ASUS TUF FX505DU (AMD + NVIDIA) Gaming Laptop Review – Uniting AMD Ryzen Processors and NVIDIA’s GPU for maximum performance

 

The ASUS TUF FX505 is the latest flagship of TUF laptop series by uniting the latest AMD Ryzen processors and NVIDIA Geforce GTX graphics card. The FX505DU undergo vigorous testing and certified in order to meet the military grade, MIL-STD-810G standard, to ensure longevity of the laptop to serve you via its tough chassis that’s suitable for everyday use i.e. gaming and productive. The unit lends to us is the DU version. Special thanks to ASUS for lending us a unit to be reviewed.

The TUF FX505DU powered by AMD Ryzen 7 3750H processor with quad cores and eight threads and equipped with latest GeForce GTX 1660Ti GPU for a smoother gaming experience. With the combined firepower of these processors, it is highly suitable for multitasking everyday including productive users and users who game on the laptop.

SPECIFICATIONS

The official specification of TUF FX505DU are as follows:

Series	TUF Gaming
Model Name	FX505-UBQ099T
Color	Stealth Black
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7-3750H Processor 2.3GHz (6M cache, up to 4.0GHz)
Memory	8GB DDR4 2666Mhz x 1
RAM Slot	2
Storage	‘PCIE NVME 512GB M.2 SSD (Extra SATA Slot: 1)
LCD Size	15.6″ FHD//IPS Panel//60hz//25ms//Anti-glare
GPU	NVIDIA Geforce GTX1660Ti
VRAM	GDDR6 6GB
Optical Drive	No ODD
Wi-Fi	802.11ac 2×2 Wave 2 WLAN + Bluetooth 5.0
Keyboard	All Zone RGB keyboard
Operating System	Windows 10 Home
Battery	48WHrs, 3S1P, 3-cell Li-ion
Warranty	2 Years Global Warranty
Backpack	Included
Price	RM4,399
Availability	Early June

USER EXPERIENCE

Accessories

The laptop was packed in a basic packaging box.

Now, let’s have a look at the laptop.

Upon purchasing the TUF FX505DU, you will receive the standard accessories. A unit of FX505DU, a power adapter, a user manual and a warranty guide.

Design

Generally, for laptops, particularly gaming laptops, the chassis should be solid in order to withstand unexpected incidents. In a such way, the TUF FX505DU has passed the U.S military grade and obtain the MIL-STD-810G certification. The TUF FX505DU equipped with a solid chassis that will protect the integrity of the components, especially storage from being damaged by unexpected drops, shocks thus, extends its longevity further.

In addition, the new NanoEdge display up to 120Hz/60Hz, offers 7.18mm bezel for extremely eye-engaging visuals. The TUF FX505DU features a brilliant IPS-level panel for smooth experience, particularly during game play with wide-view technology that promises consistent colors even when you’re looking at the screen from extreme angles.

The TUF FX505DU came with an RGB backlit feature. You can further customize the lightning effects via the TUF Aura Core software. In addition, each keycaps has a 0.25mm curved surface for better precision when fingers press onto the center of the keys. In order to serve you further, the keyboard underdone rigorous test to ensure each key offers better responsiveness with 1.8mm key travel that can withstand up to 20 million presses and only requires 62gf for activation.

The TUF FX505DU has a patented trapezoid-cut design beneath the laptop’s lid. As for the further understanding of yours, the trapezoid-cut design will avoid the interference with exhaust vents when the lid was opened, thus allowing the warm air from the laptop to be pumped out to the surroundings. This design was done to ensure the longevity of the components inside the laptop and maximizing CPU and GPU performance, especially when heavy activity such as rendering videos or playing games that requires more processing powers. Allowing the air to flow out efficiently, the laptop comes with dual-fan with Anti-Dust Cooling (ADC) system, a method of force the dust to flow with the air out of the chassis through the dedicated anti-dust tunnels located at the edges of each blade. With this, you don’t really need to open up the chassis just to blow out the accumulated dust, manually.

The first thing I always look up when I purchase a new laptop is its audio software, let it be onboard audio software, Realtek and its feature. Well, the TUF FX505DU equipped with DTS Audio Enhancement software to fully utilize your audio experience via your headsets, let it be a normal or gaming headset. Via the software, now, you can actually tweak the settings and personalize the equalizer, the advance level of audio quality (if you don’t wish to tweak the equalizer, you can tweak your preferred audio quality here) as well as enabling/disabling other features such as bass boost and surround audio to fit your needs. The audio quality comes from my headset is decent enough, even though its purpose is to serve audio enthusiast, gaming by tuning the DTS AE, gives satisfaction. However, the performance of the stock built-in speaker of the laptop is average.




Audio Quality 

Armoury Crate

The TUF FX505 comes with preloaded ASUS’s Armoury Crate software which offers several notable features. At first glance, you will be greeted with profile selection of your needs. Armoury Crate allows you to switch in between the given profiles to fulfil your purpose of activity at a particular time. In order to brief you further, the Silent Mode is suitable for the basic activity such as browsing and being productive, Balance Mode serves as to maintain the fan speed for general activity and Turbo Mode to maximize the TUF FX505DU’s performance to its ultimate level, thus, switching its fan spin rate to its peak potential to fulfil the activities that requires higher processing and higher GPU ability.

A second notable feature offered by Armoury Crate is the Aura Sync technology. Generally speaking, Aura Sync is a feature that synchronizes other aura-sync enabled peripherals to give you the best RGB lightning and personalization’s. With this software, you can further customize the settings along with other Aura Sync enabled devices.

The Armoury Crate also allows you to always check for the latest updates available for a particular peripherals also, the driver itself. Well done ASUS.

Wireless Performance

With the recently launched next generation wireless routers that supports 802.11ax standard, there are no ax-enabled clients widely available, yet. Despite of this, the TUF FX505DU comes with the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 Wireless standard, which said to improve the wireless performance up to 30% compared to traditional standards.

The wireless performance of the TUF FX505DU is decent. I don’t feel any disconnection and of course, special thanks to AC68U for doing a great job there for coping up with the test well. I can stream 4K content smoothly without any disconnection, thus, it really improves my wireless experience better.




BENCHMARK RESULTS

The TUF FX505DU uses AMD’s Ryzen™ 7 3750H Mobile Processor with Radeon™ RX Vega 10 Graphics. The Ryzen 7 3750H offers 35.0W TDP is ensuring an optimum performance for a longer period of load time. AMD states that, the Picasso APU’s are 8% faster than its predecessors, thus, the 3750H suitable for gaming laptops such as the TUF FX505DU.

Processor Performance

Scores	Single Core	Multi Core
Cinebench R20	341	1686
GeekBench	3685	13530




Game Rendering Performance

Scores	Total Scores	Graphic Score
3DMark	11759	14458

Storage Benchmark

The m.2 NVME SSD gives a quick read and write speed under two test size conditions. The unit provided to me comes with 512GB of capacity and both SSD and RAM are accessible giving you an opportunity to proceed with your future upgrade.

Test Size: 1GiB

Scores			Read [MB/s]	Write [MB/s]
CrystalDiskMark Standard Version	Seq Q32T1		1672.7	947.6
	4 KiB Q8T8		345.9	829.6
	4 KiB Q32T1		253.3	147.0
	4 KiB Q1T1		39.30	86.88

Test Size: 32 GiB

Scores			Read [MB/s]	Write [MB/s]
CrystalDiskMark Standard Version	Seq Q32T1		1839.3	947.7
	4 KiB Q8T8		342.9	734.1
	4 KiB Q32T1		299.6	195.8
	4 KiB Q1T1		55.15	127.0

Battery Life

The battery of TUF FX505DU are non-removable, hence, you’ve to fully rely on its battery capacity to run your computer. You can use this free tool to calculate your laptop’s battery life.

I’ve tested the laptop for three different profiles. Below are the results from the test.

Profiles (Mode)	Battery Life (Hours)
Balance	3.5 Hours
Silent	4 Hours
Turbo	2.8 Hours

From the table above, using Silent mode over Balance mode extends battery life (per charging) and Turbo mode drains the battery life, drastically.

CONCLUSION

To summarize the review, the FX505DU costs nearly RM4.4k. Looking at its selling price, of course there are wide ranges of gaming laptops available in the market, currently, but what makes the TUF so unique? It has everything in it that suit your needs. I mean, it is light, portable and offers variety of features to satisfy your cravings. This laptop is not only suitable for gamers, students and entrepreneurs also can opt this laptop. Designers who often use photoshop and illustrators shouldn’t have problems using this laptop to complete their task. No product comes perfect, as the TUF FX505DU does have few limitations such as battery life as it was built for gaming, but it can be used for different purposes also. Overall, this laptop worth for your pennies.