ASUS TUF FX505 - An AMD Ryzen 7 Powered Gaming Laptop
One thing is for sure, AMD has won 2019’s market with the Ryzen desktop CPUs, but how does Ryzen fair in the gaming laptop market? Well the time has come to see that, and for this reason we are going to take a look at the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505, powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 3750H CPU.
The ASUS TUF FX505 is a series of gaming laptops that offer unbeatable price/quality ratio most of the time, and the configurations of this series are very extensive. Here we have one of the most powerful variants, and this one contains:
AMD Ryzen 7 3750H processor
NVIDIA Geforce 1660Ti Video Card
8GB DDR4 memory
512GB SSD
FullHD display at 120Hz
What made us very curious, however, was how this processor behaves. We have a Ryzen 7 with 4 cores and 8 threads, 4MB of Cache L3 and a base frequency of 2.3Ghz which in boost reaches up to 4Ghz. All in exchange for a consumption of only 35W. It doesn't sound so bad, does it?
ASUS TUF FX505 Built Quality and Design
We have always been fans of ROG products, and the TUF series borrows from its older brother's pedigree and offers products dedicated to gamers, without costing as much as the Republic of Gamers range. This is the case of the ASUS TUF FX505. An aggressive looking laptop, which is fortunately not loaded with RGB lights everywhere.
We like the simple design and effect lines chosen by ASUS and the overall look. We have a finish with an interesting texture and a dark gray that reminds me of carbon fiber. The case is very resistant and has been subjected to "military grade" tests, which means it can withstand some of the toughest working conditions: exposure to solar radiation, high altitudes and extreme temperatures.
The screen is a 15.6″ IPS panel with FullHD resolution (1920 × 1080) and a 120Hz refresh rate that will make games feel as smooth as butter and give you a competitive edge over an opponent who has a 60 Hz panel. This screen has thin edges and a matte finish to not reflect sunlight. In use, we found it quite pleasant with vivid colors and ok viewing angles, along with the 120Hz that even make the browsing experience feel much more enjoyable.
Connectivity is decent, and the ASUS TUF FX505 comes with three high-speed USBs, an HDMI for connecting to a monitor / TV, a 3.5mm combo jack for microphone headsets and a Gigabit internet port. We don't have a USB-C or other crazy like Thunderbolt, mini-DP or two separate headphone and microphone jacks.
ASUS TUF FX505 Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard is nice to the touch and it requires little pressure for a commnd to be registered. It also has RGB lighting that can be controlled both from ROG Armory and directly from the TUF Aura Core application, both available in the Windows Store.
The star of this laptop, however, is the touchpad that has proven very useful after learning all the gestures it supports. You have scroll functions, pinch-to-zoom, hide/show apps and many more, and once you get ll of them or at least some of them into your memory and adapt to them, you will see an increase in productivity and overall usage of the laptop. It is large enough to be easy to use in any position, and clicking can be achieved both by a light press and the click action itself.
ASUS TUF FX505 Performance, Cooling and Noise
The ASUS TUF FX505 is, at least on paper, a powerful laptop, but we were very curious about how much power the processor generates, considering it's not even used close to its actual capacity, which is due to the 2400Mhz single-channel memory. Unfortunately, there is a limitation of this model on the frequency side of memory, but a dual-channel configuration is not only possible, but we strongly recommend it, because the performance increase can reach up to 30%.
The video card has been limited in some instances by the CPU, but as we said, most of these problems are solved with a second memory module to activate dual-channel mode.
Test results
SuperPosition, 1080p, Extreme Preset - 3752 points
Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 1080p, Preset Medium - 49 FPS
Forza Horizon 4 - 1080p, Preset Medium - 65FPS
FIFA 20 - 1080p, Preset High - 120FPS blocked from NVIDIA Control Panel
On the cooling side unfortunately, we have to say that we were not actually pleased. This processor, even if it did not work at full capacity, it got really hot.
After no more than 30 minutes of playing, we had the impression that the laptop would take off. To give you a comparison, with the laptop speakers at 30% out of 100, the fans were the ones that sounded louder.
Despite the fairly generous cooling system implemented on the ASUS TUF FX505, temperatures were also high, recording 80C on the processor and 70-75C on the video card. Decent temperatures if I can think better, but in exchange for an airplane engine that distracts attention from the game.
Conclusion
The ASUS TUF FX505 is a good laptop, with a high quality built, a very satisfactory screen even for simple actions such as internet browsing and capable enough to run the latest games.
Unfortunately, this configuration is not the best and it is clear that the model at hand is designed for Intel, which is not necessarily bad, but just shows that the two brands should not be mixed.
With a few adjustments on the voltage side, the addition of a dual-channel memory module and the Geforce 1660Ti included, the ASUS TUF FX505 can become a very solid gaming laptop, but Ryzen Mobile still has a long way to go to implement it as good as Intel and we are curious how ASUS will approach this issue in the future.
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