ASUS TUF Gaming A16 16" 165Hz FHD+ Gaming Laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX 2025 Review

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.

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

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.

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.

FAQs

Is the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 good for gaming?

Yes, the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 is a capable gaming laptop with its AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX processor, 16GB of RAM, and NVIDIA RTX 5070 graphics card. The 16” 165Hz FHD+ display provides smooth gaming performance, and the laptop can run demanding games like Fortnite at high settings with well over 100 FPS.

Is the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 good for video editing?

Yes, the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 is a solid choice for video editing. The AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX processor combined with 16GB of RAM and the NVIDIA RTX 5070 graphics card provides the power needed to handle video editing tasks efficiently, though the 8GB VRAM may limit some heavier workloads.

Is the keyboard on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 comfortable for typing?

Yes, the keyboard on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 is comfortable for both gaming and productivity work. It features a RGB backlit keyboard with comfortable keys, and the WASD keys are more translucent than the rest to make them easy to find during gaming.

What about the display on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16?

The 16” 165Hz FHD+ display on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 offers smooth, high-refresh-rate performance ideal for gaming. While it’s not OLED, the display is sharp, colorful, and bright, making it well-suited for gaming and general use.

Can I run local AI on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16?

Yes, the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 can run local AI tasks, though it has some limitations. The AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX processor lacks a dedicated NPU, but the NVIDIA RTX 5070 GPU with DLSS 4 support can handle AI-driven multi-frame generation. However, the 8GB VRAM limits you to running models around 7B parameters or smaller with 4-bit quantization.

How does the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 perform in local AI workloads?

The ASUS TUF Gaming A16 performed well in local AI testing, achieving about 60-70 tokens per second with Google’s Gemma-4-e4b model in LM Studio. However, the 8GB VRAM limitation restricts you to smaller models, making it best suited for text generation and light coding tasks rather than heavy AI workloads.