Dual graphics is a shit show, marginally less if there is a hardware MUX, so that you can just totally disable the on board GPU.
Aaaaaand, now we’ve just invented a desktop computer again.
To be fair, some laptops do have the hardware MUX, but I’d rather have whatever the best on board graphics are if I’m buying a laptop.
Portability and battery life matters, otherwise why would you buy a laptop?
Apparently this thing has the direct MUX thing. I’ve never done it, but when running VMs you can use onboard for the desktop and the discrete graphics for the VM for gaming or running graphics or compute stuff.
The way I see discrete and intgrated graphics is that it’s not an either/or. Just don’t use discrete when you want the battery to last, use the (very good these days) onboard graphics. They are all just options.
So this TUF thing has MUX and all that, plus a 16 hour battery life (when it’s a 90Wh battery). There’s no compromise there, assuming of course that we are not putting hard cutoffs on portability when something weighs a few grams more.
I get where you’re coming from, but for most people, that’s the line between buying a laptop or a desktop.
I think it’s stretching the meaning of lap top to build a laptop like you’d want.
There is degree of portability. Some of us don’t sit in parks all day where there is no power.
Personally, when I’m working on something involving a computer for many hours I like to move around a bit. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, front porch, back porch. Can’t do that with a desktop. And ultra-portables tend to trade away cpu and gpu power for light and thin.
Yep. I want an igpu that is powerful enough not to sweat for everyday tasks and gives acceptable battery life. At the moment, Ryzen has the best with the 680M igpu. And as powerful a dgpu available that is practical, for both more powerful tasks and an acceptable degree of future proofing for mid performance tasks. Ironically, the 6800H that has the 680M igpu tends to be paired with mid performance dgpu’s rather than high performance ones.
The latest AMD integrated graphics really are pretty nifty, I have a 5700G (or 5600G) APU in the desktop and it runs X-Plane 11 no probs, not high settings but still.
The 680M igpu is right in with lower end dedicated gpu performance of just a few years ago, which is a big jump from previous igpu peformance. Lots of game testing for frame rates on youtube and elsewhere that make it look pretty impressive for what it is.
Oh, that’s the one in this bad boy. The impression I’ve had from the desktop is that it has indeed caught up with dedicated graphics cards in that they aren’t necessary any more for a lot of stuff.
One possible complication of holding off right now is that AMD is reported to slowing production of some of it’s chips, which could affect availability of other products. I guess we’ll see. I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me want to pull the trigger.
I think I might have been making a mistake in looking at hi-res (4k) exclusively. Maybe what matters as much or more than resolution is subpixel clarity. I mean, for text what is wanted is sharpness on edges of fonts. High resolution eliminates jagginess of text edges, but does that really affect sharpness? Maybe not so much. The macbook that I had here recently certainly didn’t do anything special for text sharpness over the 1080 display in my old thinkpad.
As far as I know, notebookcheck.net is the only site that provides display subpixel pics, and it is obvious that all are not equal by far. Some display subpixels look very blurry, where others are pretty crisp. I’m thinking this probably matters more than resolution for text clarity, probably largely being down to the coating of the display.
Of course, I need to look into this more. But display wise I’m thinking, good subpixel clarity (sharpness), no pwm controlled backlight (no flicker), 120+ hz refresh rate (less motion blur).
A few shots from notebookcheck to demonstrate what I’m talking about:
Do you think 4k is really going to matter for text clarity with that last display coating?
How is the TUF faring? I want to hold out for what I really want, but prices look tempting on those right now.
Anti glare coatings are always a trade off.
Yea, but some of them are pretty good in not blurring edges. And glare blows. I have owned one laptop with a glossy screen. Never again.
(I sent the first back, this is the new 90Wh one)
It’s not too shabby, early days still. First AMD laptop I have high expectations of, so am aware of differences between Intel and AMD now since I’ve put Intel laptops under the microscope before. For example, setting a power plan with an Intel gets an accurate clock speed report back, something like 0.75Ghz. Although the AMD can clock down to 0.4GHz (when throttling according to netizens), the reported freq in Windows sticks to around 1.6GHz in normal use which seems wrong. The interwebz says that this isn’t accurate with AMD, but I want accurate.
Had weird battery thing where before the battery was charged/discharged a couple of times that the battery usage was awful. Also learnt in that process that Firefox can be a battery killer. Now it’s 10 hours of noodling around, which isn’t exactly 16 hours, hence the frustration with the clock speed reports.
So yeah, it’s alright. I’m troubled by the lack of full spectrum dominance over the clock speed. I learned through that experience that AMD auto-downclock on battery, hence part of the superiority over Intel in battery life benchmarks. Maybe that’s why it’s not reported accurately?
There’s an app called ryzenadj that can be used to manually control things, maybe I’ll get into that at some point.
Thanks for the detailed overview. Have you tried a linux live run yet?
No, I haven’t Linuxed apart from WSL. I’ll give Manjaro Gnome Live USB a whirl though, that sounds like minimal stress! 
Looks like good compatibility. Which dgpu is in that machine? It’s a TUF or TUF Dash? TUF is also an A15/17 and Dash is F15/17 (display size dependent for 15 or 17).
Full model #: Asus TUF A15 FA507RM, it has an RTX3060.
hwinfo in Manjaro is reporting 1.6GHz too. Note that the fan is on low by default.
When I can be arsed, I’d like to get the Win11 install running via a VM with direct access to the Nvidia card. That time is not now for sure though.
Thanks.
Looking a little more at the fractional scaling thing, it seems that Wayland clients should do fractional scaling without blurring, but Xorg clients will have issues.