New Asus 14-inch gaming laptop with AMD Strix Halo shows stellar performance following recent US release
Asus' first gaming laptop featuring AMD's Strix Halo platform has now reached North America. For context, the TUF Gaming A14 FA401EA has been available in other markets for some time. Coinciding with its North American release, ETA Prime has now put the laptop and its new Ryzen AI Max+ 392 APU through its paces.
To recap, the Ryzen AI Max+ 392 features 12 of the 16 Zen 5 CPU cores found in the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. AMD has tweaked CPU clock speeds and reduced L2 cache from 16 MB to 12 MB too. By contrast, the company has left the Radeon 8060S unchanged with 40 Compute Units (CUs) and a 2,900 MHz boost clock.
Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen AI Max+ 392 suffers about a 25% deficit to its Max+ 395 sibling in multi-core benchmarks like Cinebench 2024, although ETA Prime observed a narrower gap in 3DMark TimeSpy. Setting synthetic performance aside, the FA401EA manages to sustain around a 100 W TDP under load in its Turbo mode with a 115 W FPPT in Manual mode.
GPU performance is in line with what we have come to expect from the Radeon 8060S, too. As the video below shows, the FA401EA extracts around 80 FPS from modern triple-A titles at its native display resolution in Turbo mode. The laptop still has some thermal headroom even when pulling 100 W from its APU too, with temperatures reaching around 80° using Asus' stock fan curve.
Overall, the FA401EA represents a decent GPU upgrade on the older FA401WV variant (curr. $1,455 on Amazon) even with 16 GB VRAM assigned to its Radeon 8060S iGPU. Potentially, the FA401EA could achieve decent results even when charging at 100 W via USB-C, unlike its Nvidia-backed peers. Please see ETA Prime's video below for more details.
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