Looking beyond the specs reveals a proper bargain here: Compact gaming laptops under $1,000 are flat-out rare. At $899.99, the Asus TUF Gaming A14 is light to carry (just 3.2 pounds!) but a real heavyweight on value.
Laptop deals for Prime Day tend to be less dramatic than for other kinds of PC hardware; knock off 50% from the cost of any PC for a day or two, and it’ll sell out in a flash. Thus, this Asus TUG Gaming model may look forgettable at first glance—it may seem like a ho-hum deal based on its raw specs, versus what you might be hunting for. But it’s actually a bit of a groundbreaking value at the moment, in its Prime Day guise.
Why is that? You’ll seldom see a compact gaming laptop for anything less than $1,300 or so, and this one is at $899.99 right now.
Let’s start with the specs that may make your eyes glaze over. Yes, the graphics chip is a slightly snoozy GeForce RTX 4050. That’s Nvidia’s last-gen, lowest-end GPU for laptops. The GeForce RTX 5050 just debuted a few weeks ago, so the RTX 4050 can’t even lay claim to being the cutting edge of the low end anymore. And the CPU is not one of AMD’s spanking-new Ryzen AI 300 series “Strix Point” chips. Rather, it’s a last-generation Ryzen 8000 series.
