070 F15 model, Dave said of it: "The first Tiger Lake gaming laptop might be a quad-core beast, but it's a quality, focused machine, offering the RTX 3070 in its most affordable mobile guise yet."
But let's take a look at this more affordable, and more slimmed down, version in particular.
With four cores and eight threads, I had to do a double take to make sure it really was the Core i7 it said it was. Intel's more recent 11th/12th Gen H-series processors far exceed that core count, but that is the max configuration of the 11th Gen H35-series designed for ultra-portable gaming machines. And, for gaming purposes that quad-core chip shouldn't cut into your frame rates too harshly, and that's what you want out of a processor in a more affordable model such as this.
The money saved on the CPU is better spent elsewhere, and that's what is good about the TUF Dash F15's config. There's an RTX 3060 6GB inside it. That's a great GPU that delivers plenty of frames at 1080p, and will put the F15's 144Hz FHD screen to good use.
The bit I'm a little concerned about with the F15 is the RAM configuration. There's only 8GB of DDR4 onboard, and as far as I can tell that's 8GB of soldered memory on the board itself. That could be a little limiting in some cases as it will run in single-channel mode, and not use the full bandwidth available to it.
Though the thing to note here is that there's also a single RAM slot accessible via the underside of the laptop, which once occupied will allow your laptop greater RAM capacity and greater bandwidth in dual-channel mode.
There's also an M.2 slot free, if you want to add a little more room to breathe with a larger capacity SSD alongside the 512GB one that's included.
If this isn't to your tastes, you can check out our best gaming laptop guide for more of our recommendations. Similarly, we've just reviewed the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) and Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022), so check those out for the latest hardware out of Asus. We've also looked at the Asus ROG Flow Z13 tablet, but unless you're really into tablets that's probably not going to be a good fit.
