Asus TUF Gaming FX505 DT Review: A Pretty Solid Gaming Laptop at an Affordable Price
May. 23, 2019Design and Build
Other than that, the entire outer chassis of the laptop is devoid of any lighting whatsoever, which might be something RGB lovers won’t like, but makes the laptop suitable not only as a gaming laptop, but also as a work laptop that you can take into meetings without looking silly.
Once you open the lid up, you’re treated to the big, bright, 15.6-inch Full HD display on the laptop, which, as is the case with most gaming laptops these days, has minimal bezels on the top and the sides, and a huge bezel on the bottom with the Asus logo there as well.
Opening the lid will also throw a huge glow of RGB lighting on your face, thanks to the RGB backlit keyboard, along with the power button on the top right corner, and the trackpad on the bottom. It’s a pretty nice keyboard, even though it doesn’t feel any different from any other TUF Gaming laptop, and it has transparent WASD keys to make them easily discernible from the rest of the keys.
On the sides you’ll find the variety of ports, and the cooling vents with Asus’ anti-dust cooling system.
What’s more, the display on this laptop can get pretty bright, and really dim if you want it to, so not only can you use it outdoors or in the presence of lights falling directly on the display (thanks to the anti-glare coating), you can also use it late at night without stressing your eyes out too much.
Media consumption on this laptop is great, thanks to the bright panel, and the awesome color reproduction. Viewing angles are decently good enough as well, but I don’t think you’ll find yourself in a situation where you have to look at your laptop from a side very often anyway.
I tried all the usual things on this laptop, from running synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench, Cinemabench R20, and 3DMark, to playing games like PUBG and Far Cry 5, and the laptop handles everything really well.
With everything set to High, PUBG ran smoothly over 70FPS at all times, and when there wasn’t a lot happening around me, the frame rate jumped as high as 90. Sure, you could set the graphics to Medium or Low and get slightly better frame rates, but 70+ FPS is perfect, and I didn’t find the need to set a lower graphics quality in the game.
Far Cry 5 did a weird thing where it chose the integrated AMD GPU by default and ran at, like 12FPS in low settings, but change that to the Nvidia GPU inside this laptop, and it can run Far Cry 5 decently as well. Far Cry 5 is a very heavy game, though, and at Ultra settings, I got an average frame rate of 44FPS. That’s not too shabby, but the frame rates dropped as low as 23FPS sometimes, and that can be really annoying.
In High settings on Far Cry 5, I got an average frame rate of 47FPS, with the frame rates dropping as low as 35FPS and going as high as 59FPS.
That’s decent enough, but personally, I think playing the game on Normal will be the best bet for this laptop. At those settings, I got an average frame rate of 50FPS, with a high of 62FPS and a low of 38FPS.
Another thing I really appreciate on this keyboard is the full sized arrow-key layout, which is such a treat to use instead of the cramped layout a lot of laptop makers are now going with.
Typing on this laptop is a great experience, and even while typing for hours on end, I didn’t feel fatigued thanks to the nice responsive keys here, and the fact that I didn’t need to press them too hard to get them to actuate.
The trackpad here is not too big, but it’s not small either, but if you’re used to using laptops with bigger trackpads, like I am with my MacBook Pro, this might feel slightly cramped. In all fairness though, this is one of the bigger trackpads you’d find on Windows laptops, especially in this price range, so I’m not really going to dock points by claiming that the trackpad here is small. It’s actually pretty nice.
I did have to get used to the trackpad, but it works really well, and while clicking on this trackpad isn’t as nice a feeling as it is on something like the HP Spectre, it’s not bad either. If anything, it’s better than most laptops in the price bracket.
All that said, as gamers, I’m fairly confident you’ll be connecting a mouse to this laptop anyway, but for usual day to day usage, this trackpad will definitely suffice.
I know what you’re thinking: you’ll be wearing headphones most of the time when you’re gaming, but that’s not all you’d do on your laptop, is it? If you’re watching a movie, or bingeing on a TV show, chances are you’ll rely on the built-in speakers on your laptop.
For gaming, however, I don’t think the battery life needs to be a consideration, since you’ll not be playing games without the charger plugged in anyway, so this part shouldn’t be that big a deal for you.
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