Amazon.com: ASUS TUF FX505DT Gaming Laptop- 15.6″, 120Hz Full HD, AMD Ryzen 5 R5-3550H Processor, GeForce GTX 1650 Graphics, 8GB DDR4, 256GB PCIe SSD, RGB Keyboard, Windows 10 64-bit – FX505DT-AH51 :
This laptop arrived on my doorstep on February 9th, 2020 and had no issues out of the box. I plugged it into my monitor, plugged a keyboard and mouse in, and downloaded the Resident Evil 2 remake. This laptop will run the game on high settings, however the fans will be very loud and the CPU will be working very hard. I just want to mention this as a sort of rough benchmark, though we’ll get into more specifics in just a minute.
First, let’s look at the pro’s and con’s of this laptop. Now, just to get a subjective opinion out of the way, I do not take my laptop out of the house very often. That being said, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t. It weighs roughly 5 pounds which doesn’t really seem too heavy to me, but obviously you be your own judge.
Pro’s:
* Has played everything I’ve thrown at it
* Apparently can run Linux (I run Linux, you can run whatever you want)
* The keyboard is I believe a chiclet keyboard, but honestly it’s one of the best feeling chiclet keyboards I’ve used in recent memory
* The screen has a solid 120 hertz refresh rate and some pretty decent viewing angles for the price. I will say that there are some bright spots, which might bug some people, but I don’t mind them so much.
* Build quality is something I look for in all of my laptops, and this one was obviously no exception. The body is all plastic, but it’s a solid feeling plastic that’s kind of rigid and doesn’t flex much but also doesn’t feel brittle.
* The hinge is actually also very sturdy. I did not think this would be the case, and worried about the amount of closing/opening it would have to endure. After a few months, I’m happy to report that it feels no different than when I first bought it. Again, only 2 months at this point, but I’ve had more expensive laptops break in less time. I’ll call it a positive.
Con’s:
* Look, the touchpad just sucks. If you plan on using this touchpad for any kind of serious work, just get a mouse. It’s finicky, often deciding that I have a ghost finger touching in the opposite place as my finger, or that the three clicks I just did were all right clicks. Frankly, it’s kind of a headache, but I mean a mouse is better anyway.
* The battery life is pretty mediocre for a normal, business class laptop and downright abysmal when you’re gaming. Think 2 hours of Resident Evil before you have to think about how much progress you’re going to lose in the next 15-20 minutes. Leave it plugged in for intense gaming, surfing the web and watching youtube will get you about 4-5 hours, depending on your settings.
* This laptop only comes with the 256gb nvme flash memory. This is great as a boot drive and pretty much nothing else. It does not come with a hard drive by traditional standards, and the space provided is not enough for any kind of gaming library. You’ll likely want to get a 1tb hard drive or SSD, that should hold most of your stuff. Or get a different size, I’m not your mom.
* I/O is not great. All of the ports on this laptop are on the left hand side of the laptop, meaning that there are not very many of them, and yet they still feel kind of cramped. In total, there are three usb ports (1 of which is USB 2.0, the other two are USB 3.0) an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, the charging port, and a headphone jack. There is no card reader, no thunderbolt, no USB-c. On the other side of the laptop you’ll find a kensington lock, for all of your kensington purposes. I just kind of feel like they could have put in a card reader and maybe another USB or HDMI on the other side, but it doesn’t bug me too much.
* Finally, and this is more a gripe about the current state of windows as a whole, but this laptop does come with a fair amount of bloatware. I randomly find things like Bejewelled or Fruit Ninja and their lookalikes downloaded on my boot drive. Thank Linus for Linux, yikes.
Now something that I do want to address, this CPU (Ryzen 5 R5-3550h with Vega 8 IGPU) is not the toughest CPU out there. It’s comparable to some of the low end i5’s that Intel has been putting out, but it does only have a base clock speed of 2.1 GHZ and a boosted clock speed of 3.7 GHZ. This means that the CPU does sometimes get very hot for what seems like lower quality games, but the reality is that those games may be more CPU intensive. A good example I found was Terraria. It runs fine, but not when I was doing five other things in the background. Just some food for thought, it hasn’t really impacted my feeling about this laptop, but you should know what you’re getting before you get it.
Finally, I want to mention the Armoury Crate program that is shipped with ROG and TUF laptops from Asus. I personally really like the interface, and it’s one of few thing’s I’ll miss when I switch to Linux. It really does give you all of the real time performance info you need, as well as allowing you to control certain effects for your keyboard or what GPU will be used. You can also buy devices that link to your laptop and use the same RGB effects (For all you REAL gamers out there.)
To sum this whole thing up, I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t really expecting the build quality to be great, I wasn’t expecting a really good keyboard, and I wasn’t really expecting to be able to throw Linux on here. Lots of good surprises, not many bad ones. The touchpad sucks, but this IS still a budget laptop. I would and have recommended this laptop to friends and family alike, and am excited to see how long I can run modern titles with this lovely machine. I don’t want to say “Get this NOW!!!!” or anything, but I did a lot of shopping and found nothing better for the price, so take that how you want to.
Thanks for reading! If you’ve made it this far, have a great rest of your day!
Update 10/20/2020: Everything that I previously said has remained the same. Keyboard is great, still handles all of my games, and I’ve grown my library quite a bit since then. I really don’t have much more to add to my previous review, I just felt it was good to update this review and let anyone know that the laptop has not disappointed thus far. I do have mine in more of a second screen, desktop configuration, But the ventilation had been fantastic even when I had it on my bed playing some low resource games. All in all, I can comfortably recommend this laptop to others after over 6 months.
