Something I have thankfully not outgrown is gaming. Though I don’t get as much time to do so because of the responsibilities of adulthood, it’s still something I look forward to whenever I can find the time. Asus was kind enough to feed this habit with the TUF Gaming FX505DY, which lives up to its name being one of the tougher gaming laptops you can get your hands on.
Design: 4/5
The TUF Gaming line of devices is meant to appeal to gamers on a tighter budget, but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell that just by looking at it. The lid is smooth and black, broken up by the ASUS logo done in gold or red depending on the model, and accent lines that come in from the corners, giving it a dynamic look befitting its gaming status. Cracking open the laptop reveals solid corner hinges, wonderfully thin bezels, and RGB lighting. One nice little touch that I saw and appreciated was a little extension on the spacebar that allows for better reach with the left thumb when in the traditional WASD FPS hand position. The laptop is reasonably skinny, at about an inch thick then closed, and tips the scales at 2.2 kg—light enough to carry around should the need arise.
There aren’t a whole lot of ports, with a 3.5mm combo jack, a single USB 2.0 port, 2 type-A USB 3.0 ports, a LAN port, and one HDMI port, along with the jack for power. All of the ports are located on the left edge of the laptop, keeping connectors and cables well away from your mouse.
One of the things that makes this laptop special is ASUS’ focus on toughness. The TUF line of laptops passed military-grade MIL-STD-801G tests, making it certified to stand adverse conditions, and the occasional drop or bump.
Hardware: 4/5
The FX505DY is a gaming laptop by design, and it shows in the specs. Running a powerful Ryzen 5 3550H, coupled with the second-generation Radeon RX 560X GPU, it’s no slouch. While the configuration delivered to our office had just 4GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, it can take up to 32 GB, so you can upgrade should you feel the need to.
To complement the muscle under the hood, it also comes with a 15-inch, AMD FreeSync-enabled display with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz, for smooth, tear-free graphics. You also get a HyperStrike keyboard for quick, responsive keypresses, RGB lighting, and 20 million keystrokes for both great gaming, and comfortable typing.
A slight hit on the spec sheet is the inclusion of an HDD main drive, though you do get 1TB of storage, so this bluntts the blow somewhat. Should you want to, a drive swap is easy enough to accomplish, so it’s not a major loss. Rounding off the specs is a 48Wh battery for use when you find yourself away from a wall outlet.
User Experience: 4/5
For the course of the review, I switched from my old Asus Strix, to running the TUF as my daily driver. I installed all my usual daily programs, signed in to my usual accounts, and installed some of the games that were on rotation when the demo unit was sent over.
Daily use wasn’t a problem for the FX505DY. AMD has delivered great processors with decent numbers across its previous generation, but the 4GB of RAM on our test unit throttled the performance somewhat. While general use was smooth for the most part, there were moments when a background process would start, and things would go noticeably slow. It’s wasn’t quite enough for us to write the laptop off as a non-starter, but more RAM should be on the table should you consider this an option. Coupled with a slower HDD, the experience would occasionally take a hit.
The gaming experience on the FX505DY was adequate. I was able to run a few titles, including CS:GO, The recent Resident Evil 2 remake, and Rainbow 6 Siege, and the games ran fine on Medium settings, with perfectly playable frame rates. There were moments that it would drop to single digits, and I would notice that HDD usage would skyrocket to 100 percent. This might be due to an issue with Windows, or the lack of RAM, but it didn’t happen all too often. I do expect either a Windows update, SSD, or more RAM might make the situation a lot better.
Comfort was great though. Action games such as R6:Siege were great on the keyboard, with the shallow, positive travel translating to quick in-game results. Once the CPU and GPU start flexing their muscles though, the laptop can get quite loud. The fan did an excellent job in keeping the temps down, so it does get a pass. There’s far more cooling than the CPU and GPU need, so there’s a lot of headroom should you be looking for that.
Another thing that I appreciated with the FX505DY was battery life. While it wasn’t superlative, it did offer about enough power to survive well over five hours for non-gaming tasks.
Value: 4/5
At PHP 39,995, this is quite the affordable gaming laptop. It would easily have gotten a higher score with a little more RAM, but as it stands, it’s still a good base on which to build a better-performing device. Drop some more RAM in there, maybe an SSD, and you’ve got yourself a winner, at well under the asking price for the vast majority of gaming laptops out there today.
Specifications:
- OS: WIN10/WIN10 Professional
- Processor: AMD R5-3550H
- Display: 15.6 FHD 120Hz
- Memory: 4 GB DDR4 2400
- Graphics: RADEON-RX560X
- Storage: 1TB HDD
- Ports: 2 x USB 3.1 Gen1, 1 x USB 2.0, 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x RJ-45 Jack, 1x 3.5mm headphone and microphone combo jack
- Connectivity: WiFI 802.11A/B/G/N/AC+BT
- Battery: 48Whr
- Dimensions: 360.4 x 262 x25.8 mm
- Weight 2.2 kg
What’s Hot:
- Extremely affordable
- Great looks
- Thin bezels
What’s Not:
- Not enough RAM in base configurration
- Occasional slowdowns
Bottomline:
Not the greatest out there, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any other fighters at its price point.
Also published in GADGETS MAGAZINE July 2019 Issue
Reviewed by Ren Alcantara