Remember the Black Mesa Incident? Well that just happened in my room, thanks to a very sprightly little chip in the RTX 5060 laptop that I’m testing. The Asus TUF A14 (2025) in front of me has an Nvidia RTX 5060 and an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU inside of it. You might expect these to offer very modest performance, but let me tell you, what I just witnessed says otherwise.
After a dizzying and frankly unbelievable chain of events, this little laptop managed to score—I s*** you not—over 1,000,000 (one million) in the Cinebench 2024 multi core benchmark. Check the image below if you don’t believe me:
The first I noticed was a spark, springing out and splashing against the wall and dissipating. Then a crack, soft at first, then loud. Cinebench was running, and when I say running, I mean steaming ahead. The render blocks started spiralling at a dizzying rate, until it was just there, a pure render—each block was rendering so fast that my eyes just saw the whole 3D scene all at once.
Just as multiple sparks started to arc and dash against each other like molten metal spattering off a blacksmith’s mallet, I saw the Cinebench chair topple. As it toppled, I too did topple, and as I felt myself start to rise, that was when the room faded to black.
Upon returning to consciousness, and after killing a few errant headcrabs, I looked upon my score: 1,044,188. That’s one million, forty-four thousand, one hundred and eighty-eight.
That is more than 1,000x better than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Framework 13 scored, and around 500 times better than Core Ultra 9-powered Lenovo Legion Pro 7i scored.
As space and time flushed themselves back into equilibrium around me, I realised the only explanation could be that the hand of God had reached out and touched this precious TUF A14.
Not easily deterred, even by the reconfiguring of physical reality, I ran the test again. Unfortunately, this time I got a more understandable score of 849. I guess it was a one-off. Or a bug. Whatever, I have the proof this laptop is capable of incredible feats of CPU rendering. If only very occasionally.
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