Asus goes all-in on aggressive power saving in the TUF Gaming A18: is the unusual performance mode good or bad?

Why consistent performance profiles matter

To compare (gaming) laptops fairly, we try to test every device under similar performance profiles. Before manufacturers introduced mandatory control-center apps, this was much easier—we could rely on Windows’ own power modes (Energy Efficient, Balanced, Performance).

When these control centers first appeared, most brands kept Windows’ naming conventions and only tweaked the settings behind them. Today, that’s no longer the case, and it makes comparative testing more complicated.

Not all performance modes are created equal

A Performance mode on device A from manufacturer X rarely behaves the same as the same-named mode on device M from manufacturer Y. You can’t even rely on two laptops from the same brand using identical settings behind identical labels. For example, with the 2025 Asus ROG Strix G18, we found that “both GPU and gaming performance in Turbo mode were not actually better than in Performance mode.”

The story is completely different with the recently tested Asus TUF Gaming A18. Here, GPU performance jumps noticeably in Turbo mode—enough for the laptop to match competing models only when Turbo is enabled.

The A18’s performance mode: less power, fewer frames, but major gains elsewhere

This also means the A18’s so-called “Performance” mode delivers noticeably lower gaming performance than the G18’s Performance mode or those of other competitors. In return, the A18 is much quieter and far more energy-efficient in this mode—something our scoring system rewards. Losing a few points in 3D performance earns significantly higher scores in temperature, noise, and power consumption.

You could argue that the A18’s Performance mode is essentially just a (better) Balanced mode under a different name—and that we should have treated Turbo as the true high-performance profile. After all, the A18 doesn’t offer a Balanced mode at all. But as reviewers, you don’t know this at the start; you only realize it during testing. And more importantly, the mode is genuinely well-tuned: performance drops only moderately while the gains in other categories are substantial.

Clever optimization or sneaky renaming?

So did Asus “cheat” by cutting the Balanced mode or simply renaming it to “Performance”? Or has the company finally created a sensibly optimized performance preset that trades just a handful of frames for dramatically lower noise and power usage? That’s up to each reader to decide—our benchmarks and mode-specific data help answer that question.

Would the A18 have scored lower if rated only by turbo mode?

Yes—almost certainly. Our scoring system only uses results from one mode. That’s why it always pays to read the full review (Asus TUF Gaming A18 review), where we discuss all performance presets, not just the one used for scoring.