Asus TUF Dash F15 gaming laptop walks the line between work and play at CES 2021 – CNET

This story is part of CES, where our editors will bring you the latest news and the hottest gadgets of the entirely virtual CES 2021.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a lot more gaming laptops designed for people who want something that doesn’t necessarily look like a gaming laptop. However, because they’re typically thinner and lighter, they don’t always have all the processing and graphics performance you may want. The Asus TUF Dash F15 announced for CES 2021 seems like just the right combination for a laptop with top gaming performance in a 

The Dash F15 still leans more toward a typical gaming laptop design with its highlighted WASD keys, angular fan vents and TUF printed large on the lid. Still, with its mix of white and light gray for the body color and that it’s thin, compact and relatively light at about 4.4 pounds, it’s portable and won’t stand out too much at the coffee shop or office when you’re getting work done. Also, it can be charged over USB-C and has a rated battery life of up to nearly 17 hours of video playback, Asus says — not something you can generally expect from a gaming laptop. 

What’s crazy is the amount of potential performance packed inside its slim chassis. It can be configured with up to an 11th-gen Intel Core i7-11375H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, up to 32 GB of DDR4-3200 memory and up to a 1TB SSD. Up to 16GB of memory is onboard and there’s an available slot for another 16GB stick. There are also two M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD slots and Asus made getting inside to add components easy. 

Asus will offer two display options. Both are 1920×1080-pixel resolution 15.6-inch displays, but one will have a 240Hz refresh rate with a 3ms response time and 100% sRGB color gamut coverage while the other will be a 144Hz panel. 

Asus used a new cooling system with a large heat spreader and five copper heat pipes, 83-blade fans and a self-cleaning module to keep as much dust out as possible. The laptop also has two-way AI noise cancellation for chat and DTS:X Ultra technology for 7.1-channel virtual surround for stereo headsets or speakers. What you won’t find is a webcam — an odd move given how much more time people are spending on video chats. 

No pricing was for the Asus TUF Dash F15 was announced. It’s expected to be available in Q1 2021 in North America.