Asus TUF Gaming FX505DY Review: Ryzen Powered Gaming Goodness

Apr. 9, 2019

Once you open the lid, the display stares right at you, with agorgeous bezel-less design all around, except for the massive chin with the Asus logo again, and it’s kind of an eyesore, but you get used to it over time. There’s the keyboard, with a red backlight, and a power button that’s placed on the top right of the base. As I’ve observed with almost every TUF Gaming laptop I’ve ever laid hands on, this one too, has alot of flex in the display. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s probably because it’s made of plastic. Flexing the display makes the panel change colors and it’s kind of scary, so don’t do that to your laptop.

Itgets pretty bright, and even though it’s not as bright as some other laptops out there, it comes with ananti-glare coating, so even if you’re gaming in a situation with lights behind you, you shouldn’t have a lot of issues with this panel.

Media consumption on this is a nice experience too, the display isn’t the best when it comes to separating shades of blacks, so if you find yourself watching a lot of horror movies, or superhero movies with dark settings, you might have to squint at times to figure out just what is happening there.

That said, it’s a gaming laptop and games look perfectly fine on this panel, so I’m not really complaining about the black separation. The good thing is when Itested gradients on this display, there’s no visible banding, which is great.

In synthetic benchmarks, the laptop scores decently well enough considering its price. Geekbench shows the Ryzen 5 scoring3,692 in the single-core test and 10,653 in the multi-core test, which is pretty nice.

While all that is great, none of it really means much unless the laptop can actually handle games well enough too. So naturally, I tried playing a bunch of games on this laptop, including Far Cry 5 and PUBG and the laptop performs pretty well in both the games.

In Far Cry 5, withgraphics set to Ultra, the laptop manages to stay above 30FPS, getting an average FPS value of 32 and a maximum of 40. Switching graphics to Normal pushed the average to 47FPS, while the maximum went up to 46FPS. While both of those FPS values are playable for sure, I’d recommend sticking to Low here, which will get you anaverage frame rate of 42FPS, and a maximum of 51. I played a few hours of Far Cry 5 at low settings, and this game has such beautiful graphics, it looks stunning even on low settings.

These ports should suffice you for your everyday gaming needs, and I don’t think you’ll run into a lack of ports on this laptop. Still, I would’ve liked a USB Type-C port on the laptop for some semblance of future-proofing at least.

Moving on to the keyboard, the laptop comes with a full-sized keyboard complete with a number pad — personally, I don’t find the need for a numpad much, but if you’re playing games like FIFA where the numpad is used for trick moves, or any other game that needs a numpad for additional moves and stuff, this is definitely a great addition to have.

Thekeyboard follows the same design as you’d find in every other TUF Gaming laptop out there, and that’s perfectly fine.There’s ample travel, so typing on this keyboard is pretty great, and not tiring at all, and even though this is a chiclet keyboard, it’s pretty great to type on, or for playing games for extended periods of time.

Asus has, thankfully, still kept the slightly curved keycap design on this keyboard, and that’s something I really appreciate especially when I’m in the middle of a gunfight and can’t really spend time looking at the keyboard trying to figure out where keys end and where to press. It’s also great for typing faster, which is something I really like doing, so that’s an added bonus.

Sure, theclicks aren’t as accurate or easy to make as they are on more expensive laptops,but they’re not annoying either, which is a common issue I’ve faced with budget gaming laptops. There’s also ahandy demarcation on the bottom of the trackpad to separate the left click from the right, and that comes in pretty handy a lot of times.

There’s really not a lot to talk about in the trackpad here, it’s a pretty standard trackpad with a slightly more ‘gaming’ design aesthetic to it. But it works fine, and that’s what really matters. It’s not like you’ll be gaming without a mouse attached to the laptop anyway.

As far as gaming is concerned, I’m pretty sure you won’t be gaming without connecting the charger to your laptop, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Still, with the “best performance” setting selected, the laptop does manage to churn out around 3 hours of battery life (while running no games).

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