Asus TUF Dash F15 Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Asus' TUF line is known for being affordable, durable gaming devices – and the TUF Dash F15 is no exception. With a few models around the $1,000 price point, this 15-inch gaming laptop should be able to take a beating in real life while you dole out beatings on the virtual battlefield. I reviewed a model with these specs:

• Model: Asus TUF Dash F15 (FX516PM)
• Display: 15-inch IPS 144Hz at 1920x1080
• Processor: Intel Core i7-11370H quad-core processor (12 MB Smart Cache, up to 4.8 GHz)
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 6GB
• Memory: 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 (one user-upgradeable slot for up to 48GB)
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Storage: 512 GB NVMe SSD (two user-upgradeable slots)
• Ports: 1x USB 4.0 Type-C with Power Delivery, DisplayPort 1.4a, and Thunderbolt 4, 3x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x 3.5mm combo audio jack, 1x RJ45 Ethernet, 1x A/C power
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.2
• Battery: 76Wh
• Dimensions: 14.1" x 9.9" x 0.8"
• Weight: 4.41 lbs.
• Price (as tested): $1,149.99

You can, however, upgrade to a slightly more powerful i7-11375H and an RTX 3070, as well as up to a 240Hz display if you want something with even smoother motion for esports. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=asus-tuf-dash-f15-review&captions=true"]

Design and Features

The TUF Dash 15's appearance is what you'd expect from a brand pushing military spec MIL-STD durability standards: it isn't a behemoth, but its hard edges and giant TUF branding on the back let you know this isn't your typical office notebook. While it bills itself as a thin and light, it is still a 15-inch gaming laptop – certainly not as bulky as some of its competitors, but I wouldn't exactly call it svelte. But that's okay, because its size may allow it a bit more power than comparably-specced laptops, not to mention more cooling potential. The bottom case uses a smooth, black finish with just a bit of texture to the right and left of the keyboard, and some decidedly "TUF" looking speaker grilles along the top. (There's a white version too, with similar flourishes.) The keyboard itself is backlit and allows comfortable typing, thanks to its large size, standard key spacing, and relatively deep travel at 1.7mm. The WASD keys are translucent, and the W key contains a subtle notch so you can easily find your way back home when gaming. The lighting is not particularly customizable, though, with no RGB and only three animated patterns to choose from – but it's functional if you're gaming at night, which is what matters most. You get a few extra keys along the top of the keyboard, including volume, mic mute, and a shortcut to open Asus' Armory Crate software. The trackpad is what I would call "fine": I didn't have any major accuracy issues where the cursor jumps around, but the surface of the trackpad doesn't feel as smooth as other, better laptops either. While some trackpads allow your finger to glide effortlessly across the surface, it felt like my finger dragged a bit on the TUF Dash's trackpad. It's not a deal breaker by any means, and given the more affordable nature of the laptop, it's about exactly the amount of corner I'd expect to be cut: it's not premium, but it's not sinking down to super-budget level either. You also won't get any extras like fingerprint sensors, though, and there's no webcam at all, which is frustrating in the era of forced remote work. The slightly larger chassis also affords plentiful IO, with one Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port and three USB Type-A ports – not to mention HDMI 2.0 and Ethernet. The Ethernet port in particular is great to see, since it's left off so many modern laptops – and it can make a big difference, both when downloading large games and when playing online multiplayer with as little lag as possible. Oh, and the headphone jack is always welcome, since the F15's speakers are nothing to write home about. Finally, the display is a bit sub-par. While it does use an IPS panel, in testing I found that it only covers about 60% of the sRGB space, rather than the 100% we'd really like to see – so colors won't be very accurate, and its 853:1 contrast ratio means blacks are going to look more like dark grey. It can reach about 350 nits of brightness, which is enough for most work, but might be just a tad dim if you're trying to work or game outside in direct sunlight. All in all, though, it'll get the job done – just not particularly beautifully.

Software

Asus' laptops don't come with a ton of software baked in, and that's a good thing. The MyASUS app allows for certain troubleshooting processes and customer support, but otherwise you'll probably never open it, while Armory Crate is the gaming-centric app that allows you to adjust the fan profiles, RGB lighting (if you have compatible accessories), display customizations, and some hotkeys. I'm generally not in love with Armory Crate, and find its power profiles more confusing than helpful, though you can feel free to experiment with them to see if you get a few more frames per second (at most) out of your games – though that'll usually come at the cost of some fan noise. I do, however, have to give Asus credit for not including garbage like McAfee or other bundled trialware on this machine, like so many others do. In fact, Asus includes it on the $3,000 ROG Flow X13, but I saw no trace of it on this budget-focused laptop – which seems weird, but maybe the company’s learning? Regardless, kudos to Asus for keeping it light.

Benchmarks	Asus TUF Dash F15	Acer Predator Triton 300 SE	MSI Stealth 15M
Price as tested	$1,149	$1,399	$1,899
CPU	Intel Core i7-11370H	Intel Core i7-11375H	Intel Core i7-11375H
GPU	Nvidia RTX 3060	Nvidia RTX 3060	Nvidia RTX 3060
3DMark Time Spy	6623	6377	6294
3DMark Fire Strike	15073	14416	14091
3DMark Night Raid	33147	30238	28015
Total War: Three Kingdoms	56	54	56
Borderlands 3	62	60	61
Metro Exodus	47	48	48
Hitman 3	94	93	110
Unigine Heaven 4.0	88	85	85
PCMark 10	6351	5892	5698
PCMark 10 Battery Test	9:10	6:30	3:00

Performance and Gaming

Thanks to its solid midrange hardware, the TUF Dash F15 holds its own well in games, producing playable framerates in all of our benchmarks – which, remember, are run at Ultra settings, so if you turn a few things down, you can easily take advantage of the higher refresh display. In Doom Eternal, for example, I was easily able to stay over 100FPS in the crowded Super Gore Nest mission on High graphics settings. The 144Hz display performed admirably and the RTX 3060 had no problems keeping up. In fact, despite having nearly identical hardware to the more expensive Acer Predator Triton 300 SE, the TUF Dash outperformed it in just about every benchmark, likely due to its increased size and cooling ability (not to mention a slightly higher-specced GPU – remember, not all RTX 3060 laptops have the same capabilities). The keyboard's deep travel was a welcome advantage while gaming as well, allowing for more defined keypresses as you dodge enemy fire. I also found the laptop kept its chassis decently cool during gaming sessions. In fact, the internal hardware – while it heats up during gaming – rarely thermal throttled during my benchmarks, which was pretty shocking for a self-proclaimed thin and light. (The fan does whirr pretty loudly, though, so make sure you have some decent over-ear eadphones or a gaming headset on hand.) However, the TUF Dash still has its own shortcomings. The trackpad, for example, was a noticeable step down from the super-smooth pad on the Triton. This won't be a problem if you play with an external gaming mouse, though you may still notice it in desktop work. The Triton's display is also better, with improved colors and a better contrast ratio that'll make your games' graphics stand out. Still, all those benefits – plus others like the webcam and fingerprint sensor – come at a noticeable increase in price, so if you're on a stricter budget, the TUF Dash is still worth putting on your short list.

Battery Life

With a huge 76Wh battery and midrange hardware, you'd expect battery life on the TUF Dash F15 to be decent, if not pretty good. But at 50% brightness, PCMark 10's Modern Office battery test lasted a whopping nine hours and 10 minutes, which is fantastic if you're looking to get through a full day of work on your laptop. Now, you obviously won't get nine hours of gaming from this thing, but you'll get a lot more than the power-hungry, sub-2-hour gaming laptops out there, so this is one area where I can safely say the TUF Dash F15 kicks ass. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-gaming-laptops&captions=true"]

Purchasing Guide

The Asus TUF Dash F15 as I reviewed should retail for $1,149 at Amazon, Newegg and Best Buy.

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Total War: Rome Remastered Review

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The camera pans across a poised army as my boisterous general gives a fiery speech about honor and victory, and I'm transported back to the virtual battlefields of a time long past: 2004. Total War: Rome Remastered is a very faithful recreation of the series' first fully 3D expedition, originally known as Rome: Total War, with some modest but notable graphical and UI updates. But as astounding as it was at the time, the aging gameplay hasn’t gotten the same attention, and doesn't hold up all that well compared to its successors as a result.

The most obvious upgrades in Total War: Rome Remastered are visual. In fact, Creative Assembly insists that the engine running underneath is essentially unchanged, so everything from spies on the campaign map to a unit of Triarii on the fields of Italy should behave more or less just as it would if you fished your old CD-ROMs out of whatever box they're wedged in. And no doubt, it's an impressive face lift – especially when it comes to lighting and terrain details. The units, though, don't quite hold up to the level of fidelity we're used to in modern Total War or even 2013's Total War: Rome 2, which is itself almost eight years old by now.

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And that's kind of a running theme with this remaster: they made an old game feel less old, but they certainly didn't make it feel new again.

Rome: Total War was ahead of its time in so many ways when it came out, and all of those great ideas are still here. Dividing Rome itself up into three factions that are set off in three different directions to conquer, before ultimately meeting each other in a bloody civil war at the end, was a fantastically effective way to keep the late game challenging and interesting with fairly simple, transparent mechanics. There are even a couple things in here I think the original Rome did better than the games that came after it, like having to physically send a diplomat across the map to treat with other factions. It adds just a bit of extra immersion and sense of place if you can't ring Mithridates up on the phone to offer a trade deal.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=In%20most%20other%20ways%2C%20it's%20simply%20fallen%20too%20far%20behind%20the%20times."]But in most other ways, it's simply fallen too far behind the times. Strategy games in general, and Total War specifically, have evolved so much in the last 18 years that going back to the original Rome can be deflating. The AI is one of the primary culprits. If you're coming from Total War: Three Kingdoms or Total War: Warhammer 2, the various Gauls, Greeks, and Carthaginians you'll match wits against here won't feel like much of a match at all. It's relatively easy to beat entire armies just by microing your cavalry well, for example. The enemy tends to play very passive and can easily be lured into Cannae-like traps over and over again. It felt like going back in time as an adult to beat up on my middle school bully. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=every-ign-total-war-review-ever&captions=true"] The included Barbarian Invasion expansion was incredible in its day, but within the first handful of turns revisiting it, I was struck by the fact that it's basically a more primitive version of the excellent Total War: Attila, and I'd really rather be playing that. The fact that the map is smaller and there are fewer factions isn't necessarily the issue. In some ways, Total War actually works better with this reduced scope. But it's missing so many years of iteration and refinement of the formula that I wondered if it wouldn't have been worth including some more substantial, gameplay-related quality of life changes. A less obtuse public order system or a way to see at a glance how many men a unit needs to be back to full strength would have been nice.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=The%20UI%20is%20definitely%20much%20improved%2C%20especially%20in%20terms%20of%20readability."]The UI is definitely much improved, especially in terms of readability. That's usually the part of older strategy games that drives me up a wall the fastest, since modern games have gotten so much better at it. But Rome: Remastered still doesn't offer up information as easily as its descendants. It's cleaner, but it's still dated. Getting more detail on how a specific building or unit ability works might be a pain or just impossible. And it seems like Feral Interactive has gone out of their way to keep the look and feel of a 2004 UI when I would have rather they shined and polished it up a bit more.

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There are a couple places where Rome: Remastered has added totally new features, and they're kinda neat. For one, there's a new "experimental" unit size that allows for even larger battles, in terms of the total number of troops, than even modern Total War games have without mods. This made the trade-off for lower resolution fighty guys seem more acceptable, as I was able to orchestrate some truly titanic, ancient clashes. You can also play as any faction right from the jump, whereas the original required you to beat each one while playing as Rome to unlock them – unless you want to do it the old-fashioned way. Oh, and the music? It still totally slaps. Barbarian Victory is still one of my favorite tracks from any strategy game. The whole soundtrack is energetic, distinct, and evocative.

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New Pokémon Snap Review

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It's a good thing no one had a camera on me during my first playthrough of New Pokémon Snap, because I probably looked and sounded like a total dingus. Without fail, each time I played a new course a Pokémon would appear out of nowhere, or do something cute, or react to something I did in a surprising way, and I (this is not an exaggeration) would sit up on the couch, point at the screen, and go "Aaah!" in delight.

I love the way The Pokémon Company has, in recent years, begun letting more companies outside Game Freak (think Niantic with Pokémon Go, or Legendary Pictures with Detective Pikachu) make media that shows off Pokémon not as collectibles or as static RPG party members but as lovable, intelligent creatures. After successfully digging into their combat prowess in Pokken Tournament, Bandai Namco has been handed the far more peaceful reigns of an on-rails nature photography game and charged with portraying Pokémon as wild creatures in living ecosystems to be observed, befriended, and only "captured" via camera. Given the timbre of my happy yells every time a Wooper said "Woooh!" at me, if my neighbors had known what I was doing they'd probably agree that New Pokémon Snap is a delightful success on this front.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/new-pokemon-snap-official-gameplay-trailer"]

Despite its flaws, I was a big fan of the original Pokémon Snap on Nintendo 64 back in 1999. The classic on-rails photography game had a very fun premise, sending you on a nature safari to try and get the best photos possible of Pokémon living and interacting in their natural habitats. Though the idea was sound and many of Pokémon Snap's best moments are still memorable to this day (the Jigglypuff concert! Charizard popping out of the lava pool! Surfing Pikachu!), it was painfully short, with only just over 60 Pokémon available across seven courses that were precisely the same every single time. Even with the meat of trying to solve a few puzzles to line up some rarer shots, 1999's Pokémon Snap inevitably left me wishing for so much more.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=If%20%22Pok%C3%A9mon%20Snap%2C%20but%20more%22%20were%20the%20baseline%20for%20New%20Pok%C3%A9mon%20Snap%20being%20any%20good%2C%20it%20would%20handily%20clear%20that%20simple%20bar."]22 years later, I had a real fear that New Pokémon Snap would end up similarly repetitive or limited in either sheer Pokémon numbers or in course availability. But I am happy to report this was a non-issue: If "Pokémon Snap, but more" were the baseline for New Pokémon Snap being any good, it would handily clear that simple bar with far more courses, available Pokémon, and possible photos than its decades-old parent managed. It even has more (in a sense) of what made old-school Pokémon Snap's final course, Rainbow Cloud, so special – though I can't say more about it here due to Nintendo being overly precious about that part.

New Pokémon Snap also has far more story to drive it along, with a Pokémon professor named Mirror and his crew of research assistants trying to solve yet another Pokémon mystery, though overall it’s a fairly forgettable progression tool. You'll visit a sparkling beach, a dense jungle, a desert, underwater caverns, and several more locations, all of which look better than I've seen any Pokémon game look yet – beauty which comes at the cost of some occasional frustrating framerate dips when it pushes the Switch beyond its comfort zone. These are most noticeable in one stage in particular, when an absolutely massive Wailord slowly breaches the ocean surface and briefly slows everything to a crawl.

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Lighting Up the Room

You'll start your photo expedition with nothing but your camera, but you'll quickly unlock a set of tools that will enable you to take better photos: edible fluffruit, glowing illumina orbs, a music player, a scanning feature that will sometimes spark unique reactions, and an accelerator that you can use to catch up with fast Pokémon. You'll find plenty of use for all of these, but of the entire toolkit the illumina orbs are perhaps the most surprising. Their most obvious use is to activate crystabloom flowers that can attract Pokémon or even trigger changes in a course, you can also just throw them right at Pokémon to make them glow. A lot of Pokémon won't really react to being hit with these orbs beyond glowing, but don't get discouraged. A handful of Pokémon will have huge, surprising reactions to being hit. Try one on the Tangrowth at the start of the Park course at night for one of my favorite examples, and have your camera ready the second it hits.

Most of the Pokémon manage to look very good without melting your Switch in your hands though, and for the most part will react in interesting ways to just about anything you (literally or figuratively) throw at them, be it fruit, glowing Illumina Orbs, or a catchy tune. It's easy to view being on-rails as a limitation, but in New Pokémon Snap it's apparent that keeping your own interactions with the world a bit more limited than in something like a typical Pokémon RPG has freed Bandai Namco up to make the many different things the Pokémon themselves do far more varied, detailed, and enjoyable to watch.

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New Pokémon Snap gracefully avoids Pokémon Snap's problem of repeating the exact same courses ad infinitum in several ways. Most courses get both day and night versions, with each variation including more than enough distinct Pokémon and interactions to merit the duplication. Many courses also hide branching pathways, some obvious and some hidden, that let you get better views on certain monsters or discover new ones entirely.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Trust%20is%20earned%20and%20your%20Research%20Level%20increases."]Most interesting though are the multiple "Research Levels'' that govern how comfortable the creatures on any given course are with you, and thus how varied their interactions with you and one another will be. For example, there's a brief (albeit hard to miss) appearance by a Grookey and a Pichu at the very start of the first stage you visit. They run into the middle of the road, spot you – a human being in a big ol' technology pod – and immediately bolt. You'll catch glimpses of them here and there throughout the rest of that nature park level, but they're shy and elusive to start. You have to be quick and accurate to get a good photo of them early on, which is where the challenge offered by New Pokémon Snap often lies.

But after repeated visits to the park and numerous well-scored photos, trust is earned and your Research Level increases. Eventually, rather than scurry off any time you appear, Grookey and Pichu will greet you the moment they see you, waiting around and cheering at you long enough for you to snap adorable photos of the pair at a more leisurely pace. They'll chase you playfully through the level, introduce you to their buddy Scorbunny, and pose repeatedly so you can get a really good shot for your Photodex.

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This gradual storytelling that occurred as I visited courses over and over again is the greatest unexpected joy of New Pokémon Snap. It allows Bandai Namco to tell little visual stories and pepper them throughout each level, such as a colony of Bidoof slowly building a dam I can eventually cross in my little photo-taking pod, or solving the mystery of what Pokémon keeps leaving charred fruit sitting around. Good as all this was, by the end of New Pokémon Snap – which I reached after about 15 hours – I greedily wanted there to be even more to these observable plotlines and was disappointed when grinding to finish Research Level 3 didn't magically throw me into a course overflowing with exciting new Pokémon and interactions. All I got was an achievement.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20greedily%20wanted%20there%20to%20be%20even%20more%20to%20these%20observable%20plotlines%20and%20was%20disappointed%20after%20finishing%20Research%20Level%203."]A somewhat clunky sidequest system helps you reach the resolutions of the more puzzling of these staged stories by having NPCs request you look into certain locations or Pokémon for rare or hidden photo opps. The hints themselves were useful and helped me discover a number of genuinely cool shots I may have otherwise missed. But actually finishing the quests could be annoyingly precise – I'd often feel confident I had gotten the photo it was asking for but didn’t receive credit because the timing was slightly off of what some unspecified rule demanded. The rewards are hit or miss too; sometimes you’ll get cool new photo editing tools like filters, stickers, or frames, but other times you’ll get nothing beyond the satisfaction of completion.

It's in a handful of photo-taking-adjacent systems like these that New Pokémon Snap trips over itself a bit. One example is in its tutorials, which serve to over-explain simple mechanics and progression early on, while a notable segment later fails to give an essential detail about what the player ought to be doing next. Another irritating example is the "star" rating included in photo scoring, which both serves to indicate how rare the moment you snapped a photo of actually was, while also providing four slots per Pokémon to fill in the PhotoDex. But there's sometimes no apparent rhyme or reason to which photos get “unique” four-star ratings and which don't.

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Somewhat frequently, I would discover what I believed to be an amazing, exciting interaction in a level and managed to get a photo I was proud of, only to find that jerk Professor Mirror didn't recognize what I'd snapped as anything different than the Pokémon's everyday, default activity. Meanwhile, I have multiple Pokémon PhotoDex pages filled with photos that, to my eye, are almost indistinguishable, yet they all have different star ratings. It's ultimately not a massive issue, as I can still save any cool shots I get to my album and show off my discoveries, but Mirror's lack of recognition and unclear standards often deflated my excitement a bit at finding something I thought was rare.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=There%20are%20plenty%20of%20unlockable%20filters%2C%20frames%2C%20and%20stickers%20to%20turn%20cool%20photo%20moments%20into%20silly%2C%20shareable%20snaps."]Where New Pokémon Snap gets its addendums right is how it takes cues from modern photography and photo editing (remember, the original came out before digital photography was really a thing). There are plenty of unlockable filters, frames, and stickers to turn cool photo moments into silly, shareable snaps. Turns out, it is very fun to put silly hats and glasses and bow ties on Pokémon!

The Re-Snap feature in particular is a great addition that lets you go back and adjust a shot in the moment, in case you were just a little bit off or out of focus. It's not a perfect do-over button (which is probably for the best), but rather a way to make small adjustments to the second a photo was taken so you're not left frustrated that something wasn't just so. Also, while the online features were only just enabled yesterday, their mere existence is an essential function and I'm already enjoying some of the cool snaps my fellow reviewers have shared while decking out my own profile with my favorites.

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Fun as these are, the most memorable bits of New Pokémon Snap lie squarely in its photo-taking core. This is especially true of the best moments with Pokémon who do not often get the spotlight in other games, like the Bouffalant I saw wearing a flower crown, or the horrifying time Pinsir's teeth stuck out of its mouth, or when I learned exactly how a Stunfisk eats a piece of fruit. Even right now as I'm writing this, I'm puzzling in my head over how to interact with a particular area in one of the later stages that surely, surely must hide some very cool moment, if I could only tease out the right combination of fruit and orbs and music and Pokémon and timing to find it. Having told myself when I started that I wouldn't try too hard to fill my entire PhotoDex if it didn't happen organically, New Pokémon Snap has me feeling a bit like a kid again – eager to catch 'em all.

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Secretlab Magnus Desk Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Secretlab is best known for its race car-style gaming chairs, but that very well may change after the release of its first gaming desk, the Magnus. The Magnus sports a bevy of features that help elevate it far higher than its four legs can alone. Those features range from a rear compartment that tucks away all your cords to a luxurious RGB strip that adds a subtle glow to your wall, as well as a slew of accessories that magnetically attach to the desk’s diecast aluminum frame and steel top. It comes with a magnetic leatherette mat that covers the entire table, and at $449, it’s fairly affordable. And while buying into its cool magnetic accessories will steadily raise that price, each product I tested steadily added to the desk’s elegance without adding clutter. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=secretlab-magnus-desk-review&captions=true"]

Secretlab Magnus – Design and Features

While I’m often left wondering what, exactly, makes something a gaming desk, or a gaming chair, or gaming socks, I left my time with the Magnus with no such questions. The Magnus is totally and irrefutably a gaming device. That starts with its design. The Magnus is a deep black with slight red accents. It has four thin legs and a thinly milled top all made of steel. This helps it feel extremely sturdy while reducing the size of these components. It sits at 29 inches and unfortunately there’s very little ability to adjust that height (.8” higher, per leg). This will be a big problem for tall people and will come as a disappointment for anyone hoping for a standing desk. I’m 5’11” and the height was just about perfect. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=12af1bec-da1e-4bb9-86f6-ebad96687091"] To wrap up the size specs, the Magnus is just under five feet long (59 inches) and surprisingly deep at 27 inches. (There’s also a 47-inch model available sometime in the future.) I use a six-foot workbench for my main desk, and I found the Magnus comfortable for an ultrawide curved gaming monitor, but did feel a bit cramped when I put my gaming PC alongside it. You can alleviate the space issue by removing your desktop or pushing your monitor and keyboard to the left or right of center, but I couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice the symmetry. The Magnus has three superpowers. The first is its absolutely incredible cable management. Unlike other cable-management solutions, the Magnus doesn’t require you to climb under your desk to adjust wires. Instead, a hinged panel on the back of the desk flips up, allowing you easy access to your surge protectors and cords. This hinge leaves a small gap near the back of the desk that allows for VESA-mounting your monitor. The second is a programmable RGB LED strip designed to lock into that rear hinge and reflect against your wall. The result is a shockingly pleasing ambient glow that can be adjusted with an included remote, with four different lighting presets or 7 different colors. I don’t even like RGB most the time, but those 96 programmable LEDs have made me a believer. The Magnus has one more trick up its sleeve. Secretlab has designed a slew of magnetic accessories that attach directly to the desk. The first, and by far the most important, is a magnetic leatherette desk pad that extends the entire top of the desk. Beyond that, there’s a number of other useful accessories, including magnetic cable anchors, cable sheaths, and fastening straps.

Secretlab Magnus – Assembly

The Magnus comes in a box not much bigger than the desk (27” wide x 62” long x 7” deep). I appreciated the packaging, which felt luxurious thanks to neatly stacked boxes and perfectly ordered accessories. The latter, in particular, impressed thanks to cable fasteners, two sizes of Allen wrench, and a bulbous magnetized hex wrench that I would be proud to add to my personal toolbox. Assembly was relatively straightforward – turn the support over, screw the legs to it, then screw the top to that. But this 92.6 pound desk, and its components, are heavy. I weight lift as a hobby and assembling this desk made an hour in the gym feel like child’s play. That’s in part because I, like an idiot, decided to assemble, flip, and arrange it by myself, instead of doing the (extremely recommendable) two-person lifting. The only snag I ran into during setup was attaching the leatherette desk mat. The mat comes rolled and you’re supposed to align a metal clamp flush against the side of the desk, then carefully unroll it. But because of the magnetism,  you really only have one chance to get it right. As soon as it's down (or even a quarter of the way down), there’s no way to adjust it – only completely take it off and start over. In theory, the align and unroll method should line things up perfectly on the first try, but I spent about fifteen minutes trying to get it straight or get rid of bumps and wrinkles. It’s a laborious process, but once it’s down you won’t need to move it again.

Secretlab Magnus – Gaming

My first question about gaming on the desk was, "Is this thing going to fry my PC, demagnetize my credit cards, and wreak unforeseen havoc?" The answer, blessedly, was no. That's because the desk itself isn't magnetized – only the accessories. That still gave me pause while throwing my wallet on the desk, but I risked it all for you, dear readers. Thankfully, after three weeks of testing, nothing is broken. Gaming on the Magnus feels excellent, thanks to the leatherette desk mat. While I prefer a bit more room to manage work and play on the same desk, isolating just my desktop to a gaming desk looked far better. The ability to easily shepard away cables also made the Magnus much cleaner than even my minimalist, wooden, iMac-laden workbench. I kept the RGB running the entire time, in part to test durability, but also just because I loved the look of the lights. I mostly left a spectrum cycling from side to side, but occasionally when I was writing or vibing on music, I'd switch presets. There are four available to choose from, a spectrum, a slowly changing gradient, a pulsing hue, and a fourth that flips back to the last shade you selected. This fourth is a bit of a disappointment, especially when each of the hues is easily selectable with its own buttons. I'd like to see more options for RGB, especially those that can sync to my desktop and accessories. After serious testing, my only real concern is the longevity of the magnetism. Unlike other desk accessories, when many of these lose their magnetism – whether through time or repeated drops – they'll be functionally useless. While the cable-fastening straps and leatherette desk pads will likely survive anything you throw at them, the other currently announced accessories may not. Those accessories include cable sheaths that run down the legs, cable anchors, and a still-prototype headphone holder. During testing,  my chair’s arms knocked the headphone holder from the desk twice, where it loudly clattered to the ground. I quickly moved the accessory, but already wonder how much attraction I lost. (It still holds my headphones just fine.) [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-gaming-chairs&captions=true"]

Purchasing Guide

The Secretlab Magnus Desk retails for $449 at Secretlab's online store. The Secretlab MagPad meanwhile costs $79 for the Stealth/Signature Edition and the Special Edition costs $99, the company is also holding a special launch promo so the pads are free and $49, respectively. Here's a breakdown of the pricing on Secretlab's other accessories below

• Secretlab Magnetic Cable Anchors – $19
• Secretlab Cable Fastening Straps – $13
• Secretlab Magnetic Cable Sheaths – $29
• Secretlab MAGNUS Cable Management Bundle (Magnetic Cable Anchors, Cable Fastening Straps and Magnetic Cable Sheaths) – $44
• Secretlab MAGRGB Diffused RGB Strip – $59

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