Design

The ASUS TUF A16 Gaming Laptop is a somewhat bulky laptop, but still weighs less than 5 pounds. It has a RGB backlit keyboard that is comfortable to type or game on, and the WASD keys are more translucent than the rest to make them easy to find. At the top of the keyboard is a row specifically for controlling the volume, microphone mute, and power.

While the display is not OLED, the large 16-inch screen is still sharp, colorful, and bright, and is more than suitable for gaming.

On the left side of the laptop, you’ll find the charging jack, Ethernet port, a full-sized HDMI port, two USB-C ports, a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. On the right side, there are two additional USB-A ports.

ASUS TUF Gaming A16 backlit keyboard

Performance

This laptop features an AMD Risen 9 8940HX processor, which is a strong multi-core performer but isn’t always the most energy-efficient and has no dedicated NPU for local AI inference. Therefore, this laptop, although quite powerful, is not officially a “CoPilot+” PC.

The A16 gaming laptop also packs a GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU built on the Blackwell architecture and has excellent ray tracing (lighting and shadowing) capabilities and DLSS 4 (AI-driven multi-frame generation) support. However, this laptop’s configuration limits VRAM at 8GB, which can be limiting, especially for local AI workloads, which I’ll get to later.

I pulled the Cinebench 2026 scores while the laptop was connected to its charger and here are the scores:

GPU: 49944 CPU Multiple Threads: 5170 CPU Single Core: 562 CPU Single Thread: 433

ASUS TUF Gaming A16 laptop opened

Fortnite

I left Fortnite auto-detect the settings and it picked out “high” settings for almost everything.

View Distance: Epic (highest)
Shadows: High
Textures: High
Effects: High
Post Processing: High
Meshes: Low

While playing Fortnite, I set the FPS to unlimited and often achieved well over 100 FPS, sometimes in the low 200s even. The graphics looked great and gameplay was smooth.

ASUS TUF Gaming A16 closed

Local AI (LM Studio)

Using Google’s local Gemma-4-e4b model in LM Studio (with GPU offload and CPU Thread Pool Size maxed out), the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 laptop did a great job responding at about 60-70 tokens per second! Unfortunately, the 8GB of VRAM does limit you to running models of around 7B (7 billion parameters) or smaller, assuming 4-bit quantization (Q4_K_M). Still, this laptop would be capable of AI tasks such as text generation and light coding tasks.

Our Verdict

8.7

Very Good

It's a tough time for gaming PCs right now in mid-2026 as hardware prices are much higher than they were even a year ago due partly to AI data center demands. The ASUS TUF Gaming A16 gaming laptop is a good balance: it doesn't have the latest and greatest GPU or the fanciest CPU, which helps keep costs in check, but it is still a capable machine for both gaming and running local AI tasks.