ASUS has quite a long range of gaming laptops in the ROG series. Mostly the ROG laptops cost a bit higher but with the new TUF series laptops, they might fit into your budget. One such laptop is the ASUS TUF FX505 which is the sucessor to the FX504. So let us check out the laptop review and if it offers good performance at low price.
ASUS TUF FX505 gaming laptop review:
Design
ASUS laptops have some really tough builds and some great looks. With the TUF series in the market the design has changed a bit from the outside. The ASUS TUF FX505 has some grooves cut out at all four corners. The design is quite good considering its a gaming laptop. The chassis is made out of hard plastic and is of good quality. The keyboard base can be pressed if applied some pressure, but it doesn’t bother much while gaming. The screen has got some flex if you apply some real pressure to twist it. The laptop has brushed texture on the outside lid and inside of the laptop too. There are air vents on the right, back, and at the bottom of the laptop. The typing experience on the keyboard is just great. The WASD keys are transparent. The trackpad works in a decent manner too. The laptop weighs around 2.3 kg. As for the ports goes you have power jack, gigabit ethernet port, HDMI, USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.1, audio-microphone jack all placed on the left hand side. If you are a right-handed person then you can play games without getting issues from all the cables. On the left and right side are the speakers. Overall the build and design of FX505 laptop is good.
Display
The FX505 has a very thin bezel display on the sides. It sports a 15.6-inch Led Backlit FHD anti-glare display which comes in two refresh rates options of 60Hz & 144Hz. Getting a 144Hz display in some budget gaming laptop is a good sign. The viewing angles of the display are just great, and the color reproduction is quite good. You can adjust the brightness directly from the keyboard itself. Overall the display is pretty good for gaming, watching movies etc.
Performance
Coming to the core part of any gaming laptop – the FX505 comes in two processor variants – the i7-8750H clocked at 2.2 GHz and the i5-8300H clocked at 2.3 GHz. I got the i7 model for review. As for RAM, it comes with 8GB of DDR4 2666MHz one, and you have two slots for expansion that can go up to 32GB dual channel. For storage, you have 1 TB of SATA HDD(FireCuda) and a 256GB SATA 3.0 M.2 SSD. Decent specifications which are expandable in terms of memory. Overall this config did work great in normal use cases like heavy multi-tasking work and loading heavy software. The boot time with Windows 10 OS was short which is good. I liked the typing experience on this laptop very much due to the proper spacing and the key feedback. Talking about the graphics, one has two variant- the first one with 4 GB of NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti & the other with 6GB of NVIDIA GTX 1060. The graphics performance for gaming is kind of average I would say. Now the reason being, you can play most games smoothly at medium settings, some with good experience at ultra settings too. But there are times where FPS would really matter and you need to lower the graphics settings to achieve it. The laptop makes sound like any other gaming laptop while heavy gaming and in silent mode, you can still hear the fan a bit. The temperatures do rise while gaming, but its nothing too hot that you can’t handle. The laptop gets a bit warm from the center and prolonged use may cause some heat touching your right hand as the vent is on right-hand side too. The copper heat sink pipes are shared between the CPU & GPU. I would say, overall cooling system could have been improved. The overall gaming experience is pretty decent.
Sound & Connectivity
As you can see there are three USB ports – one 2.0 port and other two 3.1 ports. You have a port for HDMI and a highspeed ethernet port too. Normal Wifi & Bluetooth connections work in a decent manner while using gaming accessories. As for sound you have 2 speakers and the placement is something which gives decent audio output. I wouldn’t say it is loud, but decent for a normal gaming laptop.
Battery:
ASUS FX505 comes with a 3 cell 48Wh battery that will last for around 1 hr for gaming and 3.5-4 hrs for video playback when there are no background apps & keyboard backlit is off too. You can use NVIDIA settings to save battery for a longer duration. The laptop could have lasted more on battery. One common issues is drop in FPS while playing games over battery.
Price
ASUS TUF FX505 is priced at Rs. 76,390 for the i5 variant & Rs.88,990 for the i7 variant on Amazon India website. As for the GTX 1060 variant the price is Rs. 1,19,990 on Flipkart.
To sum it up, the FX505 has a great design, good display, decent gaming performance with an average battery. To get the best gaming performance for no framedrops, one might need to adjust the graphics settings accordingly. Let us know if you would go for this laptop or not in the comment section below. We would love to solve any queries or doubts regarding the review.