A mid-price gaming laptop with high-end capabilities.
If you’re a gamer who’s serious about gaming and only using the very best tech to enhance the overall gaming experience to its fullest potential, then needless to say, you’ll use a gaming laptop. A gaming laptop is like a standard laptop – and indeed can be used as such – but it has increased RAM and storage capacity, a powerful GPU, and specialized graphics cards, all created to handle the high processing power required to deliver smooth gameplay and vivid images.
Ultimately, the difference between a gaming and a normal laptop is the purpose of use and specific designs to accommodate that. While you can use a gaming laptop as a normal common-use laptop, you can also use a normal laptop for gaming purposes – as many people in fact do – however as mentioned above, the GPU and graphics card are not built specifically for gaming purposes and thus may not utilize the game’s full potential in overall playability and graphics.
Since being introduced to the marketplace in 2011, gaming laptops have proved to be a consistently popular and high seller, with marked and steady growth in sales year on year, reaching a high of some $18.67 billion and 17.75 million units sold in 2022. There has also been an exponential increase in the range of gaming laptops in the overall marketplace ever since Razer launched the very first gaming laptop – the Razer Blade – in 2011 and revolutionized the world of gaming forever.
Should you be wishing to purchase a gaming laptop, and not quite sure where to begin, let us introduce you to the Asus TUF FX505. Asus has been at the forefront of gaming laptops since the early days and established themselves as leaders in that field with a series of gaming laptops that have received glowing reviews from both critics and consumers alike.
The TUF FX505 has been a flagship gaming laptop for Asus since 2018 and certainly one of the most well-received and highly regarded units that has remained a perennial best seller. For the purposes of this article, we’ll take a close look and review of the FX505 to see if it is indeed that good and its reputation thoroughly deserved.
Plug in, boot up, and let’s go… hit any key to continue!
1. Design
Right off the bat, the FX505 impresses with a sleek exterior, compact design, and a sturdy, solid body and overall build. Corners are smooth with no sharp edges, and ample bezels for comfortability of use. There are also no less than 8 rubber feet on the underside of the unit, giving it superb grip and traction wherever you may be using it.
The FX505 comes in three colors – Gold Steel, Red Fusion, and Red Matter – but whatever color you choose, you have the advantage of a well laid-out and spacious keyboard that features backlit keys that are responsive to the touch by an impressive 0.5 seconds. Typing is surprisingly quiet which is another distinct positive and the trackpad is smooth and responsive in use also.
The screen is a generous 15.6” IPS display with an appealing non-glare matte finish, full HD 1080x1920p resolution, and an undeniably impressive 144Hz refresh rate.
Asus has also been generous in the number of ports – 6 in all – with 3 USB-A ports, plus 1 each for HDMI, LAN, and the card reader. Unfortunately though, there is no USB-C port, but that is understandable, considering when the FX505 was released.
2. Performance
The FX505 comes loaded for bear and ready for battle with a powerful Intel Core i7-8750H processor, a sizable 16 GB of RAM, dual storage capabilities, and a Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB graphics card.
While in full operating mode, the FX505 runs remarkably quietly with 3 cooler fan settings – Select, Balanced, and Overboost – for whatever temperature and climate you’re working in. It also comes with a function called Throttle Stop that, when activated, reduces overall voltage use in order to get a smoother performance and a lower temperature for the unit itself.
In terms of connectivity, the FX505 delivers with a Wave 2 Intel WiFi module equipped with Bluetooth 5.0 and Gigabit LAN. The wireless signal really impresses with a strong signal even up to 30 feet away and in a different room.
Audio is crisp, loud, and clear with an 80 dB range and a 3.5 mm jack to provide output for external speakers or headphones.
The battery is surprisingly small compared to others but can be fully charged in a mere 90 minutes.
3. Pricing
The FX505 retails for around $699, putting it in the mid-range of pricing for gaming laptops. While that mid-range price tag accurately reflects the unit’s overall capabilities and performance in comparison to more high-end models, it is nonetheless an undeniably impressive piece of tech that does everything you could want from a gaming laptop and does it very well indeed.
Highly recommended.
