I don’t have any personal experience with TUF laptops, so I can’t really offer an informed opinion on it. But I assume that’s just the slightly more plastic version of their other laptops, so it’s probably no worse than any other Asus laptop, though maybe a little less durable if you’re dragging it around everywhere.

I’ve had reasonable luck and been reasonably happy with Asus laptops, specifically the G14 and G15 models.

Currently have a 2022 G14 (the all AMD one wth a 6900hs and 6700s) and it’s… fine. It’s hot, loud, and has lousy battery life but that’s just gaming laptop life.

Only thing I would comment on Asus laptops is their fans are absolute shit and you will - not may - have to replace them after about a year. I’ve had 4 Asus laptops and all 4 of them have fallen prone to this specific failure. It’s easy enough to do (a couple of screws) and like $15 for the fans, but still, it’s a pretty consistent failure.

Afaik no, you’ll still get flagged from NPCs but I’m also not going to go test it :)

Yep, straight from Macarena to Tubthumping and nobody even noticed.

I’m still waiting for .rar so I can buy unregistered.rar, which is the way it’s meant to be.

How many mushrooms can I get in exchange for these stupid spaceship jpegs?

Because it’s no longer 1996 and there are domains beyond ccTLDs and com/net/org?

I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.

I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.

No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.

I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.

Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.

That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.