There’s a bunch of reasons why the Asus TUF A15 has been the budget gaming PC to beat this year. This model takes over from last year’s best budget buy, the Asus FX505. What these two models have in common is that they are both available in a dizzying number of configurations from a basic system at R16,000 with up to a giant slaying R40,000.

This base system comes with AMD’s Ryzen 5, Nvidia GTX 1650, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD, which is what makes it so compelling as an entry level gaming PC. However our review model has AMD’s highly regarded and power efficient Ryzen 7 4800 paired with Nvidia’s high-end RTX 2060 (6GB), so it runs all today’s top games smoothly with high graphics settings. With 16GB of RAM and a whopping 1TB SSD this rig will be zippy for years to come. The 144Hz screen might not be on par with the market leaders, but in it’s price band it’s one of the richer, brighter screens we’ve seen.

Unlike Asus work PCs this one doesn’t lift off the desktop to promote cooling. The fans didn’t spin up until we were running on maximum settings, but then they came on strong sounding like an industrial air conditioner.

The styling of the A15 is almost our favourite feature. The faux steel (plastic) lid is flat all the way to the edge with strong industrial angles and visible screws. The rear vents have a honeycomb grille which matches the hexagon shaped cooling vents underneath. The industrial feel is continued under the lid too, with a bold techie font used on the RGB backlit keyboard (not per key, though). It’s not the thinnest profile but the overall design of the A15 chassis is so cool it culd easily pass as a prop in a sci-fi movie!

15.6″ screen @ 144Hz, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD storage, 3x USB-A, 1x USB-C, R 26,000