Budget RTX 3050 TI Gaming Laptop…Is it Worth Buying?

Hey, how's it going guys? Jack and Matt here with the Toasty Bros, and today we are checking out an RTX 3050 Ti laptop for the first time, courtesy of Micro Center. Thanks to Micro Center for sending this thing over. They want us to take a look at this brand new laptop that you'll be able to buy in store over at Micro Center, one of our favorite places to shop if you're looking for PC hardware. But yeah, this has an RTX 3050 Ti. NVIDIA is slowly releasing these things into the wild, but are they worth it? Well, we'll talk about that. But first, a word from today's sponsor. Today's video is brought to you by Signal RGB, the all-in-one RGB software solution we've all been dreaming about. Signal RGB lets you control and sync all of your RGB products into one application with support for many different devices across a wide range of brands, removing the need to run 50 different RGB softwares at once. We hate that. It's awful. Signal RGB is very easy to use. 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So we're pretty excited because at the time of making this video, we have no clue what the price is on this laptop. So we'll find out soon enough, but RTX 3050 Ti, Ryzen 5800H, 16 gigs running in dual channel RAM, and 512 gig Western Digital SSD, we assume NVMe, and 144 hertz display to our knowledge is IPS. So this would be really fun to dive into based on the price. We still don't know the price. And from what we've seen, the 3050 Ti is in between like a 1660 Super and a 2060, which is kind of weird to see, but hopefully that Ryzen 5800H really carries this thing. So how about we not waste any more time, open this thing up and see what it looks like. Hey guys. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Let's go ahead and open this thing up with our BFK, big effing knife. Do you like that? Yeah. I think that's the new thing. So we got all of our tapes off, but this is an Asus TUF laptop. We've really come to like the TUF lineup and look at this, look at this intro, this introduction you get when opening this. I think it is. That's a lot of stickers. Yeah, that's pretty cool. But I love when they, some boxes, man, they really do present themselves. So the laptop comes in one of these nice mesh covers. Just gonna go and pull out the laptop and wow. That's different. This looks like some military grade laptop. It's really tough. Before we open the laptop though, just gonna go through and just check and see what we get in the box here. Lift up these flags and we literally just get a pretty beefy power brick. And that's basically it. Other than that, it just looks like there's, you know, the typical instruction warranty manual. But I gotta give Asus props for this box because it's not like this is one of their, you know, super duper high-end laptops. This is a tough laptop. And as you guys probably know, Asus' tough gaming line is kind of like their entry-level gaming peripherals and components. I should say components because that's mainly what it is. But wow. Look at that. So it looks like we have a light-up keyboard. I don't know if it's RGB or not. I'm gonna imagine it. Start it on. See if it has power. Do we have power? It appears we don't have power. We might need to plug this thing up real quick. It's dead. All right, let's plug her in. And then I suppose if the keyboard lights up first and then we'll check out what we have on the outside of the laptop as far as cooling and ports. Oh, and look at that. We got a light-up keyboard. And it's RGB. Look at that. Ooh, yeah. And I bet you can customize this to do all kinds of cool things. It looks like we're doing some typical boot looping. So we can now confirm 144 hertz display. Relatively big bezel on this area. But I pointed out to Matt, this is kind of cool. It's like a see-through frame. It almost is like not connected to the laptop. Put your finger behind it. Can I put my finger through it? There you go. Yeah, but that's pretty cool. So while this laptop is boot looping or booting up for the first time, let's go and talk about what we have as far as ports go. So we have an ethernet jack, HDMI out, USB 3, USB 3, a USB type C jack, and a combo jack. In the back, we don't have anything. We just have lots of cooling in the back. Yeah, lots of cooling in the back. The bottom, you have like some honeycomb grills. So we'll see. It's really rare to find a laptop that actually runs cool and quiet. I don't think it's gonna be one, but we'll see. And then we just have, it looks like a, that's not even a port right there. Kind of looks like one, but one more USB 3. So as far as ports go, it's pretty typical. Only three USB ports and one USB-C. I know on some laptops, you'll see four USB ports. That could be a deal breaker for you, but I don't think it's going to be. Ready for Cortana to yell at us again? I'm ready for Cortana to yell at us. I'm ready. Come on, Cortana, do it again. Come on, Cortana, do it. You always do this. Do it. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie though. Just the, the simple like things that they added to this laptop really do make such a difference. I mean, this right here, Cortana, Cortana. There we go again. I'm just- Just stop. It's just, it's really nice how they added different layers to it and different textures. Like you notice there's a lot of different, we have horizontal, vertical. We have all kinds of different things going on. We have different textures that really make this just look like it's a gaming laptop. It kind of reminds me of back in the day you had these Alienware laptops. They used to be huge and bulky, but they looked really cool. And then laptops kind of started straying away from that. And your gaming laptops, like companies like Razer and stuff, you had the cool Razer logo, but other than that, very simple laptop. But this one, I mean, you get a lot of appeal to it. Now, if you're like a business person, this might look a little goofy, but I don't know. It kind of makes me think like you're in the military or something. This is a laptop I'd carry with me. So you're saying it's like an onion. It has layers. Or is it like an ogre? Like an ogre. Ogres are like onions because they have layers. But we're gonna go through this whole setup real quick. We're gonna connect to our printer because, you know, Wi-Fi. We have an ethernet. We actually have an ethernet. Yeah, just screw Wi-Fi. Screw Wi-Fi. Dude, it's time to fricking use our enterprise internet that cost us a fortune. Laptop. You know, I want to talk about this keyboard real quick because I didn't address. It's actually, yeah, you're gonna feel it. It has like a really long travel to it. Do I feel it? Oh yeah, not too shabby. They're not like, so I've noticed with some, oh God, let's not do that. Oh, that's a bad answer. I've noticed with some laptop keyboards, they're starting to all get really nice in my opinion, but some of them have a really short travel and a really hard click. Like it's an instant actuation. This one actually has a slow actuation. Like it almost reminds me of like brown switches where it's a little bit mushy, but it feels somewhat linear. We're not, we don't need any protection. We're the Toasty Brothers. Oh God. McAfee policy. Yandex's policy. I don't, what does McAfee do to get in every single laptop company? How much money do they got? I don't know, man. Yeah. All right, so we're gonna plug an internet back in, let this do its setup, get some games installed on it. And then Matt's gonna probably fricking wreck it Fortnite. Wrecking it Fortnite? He did nasty earlier. This guy was speed building and he said, I don't care. Let's install some games. All right gamers, we have this laptop ready to go. We have some games installed. And first up we're gonna be playing good old Call of Duty Cold War. Yeah, I'll show the settings off to everyone. See what we got going here. 144 Hertz. It's just like it has the meanest slope to it so we don't have a glare. A limited frame rate, of course, but the menu frame rate is capped at 60. We're on medium settings. That's respectable. I think this could even, it could maybe do higher. Actually it only has four gigs of VRAM. So you can see right here, we're almost there, but not quite. So yeah, it is a budget laptop. So if we can run medium settings over 60 FPS, maybe get closer to the 100s, then yeah, it would be really awesome to take advantage of that screen. But we will not know until we dive in real quick and we'll be able to keep an eye on those temperatures too and see what we're working with. We really think this laptop makes a lot of sense for like content creation because, oh, there we go. That Ryzen 7 is really good for like, let's say entry-level live streaming or video editing. And also that GPU as well has the NVENC encoder. You can do stuff like that if you want to, but the balance of that eight core 16 thread with the lower end GPU makes more sense for content creation and somebody who can actually hit their Snipes. Doesn't make sense for us though. No, it doesn't make sense for us, obviously. Can't hit our Snipes. Oh, okay. Guys, if you can hit Snipes on a laptop, that's a good sign that it's a good laptop because normally I can't hit ----. Yeah, exactly. Especially when it's, if it's a bad laptop, it's just, we're going to be playing for a while until we get some kills. I didn't even realize we can really lower settings too because we're not even getting the smooth 144, we're not even getting the smooth 144 Hertz that the, or FPS that this monitor really deserves, but it still feels so smooth. So buttery smooth. We did confirm, and it will probably be added to the beginning of the video, this laptop is available on Micro Center's website. You can actually buy it from Micro Center's website for $1,099 at the time of recording this video. Do keep that in mind, at $1,099, it is competing with a bunch of other laptops we've taken a look at recently, but it has the newer 3000 series GPU, that awesome newer Ryzen 7 GPU, and 16 gigs of RAM with a 512 gig SSD. It's pretty good value. Okay, there he goes. But hey, Call of Duty Cold War, it does play Call of Duty Cold War. Lower some settings a little bit, you probably get closer to the 100 plus FPS. Let's go and test another game, shall we? All right guys, the next game we're going to be playing is good old Fortnite, and we are running on performance mode, and as you can see right here, whoops, what's up with that 3D resolution? We are running with the far view distance, and then meshes on high, and the textures on high as well. So we're gonna try to stretch that 3050 Ti a little bit, and have it work instead of just going mainly with the Ryzen 7. But we should get some pretty good performance here, well over 100 plus FPS, but we're gonna dive in and see exactly how well this thing performs when it loads. All right guys, we're going to drop into Fortnite real quick and see what kind of numbers we get. Right now we are around 100 FPS, normally there is an FPS drop when we, well, leave the battle bus, so we're gonna land and see what kind of numbers we get. But as long as we're over 144, then we can fully take advantage of the screen on this laptop, and I do expect to do so once we actually settle in here. But yeah, the combination of the Ryzen 7 5800H and 3050 Ti works pretty well together, and the fact that this thing comes with dual channel 16 gigs at 3200 megahertz makes this a pretty well balanced system. And as you can see, we're getting pretty good gaming results. Hopefully I don't get taken by these aliens. So it's looking like we're getting pretty good numbers, 100 plus FPS, I'm as in the 200s, and it looks really, really smooth. This laptop plays, well, this game really well actually, so very happy with that. I am noticing some weird things with the clock speed on the CPU, it probably has to do with some power management or MSI Afterburner is just not reading it properly. So just something to keep in mind, the clock speed is acting a little bit wonky, but it doesn't seem to be impacting our performance all that much. But there is a potential that with a few optimizations here and there, it could improve the performance. But hey, frame rate is looking pretty good. This thing is whisper quiet. I do believe there has to be some sort of performance or battery saving or whatever mode that's on right now, because this thing isn't fully ramping up, the CPU is only running at like 35%, GPU running at like 50 some percent. So diving into the settings might increase the performance a little bit, but it's nice to have a whisper quiet laptop without severely impacting performance. So I really can't complain too much about it. And if I can find somebody here again, we might kill them and then we can move on to the next game. I'm not gonna make it. Oh God, I got blasted by a laser. A ray gun, what the hell is Fortnite anymore? A ray gun. Bro, is this Call of Duty? I think this is Call of Duty. All right guys, well, Fortnite runs pretty well. Let's try another game real quick that Jackson cannot pronounce, Chivalry. Try it, go. All right guys, we are now in Chivarly, Chivar, Chivalry. Chivalry, we're in Chivalry 2. And we are going to be playing the 64 player mixed modes, which is the most intense you can get. We are not maxed out because we figured maxing out is a little bit overkill. So we're basically on, oh, we're on high settings, which is one off from max settings. And we're at 1080p, no frame rate. Cap? No frame rate cap? No cap. Oh, it's the fighting pit. I've heard this one's the most demanding mode because it's so close quarters and there's so much going on at once. Ooh, it is definitely demanding. Yeah, like I said, this map, I know everyone always chats before they game when I play it and they're like, oh, there goes my frame rate. Oh God. This is definitely a game too. If it's a little bit below 60, I mean, it doesn't ruin the experience because you're just kind of running around swinging an ax or a sword. There's not really like super split millisecond decisions like there would be if you were shooting a gun in a game. Oh, we lost? It's over. Okay, well, there you go. You died. It's over. It's great. Did I get a takedown? Did you get a takedown? Nope, no takedowns. Just two deaths. No takedowns? Wow. I contributed. That was great. Great times. But yeah, that's pretty much this laptop. It's pretty good. 3050 Ti isn't great. It's all right. It's probably gonna be good for budget laptops. I'd like to see how cheap these laptops could actually get with some other offerings, but it was kind of cool to be able to take a look at this 3050 Ti. Let's wrap this video up real quick. Hey guys, future Matt here. I wanted to give you all a quick update. We just got word that this laptop sent over by Micro Center is now gonna be part of Micro Center's new Platinum Collection, which is a collection of high quality name brand gaming desktops and laptops that are exclusive to Micro Center. So this laptop is actually gonna be a Micro Center only exclusive. So definitely if you're gonna pick this thing up, check the link in the description down below. But this program is designed for people who are hardcore gamers, working professionals, or tech enthusiasts who thrive on having the latest in technology. You can get it directly from Micro Center, and it's, well, your one-stop shop to get this kind of PC hardware that they basically give their stamp of approval for. So definitely check the link down below. Now back to the video. All right, guys. So overall, this laptop, for the money, and it being brand new, is honestly really awesome. We really like the whole entire build quality of the TUF laptop. And one of the best parts was this thing stayed really quiet. It's probably one of the quietest gaming laptops that we have reviewed in a while. And the only real drawback is the fact that 3050 Ti, although it's a new RTX card, it's definitely on the lower end. It reminds me of like a GTX 1660 Super, but just a little bit better. So overall, this is a pretty awesome laptop for the money. Once again, if you wanna buy this laptop, link down below. We'll link to Micro Center because Micro Center was nice to send this over. And you can actually buy it from Micro Center on their website. So for those who really can't get deals and go to Micro Center to pick things up, you can actually buy this one online. So definitely take a look at it if you haven't done so already. And yeah, very happy that we were able to take a look at this laptop. So as always, we hope you guys enjoyed today's review. Don't forget to check out our other two YouTube channels and also our twitch.tv slash Toasty Bros. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. And we'll see you guys in the next one. Goodbye. Kumbaya. And hey, in case you guys didn't notice, not only are we your favorite tech YouTubers, we're also your favorite place to buy tech stuff from. PCBros.tech, we sell a lot of stuff that we showcase in videos, so take a look at it. PCBros.tech, link down below. Thanks again for watching. Goodbye.