One of those joints is mine. Ramen Noir is a floundering noodle bar left to me by a friend named Thaddeus who flees the city for mysterious reasons, saddling me with its complementary insurmountable debt of 50,000 Lims.

Thaddeus also left me a greenhouse. A salty lad named Crabface bequeaths me a boat. Some lady named Ma Gomba wants me to grow her enoki mushrooms. Danny Danetti wants my opinion on his donut recipes. A sentient vacuum needs my help fleeing the human wife of his deceased former consciousness. CorpSec Agent Teleshko suggests, nay, demands that I expand my operation by buying additional businesses. Oh, right, and there's a serial killer at large who's taking out people with massive amounts of debt. You know, like me.

Folks, I am just trying to scrape out a profit serving chicken noodle soup and beer while I hoof it back and forth from the market buying nearly-expired ingredients on the cheap until I can afford to hire a general manager who will free me up to pursue even one of these quests.

My day in Nivalis looks like this:

• 8:00: Fast travel to the Docks district and sprint down the ramshackle catwalks to my greenhouse to pick the onions and potatoes I grew in my farming modules overnight.
• 8:30: Fast travel to Meridian Market to put my produce in the fridge at Ramen Noir for the day before my general manager starts a restock order.
• 8:30 - 11:30: Assist my staff for the breakfast rush by using the food processor station eight times and grabbing a couple plates of food to deliver to customers bellied up to the bar, choosing to "make polite small talk" with new customers and "offer 10% discount" to some returning ones.
• 11:30: Spot my not-really-rival and donut seller Danny Danetti hanging near my kitchen waiting to ask my opinion about a recipe.

• 11:30 - 12:00: Visit the greengrocer and drinks vendor in the Central Canyon district to buy and drop off all the ingredients on my shopping list for my new sake bar which doesn't have a GM yet.
• 12:00: Meet up with my landlord Pilk Dane who wants to accuse me of subletting (read: having any guests at all).
• 13:00: Receive a mysterious communication from an unknown employer demanding I go visit the crime scene of the latest serial killing and have a conversation with my automata digital assistant Ava about whether to comply or not.
• 14:00: Somehow become involved in seeking out the memories CorpSec erased from the past of a large guy calling himself the Miso Baron.
• 14:00 - 17:00: Spend too long fussing with the kitchen layout at the sake bar by putting the sink for dishwashing near the kitchen access door and the drink machine station perpendicular to the bar.

• 17:00: Use the photo mode to take a nice aesthetic shot of my remodel in the evening neon glow.
• 18:00: Fiddle with my staff schedule at Ramen Noir, increasing my waiter's happiness by shortening her shift and compensating by docking the pay for my robot Waiter X5 by 0.50 Lims, sorry.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Help serve cocktails at Sake Bar to turn a bit of profit faster than my staff would alone.
• 21:00 - 24:00: Stumble through the extremely confusing and layered Hive Mall district to find a furniture vendor, thinking I'll buy a couple extra chairs, but ultimately chickening out of spending the money.
• 24:00 - 1:00: Open my quest log, see that I still haven't started the ones related to using my boat and purposefully ignore them because I just really dislike fishing in games.
• 2:00: Stay out past curfew to filch some chairs from the restaurant next to Ramen Noir, dodging CorpSec security camera beams, so I can add them to Sake Bar to serve more customers—for profit!

Just a slice, please

Nivalis Nights calls itself a "slice-of-life" sim, which is a close enough description of what you get when you borrow life sim decorating, shop sim management, open-ish world exploration, farm sim produce production, and bungee cord them all together with a surprisingly story-heavy quest structure.

In the first five-ish hours, I worried that the genre soup of Nivalis Nights was going to ultimately disappoint me. Everything I found to praise about it came with a caveat.

It's a personality hire

What I found after several hours and a couple in-game weeks in Nivalis is that the characters are the star feature. I'll allow myself a heavy-handed food metaphor, given the context: The characters and setting are the eggs of Nivalis Nights. Whip 'em up with those dry ingredients and they become a leavening agent to make that batter rise, baby.

The streets of every district are jam packed with people. Many are unnamed, silent NPCs but a surprising number are fully voice-acted characters with stories and quests, some of whom can eventually work at my shops. Sometimes they don't seem immediately relevant until suddenly I'm five steps deep into someone else's quest and they ask me to find a specific hacker who, oh wait, I know that guy!

Their stories run a full neon spectrum from comedic corporate satire to strikingly earnest stories of people crushed beneath inherited debt:

There are dozens more of them (At least 121, by count of the portraits in the "known characters" section of my menu) all with nuanced stories and genuinely excellent vocal performances that really sell some of the moments when they turn from goofy caricature to gut-spillingly relatable.

The amount of quests and story content that weaves these characters into each others' lives and into the main plot of a debt-chasing serial killer stalking the lower districts is a delight. I'd expected for the shop management and decorating to be the real draw in Nivalis Nights, but instead it's this vibrant, enormous cast of characters who are really motivating me to beat the streets every day, navigating labyrinthine districts in search of the next thread to pull.

Nivalis Nights is an alright shop sim with some okay decorating and a nod to life sim romances, but it's an excellent place. It's a smog-filled techno hellscape full of people with "generational debt" loomed over by advertisements about transferring the consciousness of your pet dog into any body, forced to live in nearly religious adherence to capitalism. I'd eat up a novel set here. Lacking that, I'll probably develop strong feelings on head-canons about its characters and spend hours tooling for new angles in its photo mode long past rinsing the simulation game this world is hiding in.

What's the most stunning revelation in this Gears of War prequel? Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover. So E-Day contains at least one literal leap forward for the franchise. Shame it's trapped in a slog of a campaign that's otherwise anything but.

But before I moan about that, plenty of good news first. Gears has never felt better to play. These third-person cover shooters have always been a blast when they're working, and a miserable swearing fit when you dodge roll into certain death instead of snapping into cover like you wanted to. Again.

That nonsense has finally been excised, mostly, thanks to slightly more acrobatic characters and some wise button remapping. It's amazing what a difference sticking run on L3 and giving climb its own designated button makes.

Gears of War's biggest haters are liable to characterise its cover-shooting as a dull game of whack-a-mole. Perhaps on Normal difficulty, but Hardcore is where the experience sings. Here, staying in the same spot of cover is rightfully punished. You've got to keep gaining better ground, constantly weighing up the risks of lining up a sniper shot, a chainsaw insta-kill, or making a desperate dash for cover. It's a turn-based tactics shooter with a missing pause button. There's a reason that it translated so smoothly to a tactics spin-off.

E-Day introduces new weaponry that makes cowering in cover harder than ever. It loves a blast of acid, this game, either delivered from a massive evil frog or a new gun that shotguns it at you. Devastating, but a loving kiss on the cheek compared to the Goreshot, a grappling hook only interested in grappling your torso from your body. So gloriously over-the-top, it almost makes up for the insta-kill tedium from the elite enemy who wields it.

That stuff's good, but it's the renovations to the old guard that stand out. The spike trap now opens with a hugely satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk as its horrible insides prepare themselves for a good gouging. The explosive arrow-firing torque bow gets a great glow up—the sound design as it finds its target is wonderful, practically a doomsday drum roll, so good I still enjoy it even when a locust is aiming it at me. And if I'm ever called upon to assassinate God, this game's sublime sniper rifle is what I'm reaching for.

So if the gunplay's a treat and the core combat never better, what's the problem? Well, almost everything else, unfortunately.

Dis-may

E-Day is a prequel, referring to the fateful day when the locust got bored of living underground and burst free from the surface to say a very messy hello. This is covered in the opening cutscene of the original Gears of War. And if you're wondering what insights E-Day has that weren't covered in said cutscene, same here.

The game opens with Marcus Fenix and Dom 'boy isn't it great that my wife and kids are alive' Santiago. Instead of the cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran of the original Gears, here Marcus is… a cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran. Oh.

Discovering Marcus was once a flamboyant drag queen who was changed forever by E-Day into the man we know today was probably too much to hope for. But the fact he's essentially exactly the frikkin' same is the first alarm bell that this prequel is struggling to justify its own existence.

Once the locust arrive, E-Day tries cosplaying as Resident Evil for a bit, complete with a trip through the panicking city to the police station. Some of these horror moments work. The drone gets an excellent introduction, though not so much for the poor sap stuck in the interrogation room with it. Other attempts at horror atmosphere are hilariously clumsy. I find the blood-soaked helmet of a transit worker, and the game immediately shatters any sense of foreboding with text popping up saying 'Bloody Transit Worker's Helmet Found!' Er, hooray?

The game then has some dumb fun giving little origin stories to its iconography—chainsaws being attached to machine guns! Grenades being tossed in emergence holes! Problem is, by the start of Act 2, you have the weaponry, armor, and the squad. At which point E-Day just becomes standard Gears of War again. You explore the ruined city (not open-world, more wide-ish linear) with goals never more complicated than 'shoot those locusts' or 'survive this wave of locusts' or 'why haven't you shot those locusts yet?'

Gears 5 understood the value of variety. It had sections where you had to stealth around a mad scientist's factory to stealth kill infected robots. Or ride a skiff down an icy mountain. Or fight an enemy on the stage of a Hamilton-inspired musical which starts rotating at the worst moment possible (play Gears 5—it's one of the best 7/10s ever).

True, not all of Gears 5's ideas worked. But I wanted a sequel that improved upon them, not a regression that believes the only thing you should ever be doing in one of these games is endlessly pulling the trigger. It's just slightly remixed combat encounters all the way down. Battle a giant frog and several snipers! OK, now two frogs, one sniper, and several shotgunners! OK, OK, now three giant spiders that fire insta-kill rockets, and loads of grunts, and the last checkpoint was seven minutes back! …Hey, why are you suddenly aiming at me?

Is the shooting strong enough to sustain this? Yeah, just, though it does get exhausting. It's an action movie with everything ripped out that isn't bullets going into bastards. The 20+ hour campaign is also waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is (well, aside from two crap shooting-from-a-turret-inside-a-helicopter bits, but I was planning on being nice and not bringing those up).

Moderate improvements

New for E-Day are mod slots for your weapons and armour. Mods include less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, etc. Not as useless and incremental as the crap you get in [insert whichever live service shooter you currently have the most beef with here], but it's borderline and hard to get excited about. Far better is the gizmo that can send out rippling shockwaves that stun enemies, perfect for a chainsawin'. I found a mod for it that also sets enemies on fire. Lovely.

You get these mods for completing sidequests or finding them in cases. But E-Day is so terrified of you missing anything that tiresome all-caps text saying HARD CASE NEARBY blazes across the screen. And the location of the case is immediately added to your map. Oh and if you activate whatever this game's version of Eagle Vision is called, we'll show you exactly where the case is. Ugh.

Gears 5—which I promise to stop swooning over soon—did all this so much more elegantly. You had a robot companion with abilities that were upgraded with currency you found through exploring. No map markers, screaming text, or other BS that belongs in the Ubisoft dark ages. You were actually incentivised to explore properly, with any world-building or character moments you encountered along the way a nice bonus.

E-Day's a less interesting place to explore regardless. A city in ruin is one of gaming's most overdone settings, so you really have to pull out the stops to make it interesting, like in The Last of Us 2, or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil Requiem. Otherwise, seen one ruined city block, seen 'em all, like in the second half of Resident Evil Requiem (at least E-Day is less grey and brown, shockingly).

Other frustrations just feel like they shouldn't be happening in the seventh game of a series. There's a special place in hell for games that put checkpoints before long dialogue exchanges that you can't skip through. Normal difficulty still isn't challenging enough. Opt for hardcore and you get the compelling challenge, but also have to swallow the occasional ocean of stale piss, with boss health bars so overlong I'm amazed they fit on the screen.

And how can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies? There's no satisfaction in emptying clip after clip into a monster, not feeling like you're having any impact whatsoever until it finally falls over. Do I actually love E-Day's sniper rifle, or is it the only gunshot against the more bullet-spongy cretins that feels like it has any kick?

A new enemy at least has the decency to have a nice big eye that it doesn't like being shot in, which means I actually feel the impact of my gunfire. This thing is called… actually, to try and describe it myself when I can let the game do that in the following screenshot would be like snatching the pen from Shakespeare. My apologies. Take it away, E-Day:

Thank you, Lucas. God this game is infuriating. Great shooting trapped in a horribly overstretched campaign, telling a story that clearly didn't long to be told. It feels more like Microsoft taking a page out of the Jack Donaghy playbook and tapping a sign saying 'make it 2007 again'. Marcus is gonna have to open Gears 6 with one Hell of a drag show to make up for this.

Multiplayer saves the E-Day

Multiplayer is a less qualified success. The 4-v-4 modes are great if you just want to jump right in and quickly discover that you should have been practicing with the shotgun a lot more during the campaign. Conquest is all about taking and holding a certain section of the map, Demolition is all about triggering and protecting a bomb somewhere the opposing team would rather you didn't, and so on.

Nothing revolutionary, but all executed well, and even fun when you get matched against bots. I like how the new jump button means leaping over insta-death chasms is now an option. Which The Coalition have celebrated by sneaking in a bunch of insta-death chasms that are easy to miss, the cads.

Horde Siege is more ambitious as it takes advantage of the city's massive scope. Classic horde saw you setting up defenses like spike traps and turrets before waves of enemies came to tear them down. That's still true here, except now that Horde is basically open-world, there's a lot of commuting between the actual wave-battling bits. But where that padded out an irritatingly wheel-spinny campaign, it works here because the city feels much more alive and spontaneous.

Optional objectives with tasty rewards constantly pop-up, tempting you and your team to hunt down a massive enemy, or carry a core across the city that essentially leaves one of you unarmed. Even if you ignore these because you've unfortunately matched with the dullest squad alive, locusts can still suddenly appear in big numbers at any moment. Not so often that it becomes as exhausting as the campaign, but enough to give even a long encounter-free trudge across the city constant tension.

You're on a squad of four, and there are two other squads out there, too. Occasionally you might cross paths and can join them for a bit of shooting, or maybe they'll save you. There's not much incentive to do so—besides, y'know, compassion or whatever—but it's still a fun touch.

Horde Siege is a fun, smart evolution of what came before, and an experience that tries to expand what Gears can be. It'll still be worth playing whether The Coalition decides to build on it or not. I just wish it didn't feel like it was living in such a separate silo to a flawed solo adventure that's disappointingly conservative in comparison.

The Star Wars movies have always had a mashup quality. You take some dogfighting from The Dam Busters, some swordfighting from old samurai movies, the saloon scene from a western, and you mix 'em up real good. That's how you make one (1) Star War. There's nothing wrong with that—when The Phantom Menace threw the chariot-racing from Ben Hur into the mix, it ended up being easily one of the best parts of the movie.

While Episode 1 Racer managed to recreate that specific scene just fine, as soon as you left Tatooine the quality dropped. Star Wars: Galactic Racer sets its aim higher than recreating just one scene, and instead imagines an entire racing culture flourishing in the peacetime gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, where crime syndicates back planet-hopping hotshots who race landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders across planets that conveniently have one biome each.

That worldbuilding helps populate a cast of rivals—the villainous Kestar Bool is immediately hateable, so well done there—including an ex-TIE Fighter pilot and a bunch of rich kids who could be real-life Formula One drivers if they weren't blue or speaking Huttese.

These characters populate the paddock you walk across every few races on your way to the upgrade monkey and they insult you during the races, though since half of those insults are in subtitled alien language I didn't pay much attention to them. If you've got time to read subtitles when you're hurling through a cavern at 450 km/h, good for you.

It's arcade racing, of course. A bit like Wipeout only instead of losing all your speed the second you touch the sides you either scrape along for a bit or bounce off or explode in a way that'll be familiar from the Burnout games. Galactic Racer studio Fuse Games was founded by a bunch of ex-Criterion developers who worked on the Burnout series as well as helping DICE with the modern Star Wars Battlefront games, so that explains that.

When you slam another racer into a wall the takedown camera pans over to give you a proper slow-motion look at their greebly Star Wars vehicle being reduced to the kind of scrap Jawas would turn their nose up at, though unlike Burnout 3 the computer isn't great at steering for you while that happens. More than once I came out of a takedown to discover the CPU was aiming me directly at a wall at high speed.

Roger Ramjet

Takedowns are a much less significant part of Galactic Racer than I expected. I thought this would, like Burnout 3, be a string of high-speed crashes with some brief bits of racing in between. Instead, it's an actual racing game—albeit one where a crocodile-faced alien will occasionally rocket into a wall and be engulfed in flame.

You've got an afterburner that gives a modest speed boost on a cooldown and a faster "ramjet" boost that can dangerously overheat if pushed to the limit, and balancing these two varieties of turbo are important. You have to pay attention to status effects like Cooled, which triggers at high speed or when cruising over water and lowers your heat, and Burning, delivered by the flame jets one opponent loves to deploy or by racing over lava, which of course raises your heat. Other status effects like Overcharged and Corroded and Shielded might factor into your build as well.

Those builds are developed over the course of a tour linking races together. Five of them in a multiplayer tour or the scenario mode where you get to play as one of the cast of rivals, or three acts worth of them in the campaign mode that borrows elements of its structure from roguelite games. This mode is run-based, so you pick your next event from a map of nodes right out of FTL or Slay the Spire, earning upgrades as you go, but if you wipe out it's back to the start of the act—with some unlocks that should make your next attempt easier.

It's not that far off the kind of knockout grand prix mode you get in other racing games, but like that crack it really is more-ish. One path might favor more traditional races, while another is high on eliminators, where you lose a league token (a life, basically) if you don't finish in the top three. But eliminators have better rewards, so I always choose them. Maybe another path has a random event or a visit to the scrap shop, which could result in some gear that radically changes my build and my odds of winning the championship. There's plenty to consider.

Death Rally

A big part of most builds are abilities. Ion bolt temporarily scrambles steering for a targeted pilot ahead of you, while the vent ability drops your heat to nothing. Concussion mine? Does exactly what it sounds like. Abilities are on cooldowns but also cost energy to use, and you've got a limited amount of that based on your battery, which is another thing that can be upgraded.

After events you get to spend whatever credits you've earned on a random selection of improvements to your racer and its abilities, as well as bolting on parts that might influence the direction your build takes—a part that refills my afterburner on collision encourages me to build for tankiness, while one that wipes all heat on a perfect landing after a jump means I can go all-in on the ramjet.

The other thing splitting up events is the paddock, a hangout for racers with a bar and garage that you walk through in third-person at the start of each planet in a tour. One of your rivals might confront you, a couple of racers may be arguing over drinks, or the league organizer might have something to say about how you're doing.

It's nothing as involved as the Underworld hub from Hades, but it does add a narrative layer and set dressing that feels properly Star Wars. The racer who dresses like an X-Wing pilot has a real 1970s mustache like Biggs (I think humans in Star Wars should always look like they're from the '70s and '80s, bring on the feathered hair and sideburns), and each planet has some native critters hanging out so they can scurry away as you approach.

Another pleasantly Star Wars touch is the pre-race check where you flip a bunch of toggles just like Han Solo sitting in the Millennium Falcon, a string of quick-time events that can give you instant access to your afterburner or power up the first activation of your abilities. Nailing a string of them feels great, though the ones that use the D-pad have reminded me why I hate the 360 controller's D-pad.

Get in the podracer, Shade

The story casts you as a human, customizable though always a helmet-wearing courier named Shade. (An anagram for Hades, now I think of it. Coincidence? Well, probably, yeah.) You get to choose from a handful of outfits and voices, then change the color swatch of those outfits and put different levels of mechanical echo on the voices.

Most humans don't have the fast reaction times needed to fly a podracer, but Galactic Racer finds ways to work them in regardless—including a series of flashback races where you play as Sebulba, Anakin's main opponent from The Phantom Menace. Cantankerous and bearded, he hangs around the paddock in later acts being the legend from the old days everyone's afraid of, giving out "advice" that's actually self-aggrandizement. He rules, and ends up stealing the show from the new characters Galactic Racer introduces.

The speed of podracers is almost too much for the tracks, and I got intimately familiar with the walls of the crystal caverns on Crait (the salt-covered planet from The Last Jedi) after colliding with them a bunch of times. Something Galactic Racer definitely nails is the sense of speed. When you're whipping through tunnels making turns that seem impossible then zip out into the open, redlining the ramjet as you fly down the straight, it really does capture the feeling of riding a shopping cart down a hill after a few beers—which is the closest I've ever come to racecar driving in real life.

Wacky Races

It's frustrating then how often that feeling is interrupted by crashes caused by the tracks being hard to read. If a rival like Biddy Blas takes me out with a well-timed slam that's par for the course, but a lot of my crashes came from struggling to distinguish between an outcrop of white ice and the white snow of the racetrack, or a brown boulder and the brown sand beneath it. Some corners have rows of lights strung up to highlight them, and I wish there was an option to add more of them to certain tracks.

The other thing that caused more crashes than I would have liked was the autopilot ability. Activate it and you get several seconds of near-perfect piloting, with upgrades that can boost your speed and extend your ramjets while on autopilot. More than once though, I hit the autopilot and then watched in horror as it went out of its way to steer directly into the side of heating tunnels on the snow planet, or clipped the top of a tunnel after taking a jump, or drove straight over a concussion mine in the middle of the track. Even when it didn't, sometimes I'd come out of autopilot racing toward a corner at top speed, unable to slow enough to take it safely.

I kept choosing autopilot when I had the option though, because when it works it's one of the most powerful abilities in Galactic Racer. If you're struggling on the final race of act three, fully upgraded autopilot and ramjet can carry you through. It's an odd combination of overpowered and flawed, and feels like it'll probably be patched post-haste.

Revenge of the plot

The amount of story in the gutters around the races might seem odd given how badly that stuff often lands in regular racing games, but being a Star Wars game helps Galactic Racer immensely. Every generic street-racing game thinks players will care about its cast of backwards-hat douchebags and rejects from The Fast & The Furious, and we never do. Yet I enjoyed hating the hateable racers here (honestly, fuck Kestar Bool), and enjoyed slowly earning the respect of a blue lady who dresses like Amelia Earhart. The four-armed monkey mechanic who sounds like she's from Liverpool is an entertaining sidekick, and if you're the kind of fan who will recognize a character from Star Wars Resistance you'll get to point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Which is why it's a shame the story doesn't amount to much in the end. When I made it to the end of act three and finally triumphed, it felt flat. There's not much payoff compared to all the setup and I feel like a rube for getting invested in the trimmings instead of the meat. Even before the finale, characters started repeating dialogue I'd already heard.

I felt kind of the same about Zero Company when I finished that. The benefit of making a Star Wars game is if you get stuff like the sound effects and the music right—Galactic Racer nails both the gnarly stutter of the engines and the soundtrack only kicking in on the final lap just like in The Phantom Menace—then you get to piggyback on the warm fuzzy feelings the movies installed in me when I was young. Even the movies struggled to pay off on the expectations that set up.

But while I didn't roll credits thinking I'd just played a masterpiece, and the signposting on some tracks wasn't great, I did enjoy zooming past Biddy Blas while he screamed "nobata nobata!" at me. Huh, maybe I did learn some Huttese after all.

It's been fun, inciteful, and frustrating at times, and as this is the last review of the bunch, let me tell you, if this was Maximum PC or PC Format, it's here that I'd be waxing lyrical about how the winner of this month's arduous journey, is, without even a modicum of doubt, the Asus TUF Gaming A16.

Truly, its implementation is a thing of beauty. It's an expertly balanced laptop that satisfies not only the needs of the professional, but that of the gamer as well. Its blend of hardware, style and pricing has put the TUF on the right path to claim its very own slot in our best gaming laptops buying guide, and with good reason.

That's not to say it's perfect, I have my quibbles with it, don't get me wrong, but what Asus has managed to achieve here, on a budget is nigh impressive. The form factor, the design, the performance, the screen, the ports, all of it hits the marks that matter, and smooth over the wrinkles that the others introduce.

It's a thing of beauty, again all for a price that slides under what you'd expect Asus would charge for something like this. If you're after a new laptop and find this thing on sale during Black Friday and the next few months, and it sits in your price bracket, I'd highly recommend it.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Features

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Value

The top line specs here don't exactly shout "premium" from the rooftops, I get that. RTX 5050 and an AMD Ryzen 7 260 are hardly ground breaking, but it's how Asus has integrated the cooling and power delivery into this mixture that really breathes life into the thing. So many manufacturers skimp out on that latter part, and leave consumers with RTX 5070 and 5080s choked on low TGPs and it severely impacts market credibility. Asus has done the opposite here, and allowing that RTX 5050 to run at full tilt under a 115 W TGP delivers some exceptional performance without necessarily breaking the bank.

The CPU ain't half bad either. Although like most of the laptops we have under review currently, it's a little long in the tooth, AMD's Ryzen 7 260, is an eight-core, 16-thread beastie, that produces some respectable numbers under load, all while keeping the heat down in the process.

It also comes with 16 GB (2x 8GB) of DDR5 at a comfortable 5,600 MT/s. Although it's not exactly insanely high-end by modern standards it does mean you can swap that out at a later date with a higher capacity kit without much worry. And, for once, we're not looking at a single-channel memory setup that some manufacturers (ahem… Lenovo…) like to proclaim as "consumer friendly".

The rest of the spec list equally fails to disappoint. That RTX 5050's been matched with a 1920x1200 "IPS-level" 16-inch display fluttering along at a smooth 165 Hz, and it's a beaut too. Brightness is great, the colours really pop, and there's minimal ghosting or latency issues here as well. Is it as vibrant or as high refresh as an OLED model? Well, no, but for those after a versatile screen that gets the job done well, it's more than good enough. Pixel density too, isn't half bad either, just a fraction above that of a 32-inch 4K desktop panel, and the reduced pixel count significantly helps that RTX 5050 hold its own at native.

On the connectivity front, aside from WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4, the TUF also comes 3x USB Type-A, 2x USB Type-C, a 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI out, and full ethernet as well, along with a dedicated power port too. Oh and there's a 1080p webcam, but that's fairly standard affair at this point.

The keyboard's not exactly anything to write home about, it's just a standard chiclet RGB affair, but it'll do, and the sizable trackpad lends itself well to light desktop work (I did once know a guy who used to raid in WoW Cataclysm with a trackpad, and it still makes me shudder to this day).

All told, it's a reasonable spec. But in all honesty, while it is a well put together system, that $1,500 price tag is too much, and it's going to need some hefty discounting to make it a genuinely budget-friendly machine.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Sound

Let's talk audio quick before we get onto the good stuff (performance), because for once, I'm actually excited to talk about laptop speakers. Because these things absolutely slap.

At max volume there's minimal distortion, and a healthy chunking of bass reverberating along underneath. Watching Sung Jin-woo slap the metaphorical crud out of Beru in Solo Levelling, as Howl plays in the background is as epic as it can ever be. Treble's smooth, mids are there too in abundance, and honestly I was genuinely impressed. In heavier bass moments in certain music genres there's fractional disturbance and vibration, but the moments are fleeting.

Fan noise on the other hand is chonky. Not quite as potent as the Lenovo Legion 5, but notably sitting in between it and the MSI Katana (which is arguably too quiet, and hamstringing its own cooling as a result).

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Performance

Okay, on to the good stuff, and there's an interesting tale here with performance. I've already alluded to it heavily with the MSI Katana 15 HX review, but its a tale of the plucky little RTX 5050 that could, that's what I'll say.

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1080p gaming performance

Running games at a normalised resolution to compare frame rates at the same level

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High)F1 24 (1080p Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

31

21

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

29

15

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

32

21

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	31 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	29 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	32 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

63

31

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

63

36

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

50

27

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	63 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	63 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	50 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

48

40

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

49

42

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

46

39

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	48 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	49 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	46 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

54

43

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

58

47

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

60

46

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	54 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	58 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

59

24

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

72

26

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

65

22

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	59 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	72 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	65 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS

Native res. gaming performance

Games run at the native resolution of the laptop's screen.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

27

19

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

12

4

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

20

15

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	27 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	12 Avg FPS, 4 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	20 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

66

35

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

58

31

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

47

20

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	66 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	58 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	47 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

47

30

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

34

24

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

31

20

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	47 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	34 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	31 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

51

41

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

30

22

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

37

31

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	51 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	30 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	37 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

56

23

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

50

35

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

49

33

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	56 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	50 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	49 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS

Native res. gaming performance

Games run at native resolution and with DLSS and frame gen enabled where applicable.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%))F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

82

51

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

64

32

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

64

35

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	64 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	64 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

68

58

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

52

45

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

50

43

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%)) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	68 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	52 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	50 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

116

99

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

61

73

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

84

72

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	116 Avg FPS, 99 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	61 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS

Synthetic gaming performance

Using industry standard 3DMark tests to compare performance.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme3DMark Port Royal3DMark Storage

Overall index score

GPU index

CPU index

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

4764

4625

5751

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

5962

5357

5776

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

5415

5357

5776

3DMark Time Spy Extreme Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	4764 Overall index score, 4625 GPU index, 5751 CPU index
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	5962 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	5415 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

5508

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

7059

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

7059

3DMark Port Royal Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	5508
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	7059
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	7059

Overall index score

Avg bandwidth (MB/s)

Access time (ųs)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

1974

338.34

91

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

2243

388.87

81

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

2243

388.87

81

3DMark Storage Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	1974 Overall index score, 338.34 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 91 Access time (ųs)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)

Let's just compare the top-line real quick. Because between this and the MSI, it's a real showcase as to what good cooling in laptops can do. So, Asus: RTX 5050, 115 W TGP. MSI: RTX 5060, 115 W TGP. Average GPU temp for Asus: 60; average GPU temp for MSI: 77. Average clock speed for Asus: 2,680 MHz at 75 W; MSI: 2,305 MHz at 68W.

The reason that matters is that in every single benchmark I ran these two laptops at, both running at 1080p on Ultra, the Asus was either close, or significantly beat its red dragon shaped counterpart. It lost out in Metro Exodus by 6 fps, F1 by 6 fps, Cyberpunk by 1 fps, but beat it in Baldur's Gate 3 by 13 fps, and Black Myth Wukong by 2 fps.

Creator and system performance

Testing the non-gaming performance of the laptops.

7zip 24.07Cinebench 2024Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop)Procyon

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

82.31

119.91

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

66.83

113

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

100.46

105.57

7zip 24.07 Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	82.31 Compressing (GIPS), 119.91 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	66.83 Compressing (GIPS), 113 Decompressing (GIPS)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	100.46 Compressing (GIPS), 105.57 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

920

102

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

956

105

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

832

112

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	920 Multi-core index score, 102 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	956 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	832 Multi-core index score, 112 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

79.28

930.53

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

89.16

1085.56

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77.88

1044.62

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	79.28 CPU (samples/min), 930.53 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	89.16 CPU (samples/min), 1085.56 GPU (samples/min)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	77.88 CPU (samples/min), 1044.62 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

1285

77.79

4.862

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

1412

70.81

4.425

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

1349

74.11

4.632

Procyon Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	1285 Overall index score, 77.79 Duration (Sec), 4.862 Sec/image
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	1412 Overall index score, 70.81 Duration (Sec), 4.425 Sec/image
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	1349 Overall index score, 74.11 Duration (Sec), 4.632 Sec/image

CPU performance too demolished the Katana in multi-threaded Cinebench scoring 920 versus 832, and only coming second due to the Lenovo Legion 5's impressive 956 figure on that front. That further tells us that whatever MSI's doing in its cooling profile, it's not enough and its causing both its CPU and GPU to throttle. Just goes to show folks, you can have a shiny chip on paper that's theoretically better than the competition, but if it ain't cooled right, it's just a name.

Overall, in isolation, the TUF does well across the board. Particularly when taking advantage of DLSS and frame-gen. 82 fps in Cyberpunk at Native, 66 fps in BG3, 68 in Black Myth Wukong, 116 in F1. All comfortable numbers and then some. Dial the settings in a bit more and you'll likely hit that sweet 165 fps spot too with a bit of effort.

System performance

Testing power and thermal performance of the laptops.

Gaming temperaturesGPU statsSystem temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

71

87

60

85

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

76

91

81

85

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77

95

77

82

Gaming temperatures Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	71 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 60 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	76 Avg CPU (°C), 91 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	77 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 77 Avg GPU (°C), 82 Max GPU (°C)

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

2680

75

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

2678

85

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

2305

68

GPU stats Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	2680 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 75 Avg GPU power (W)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	2678 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 85 Avg GPU power (W)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	2305 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 68 Avg GPU power (W)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max GPU temp (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

95

68

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

99

74

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

96

75

System temperatures Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	95 Max CPU temp (°C), 68 Max GPU temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	99 Max CPU temp (°C), 74 Max GPU temp (°C)
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	96 Max CPU temp (°C), 75 Max GPU temp (°C)

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Aesthetics

From a visual perspective, the TUF A16 is positively dull. But it's a good thing. It's crisp, clean, squared off. There are no odd shapes, or weird bevels, or obscene logos and RGB littering everything. It's subdued, understated, a true sleeper machine. The only inkling it might even be slightly "gamery" comes in the form of the TUF logo and shield etched into the lid, and even then you can't really see it unless the light hits it just right.

The bezels are thin, and it just looks and feels great, with a soft-touch satin finish. Like all of these laptops I've tested recently, it's a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but aside from that, there's little to complain about. Perhaps the keyboard could be a bit more mature, but it's nowhere near the Katana's level of "trust me bro, I'm a gamer".

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Software

Armoury crate… eugh… I still don't like it. It's there, you can use it. It has profiles, for extra performance, or battery saving (all our results are based on the high-performance mode, which does add a significant performance boost to the overall figures), but it's clunky to install, and load, and about the only downside to this beautiful machine.

As with all of these three laptops, there's pre-installed Mal… I mean aftermarket antivirus. Highly recommend you uninstall that pronto, and dodge the free trial expiry that comes along with it. Windows Defender will comfortably handle all of your AV needs.

Asus TUF Gaming A16 - Battery life

As for the battery life it's one of the best I've seen at this price. 112 minutes puts the other two to shame, nearly doubling what the Lenovo Legion 5 managed. But then that's to be expected really, particularly given it's got a 90 WHr battery under the hood, and it charges rapidly too, with an included 240 W battery bank.

Battery life

Testing the long term gaming life of the laptops using the industry standard PCMark 10 gaming test.

PCMark 10 Gaming test

Asus TUF Gaming A16

112

Lenovo Legion 5

64

MSI Katana 15 HX

71

PCMark 10 Gaming test Data

Product	Value
Asus TUF Gaming A16	112
Lenovo Legion 5	64
MSI Katana 15 HX	71

In ol' blighty, in the realm of the surprisingly good cooking and cheap dental care, it's a whole other story. What you get for a meagre £1,300 first looks quite solid. And although, yes, that's probably three days of heating this coming winter, if you forgo the soothing warmth of your radiators for a bit you can net yourself an RTX 5060, Core i7 14650HX, and 16 GB of (gloriously dual-channel) 5,600 MT/s DDR5 RAM, all paired nicely with a crisp 2560x1440 "IPS-level" display flickering along 165 times every single second.

For that outlay, I wouldn't blame you in thinking that this is a surprisingly tempting proposition, especially as Black Friday is right around the corner. But it's not without fault, and there's some curious side-effects as a result of the cooling design, that you need to be aware of before you pull the trigger and tell grandma to grab another coat to keep warm.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Features

So, we've covered the basics already, chunky GPU that kinda pairs nicely with the 2560 x 1440 "IPS-level" display, 115 W TGP which should give the card a bit of leg room to clock-up nice and high. Should. You get WiFi 6E, and Bluetooth as standard. As well as three USB Type-A ports, a USB-C, Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio, and HDMI out too. That's not a huge amount of connectivity; you may need a USB hub or dongle if you're going to spin this up as your main rig with a few extra periphs, but it's a comfortable enough experience if you're on the move, and I've seen worse recently. Razer's Blade 16, doesn't even come with ethernet and that thing costs a staggering five grand or thereabouts (although to be fair it is very good).

The SSD is a bit underwhelming mind you. It's one of Samsung's… well, I'm not going to reel off the serial code because it's one of those cryptic OEM-only designations that makes no sense to any human that reads it, but in short its an OEM PM9C1b, PCIe 4.0 SSD, that should top out at 7 GB/s on the read and 5.7 GB/s on the writes. It's based on Samsung's in-house Piccolo controller, and taps into 236-layer TLC V-NAND, it's not too dissimilar to the 990 Evo Samsung launched a couple of years back at this point. So y'know, eh…

As for the chip, that's Intel's Raptor Lake Core i7 14650HX. Again a little dated, but you do get eight performance cores and eight efficient cores for fully 24 threads, and a max turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz at full tilt. But it's hot, real hot, and that is I think the biggest issue that the B14W currently has. Certainly if we compare it to something like Asus' TUF Gaming A16.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Value

Alright, yep let's talk value. Ahem... It's a bit of a double-edged sword. Something that ironically a traditional Katana isn't, and it's mostly dependent on which part of the globe you sit. If you're in the US $1,800 for this kit-out is absurd. Particularly when you have laptops like the Lenovo Legion 5 available for a near identical spec, but with a far better OLED screen for less than that.

And it's that screen that really lets down the whole affair. MSI has it listed as "IPS-level", and to be frank, it doesn't look anything like an IPS. I've got it sat next to two separate IPS monitors right now, and the brightness is dull, the contrast underwhelming, and the color difference between the three genuinely astounding. If you'd have told me this was a TN panel, I'd believe you, and even then go "man, it's a bit rough by modern TN standards, aint it?" Like yes, it's great it's got that 165 Hz refresh rate, and a 16:10 aspect ratio, and a pixel density that puts 4K 32-inch monitors to shame, but it just absolutely pulls you out of the immersion when you see just how dull it looks by comparison to most modern offerings.

That's almost excusable at the £1200 - £1300 mark, and unconscionable at $1,800 (I have seen this cheaper during my time testing, but let's not assume it's always on offer). Even so, it just leaves a bit of a sour taste in your mouth, particularly when compared to that A16, or the Lenovo Legion 5.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Sound

I'll talk more about this momentarily, but the fans are not particularly that noisy under load. They are spinning and going at what I assume is full-tilt, but compared to the likes of the Lenovo, it's a whole other ball game. Dare I say, you don't need a set of noise cancelling headphones to drown out the sound of this thing.

As for the speakers, they're ok. Bass is a bit muted, there's not a lot of breadth to the soundscape (perhaps unsurprising given the form factor), but clarity is up there, and there's no tinniness in the upper trebles. If you're listening to Blood in the Bayou by River Lume and Spearfisher, you can hear every single note of the banjo as clear as day. Yes it does lack the warmth and thrum you'd expect from a full setup, but again, it's two tiny tweeters.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Performance

Things don't fair particularly better in the performance department either. Although yes it does have a dual-channel RAM setup (thank god, because I don't think I could cope if it didn't), CPU performance is woefully under par compared to even the Core i7 13650HX in the Legion 5, and in-game things get considerably less impressive, even though it has that 115W TGP.

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1080p gaming performance

Running games at a normalised resolution to compare frame rates at the same level

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High)F1 24 (1080p Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

32

21

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

29

15

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

31

21

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	32 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	29 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	31 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

50

27

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

63

36

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

63

31

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	50 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	63 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	63 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

46

39

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

49

42

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

48

40

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	46 Avg FPS, 39 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	49 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	48 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

60

46

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

58

47

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

54

43

F1 24 (1080p Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	60 Avg FPS, 46 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	58 Avg FPS, 47 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	54 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

65

22

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

72

26

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

59

24

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	65 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	72 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	59 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Native res. gaming performance

Games run at the native resolution of the laptop's screen.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra)Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High)F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High)Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

20

15

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

12

4

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

27

19

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	20 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	12 Avg FPS, 4 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	27 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

47

20

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

58

31

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

66

35

Baldur's Gate 3 (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	47 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	58 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	66 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

31

20

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

34

24

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

47

30

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	31 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	34 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	47 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

37

31

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

30

22

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

51

41

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	37 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	30 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	51 Avg FPS, 41 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

49

33

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

50

35

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

56

23

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (Native res. Ultra) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	49 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	50 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	56 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Native res. gaming performance

Games run at native resolution and with DLSS and frame gen enabled where applicable.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%))F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

64

35

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

64

32

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

82

51

Cyberpunk 2077 (Native res. RT Ultra + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	64 Avg FPS, 35 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	64 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	82 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

50

43

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

52

45

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

68

58

Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (Native res. High + upscaling (quality, 67%)) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	50 Avg FPS, 43 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	52 Avg FPS, 45 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	68 Avg FPS, 58 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

84

72

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

61

73

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

116

99

F1 24 (Native res. Ultra High + upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	84 Avg FPS, 72 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	61 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	116 Avg FPS, 99 1% Low FPS

Synthetic gaming performance

Using industry standard 3DMark tests to compare performance.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme3DMark Port Royal3DMark Storage

Overall index score

GPU index

CPU index

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

5415

5357

5776

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

5962

5357

5776

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

4764

4625

5751

3DMark Time Spy Extreme Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	5415 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	5962 Overall index score, 5357 GPU index, 5776 CPU index
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	4764 Overall index score, 4625 GPU index, 5751 CPU index

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

7059

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

7059

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

5508

3DMark Port Royal Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	7059
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	7059
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	5508

Overall index score

Avg bandwidth (MB/s)

Access time (ųs)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p

2243

388.87

81

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p

2243

388.87

81

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p

1974

338.34

91

3DMark Storage Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX | 1600p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX | 1440p	2243 Overall index score, 388.87 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 81 Access time (ųs)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260 | 1200p	1974 Overall index score, 338.34 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 91 Access time (ųs)

Take it into Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p with ray tracing dialed up to Ultra, and it runs only a single frame per second faster than the TUF Gaming A16. Which would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that laptop's running an RTX 5050, not the more powerful RTX 5060. In fact the Katana behaves almost as badly as Lenovo's memory starved RTX 5060 does.

Things do improve when you turn the DLSS fun times on of course, and at the screen's native res. we saw exactly that, with the frame rate shooting up from 20 fps to 64 fps. But then logically that makes sense as we're shifting more of the load away from the CPU and onto the GPU with those interpolated frames.

And it's definitely the CPU that's the crux of the issue here too. Jump into Baldur's Gate 3, and there's an even larger discrepancy between it and the TUF. At 1080p again, the MSI managed just 50 fps, versus that plucky little RTX 5050's 63 fps. In fact you can go down the entire list of benchmarks, and at every single 1080p level, the Asus TUF Gaming A16 is either close, or beating it. For a lower model GPU, and a card that scores lower in every synthetic test we can run. It's astounding.

Creator and system performance

Testing the non-gaming performance of the laptops.

7zip 24.07Cinebench 2024Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop)Procyon

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

100.46

105.57

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

66.83

113

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

82.31

119.91

7zip 24.07 Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	100.46 Compressing (GIPS), 105.57 Decompressing (GIPS)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	66.83 Compressing (GIPS), 113 Decompressing (GIPS)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	82.31 Compressing (GIPS), 119.91 Decompressing (GIPS)

Multi-core index score

Single-core index score

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

832

112

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

956

105

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

920

102

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	832 Multi-core index score, 112 Single-core index score
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	956 Multi-core index score, 105 Single-core index score
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	920 Multi-core index score, 102 Single-core index score

CPU (samples/min)

GPU (samples/min)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77.88

1044.62

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

89.16

1085.56

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

79.28

930.53

Blender 4.2.0 (junkshop) Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	77.88 CPU (samples/min), 1044.62 GPU (samples/min)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	89.16 CPU (samples/min), 1085.56 GPU (samples/min)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	79.28 CPU (samples/min), 930.53 GPU (samples/min)

Overall index score

Duration (Sec)

Sec/image

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

1349

74.11

4.632

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

1412

70.81

4.425

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

1285

77.79

4.862

Procyon Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	1349 Overall index score, 74.11 Duration (Sec), 4.632 Sec/image
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	1412 Overall index score, 70.81 Duration (Sec), 4.425 Sec/image
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	1285 Overall index score, 77.79 Duration (Sec), 4.862 Sec/image

That hypothesis on the chip is drawn entirely from observing both the temperature testing, and the GPU clock-speeds. Of the three budget laptops I've tested here, the CPU ran the hottest both on max and on average, and the GPU clocked in the lowest at 2,305 MHz, only drawing on 68 W of total graphical power. Telling.

System performance

Testing power and thermal performance of the laptops.

Gaming temperaturesGPU statsSystem temperatures

Avg CPU (°C)

Max CPU (°C)

Avg GPU (°C)

Max GPU (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

77

95

77

82

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

76

91

81

85

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

71

87

60

85

Gaming temperatures Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	77 Avg CPU (°C), 95 Max CPU (°C), 77 Avg GPU (°C), 82 Max GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	76 Avg CPU (°C), 91 Max CPU (°C), 81 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	71 Avg CPU (°C), 87 Max CPU (°C), 60 Avg GPU (°C), 85 Max GPU (°C)

Avg GPU freq. (MHz)

Avg GPU power (W)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

2305

68

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

2678

85

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

2680

75

GPU stats Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	2305 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 68 Avg GPU power (W)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	2678 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 85 Avg GPU power (W)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	2680 Avg GPU freq. (MHz), 75 Avg GPU power (W)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max GPU temp (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX

96

75

Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX

99

74

Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260

95

68

System temperatures Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 14650HX	96 Max CPU temp (°C), 75 Max GPU temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion 5 | RTX 5060 115 W | i7 13650HX	99 Max CPU temp (°C), 74 Max GPU temp (°C)
Asus TUF Gaming A16 | RTX 5050 115 W | Ryzen 7 260	95 Max CPU temp (°C), 68 Max GPU temp (°C)

MSI Katana 15 HX - Aesthetics

From a visual standpoint, this is very much a gaming laptop. It's not bad, but if you're a grown professional that blends a bit of work in the day, and gaming in the evening (or on your lunchbreak, who am I to judge on whether or not you fancy some midday WoW Forever dopamine), it might not be the best fit. You've got that hexagonal shaped bezel lining the display, housing the integrated webcam. The same design language along the base near the trackpad. Bold ostentatious keycaps, some of those semi-transparent—for the WASD, and power keys, along with some gaudy arrow keys as well—and it does all feel a bit plasticky too.

It's a shame because, there's no need for it in the modern era, not really, when the humble square and rectangle exist. It's not particularly abrasive, but if you're in the middle of a presentation and the new hire zones out staring at the RGB rainbow gliding across your keys, you can blame it on that, and not your 23 slides on the implementation of the new agentic optimised structured data markdown system you're rolling out for site content in Q3 2027.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Software

Perhaps suprisingly, MSI's software suite is genuinely impressive. It's one of the better ones out there once you get past the myriad terms and conditions, scroll boxes, and update windows. There's multi-profile setups, mystic light control, hardware monitoring, GPU switches, recovery modes, all in a singular centralised hub, that doesn't feel that intrusive. You can live without it of course (the profiles don't seem to do that much from my own testing), but it's there for those that really want to tinker and dive into the software settings.

As always these things come with pre-installed after market antivirus (that yet again stopped me from installing the pre-requisite benchmarks and games I needed), and as always I recommend uninstalling that pronto to free up system resources. Windows Defender is still one of the best native antivirus platforms out there, and as long as you're clued up and internet savvy, you shouldn't have any major issues relying on just that.

MSI Katana 15 HX - Battery life

As for the battery, in an amazing twist of fate, that slightly dull screen doesn't exactly help on the battery front. In PC Mark's gaming benchmark—at 50% brightness, with WiFi disabled—the Katana netted just 71 minutes from 100% down to 3% charge. That's not a lot, and only slightly better than Lenovo's Legion 5 (which scored 64 minutes).

I've got beef with that, particularly because the TUF Gaming A16, has somehow crammed in a 90 WHr battery, in the same form factor, kept the entire device cooler, runs the GPU at higher frequency, performs better, and does it for a similar price (if not cheaper in the States). That's the problem. Is 71 minutes enough if you're stuck on a train without a socket? Maybe, but it could be better, and that's the theme for the entire review. It could be better. Should be better.

Battery life

Testing the long term gaming life of the laptops using the industry standard PCMark 10 gaming test.

PCMark 10 Gaming test

MSI Katana 15 HX

71

Lenovo Legion 5

64

Asus TUF Gaming A16

112

PCMark 10 Gaming test Data

Product	Value
MSI Katana 15 HX	71
Lenovo Legion 5	64
Asus TUF Gaming A16	112