ASUS TUF FX505 – 15.6 inch IPS full HD gaming laptop – Intel i5-9300h

A powerful, rugged laptop for a great price


The customer reviews on this item were mixed at the time of purchase, which initially put me off ordering. I spent a while shopping around for a similarly-specced laptop for a similar price, but I couldn’t find anything even approaching this spec at a 15’6″ screen size without going for a refurbished model, so in the end I took the plunge.

The first thing that will strike you when you pull the device out of its packaging is just how sturdy it feels. It’s built out of plastic rather than fancy brushed aluminium, but this plastic is chunky, sturdy, and textured so that it doesn’t feel cheap. While I don’t take the ‘MIL-STD’ marketing fluff seriously, it does *feel* like a laptop that could withstand a beating – not that I’m going to try it. This extends to the hinge mechanism, which feels smooth and sturdy as you open the lid.

I’m not a fan of ‘gamer style’ laptops or desktops, personally. I was somewhat concerned that it’d be ugly as hell based on the product image, but in the flesh it’s actually surprisingly understated for a gaming machine. With the exception of the keyboard lights (more on that below) and a couple of minor flourishes here and there, it’s actually quite a nice-looking machine.

Inside you’ll find a full keyboard with a numerical pad (that is a big selling-point for me, though your mileage may vary). The keys have a cushioned, soft feeling to them when depressed, which I find quite pleasant. I’ve typed lengthy documents – and this very review – on the thing, and I’ve found it to be a pleasant experience. The labels on the keys are all big and clear (albeit in an angular font), with good contrast between the colour of the keys and their labels. The key labels also light up, with the exception of the WASD keys (which are fully lit except for the labels, which are in black).

The keyboard features spacing between the keys, as is typical these days, and the ‘WASD’ keys have a white background with black lettering, distinct from the black-with-white-lettering of the rest of the keys. The ‘W’ key features a brail-like ‘lump’ on it, enabling you to find it easily without looking down. In another nod to the gaming-orientated nature of this laptop, the ‘space’ key is wider on the left than the right, with a kind of elongated ‘notch’ protruding down towards the trackpad. This allows your thumb to rest more comfortably on the space key while operating the WASD keys – handy for gaming. To my surprise, I actually find it more useful in typing too, as I use my left thumb to operate the space key there too, and now I barely have to move it at all.

Turn the laptop on and soft, colourful LED backlighting causes the sides and the labelling of all of the keys to light up (while the WASD keys are translucent, and light up fully). I was convinced that I’d hate this effect, but it’s actually kind of pleasant. They are set to cycle through different colours by default, but the ASUS software panel lets you control this – you can control the speed of the cycling, turn off the lights completely, change the brightness, or you can set the keys to a specific colour. It’s not stuck on ‘orange’, as the product image might suggest, but rather you’ve got the full gamut of colours in there.

The screen is – to me, at least – lovely, at least for a laptop in this price range. It shows crystal-clear clarity whenever there’s movement on the screen, and not just within games. It’s 1080p, and provides crisp detail. The backlight is a bit dim compared to some other laptops I’ve used, so using this outside (or if you have visual impairments that necessitate high-lighting screens) might be a bit uncomfortable, but for indoor use I’ve not had any problems whatsoever. The screen has a matte finish, so you don’t get glare or reflections (a problem I’ve had with nearly all other laptops in recent years!). One review complained that the keyboard lights made the screen difficult to use in the dark, but I haven’t had this problem – I haven’t noticed them at all, in fact. Perhaps it depends on the angle of the screen?

In terms of performance I can’t find any cause to complain, certainly not for this price.

For general use you will not experience any slowdown at all. Thanks to that SSD it boots up instantly, and anything involving loading files is the same. Applications are snappy, load fast, and experience no slowdown even at high load. I tend to do a lot of work with PhotoShop while having numerous, memory-intensive browser tabs open, Outlook, a media player blaring in the background, and usually both Word and Excel running, and the laptop doesn’t skip a beat.

So far I’m yet to find a game that won’t run at high quality either. I’ve run several CPU-intensive strategy games and GPU-intensive modern shooters (as well as Skyrim: Special Edition and Fallout 4, both modded up to the eyeballs with graphical enhancement mods) all without any noticeable slowdown. While you’re not going to be doing VR gaming or outputting ultra-settings 4K gameplay using this thing, for general gaming it’s hard to baulk at this price level. The machine is yet to crash on me either. The 8 GB RAM is a bit concerning so far as future-proofing goes, but you should be able to chuck an extra 8 GB chip in. It certainly hasn’t presented any problems so far.

The only bloatware I’ve had to remove has been the usual assortment of McAfee antivirus trials. I’ve found the Asus software – mostly focussed around hardware performance and features, such as Armory – to be alright for normal use, and I’m still running with it for the time being. It’s not intrusive either.

In terms of connectivity, I’ve not experienced the wifi driver problems that others have – it’s possible that my machine was spared, or Asus has resolved the issue on more recent units. In any event, I’ve maintained a stable, fast, low-latency connection all day, every day since I first loaded it up.

Incidentally, the webcam is pretty good. I’ve used it for Skype meetings with my colleagues and I’m far and away the most ‘crisp and detailed’ head-in-a-box on the screen. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another matter, of course.

You’ve got three USB ports, all on the left-side of the device. Only two of them are USB 3.1 ports, with a USB 2.0 port on the top. That’s disappointing, but I’ve just used the slower port for my mouse dongle. In addition, there’s a single HDMI port, an ethernet port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack (I had an issue with a sound driver here, which caused sound even from my 2.1 speakers to sound like tinny laptop speakers, but it was easily resolved by updating the driver). While the laptop’s built-in speakers aren’t the worst I’ve ever heard, they’re not great either – but connect it to some headphones or a decent pair of speakers, and it pumps out perfect sound. There is no USB-C port, which is disappointing but easily resolved with a dongle, and there is also no SD card reader.

There *is* the matter of the fans, of course. They’re mentioned in other reviews, and those reviews aren’t wrong.

During normal, day-to-day operations (such as writing this review right now with some music playing in the background), it’s as quiet as any other average laptop. Load up a game, though, and it does become quite loud. Personally I don’t think it’s too loud, and after a day or two I quickly grew used to the noise (and if you’ve got headphones in, or loud music playing through nearby speakers, you won’t notice it at all), but if this is the sort of thing that bothers you *particularly*, it’s something to consider. You can manually adjust the fan speed to make it quieter if you need to, or change the performance profile so that it doesn’t need them as much, but I’d rather it be loud and cool than quiet and hot! I keep it on a cooling pad, which does seem to help reduce its reliance on the loudest fan setting in all but the most demanding circumstances.

The battery life is nothing to write home about. From a full charge, it will last around six or seven hours on battery power if all you’re doing is browsing the web, doing some minor document editing, and listening to music through an external source (I haven’t tried it with the internal speakers). With a non-demanding game, you’ll get maybe two or three hours, if you keep the performance profile on battery saving.

Unfortunately the battery is not removable (or at least, not in the traditional sense – I haven’t voided my warrantee to find out if you can dismantle the thing to remove it). This is probably my biggest complaint with the laptop, personally, but it’s hardly game-breaking.

Overall, despite some initial reservations, I’m really happy that I took the risk on this laptop. For the asking price at the time of purchase you can’t really get a better deal; it’s a decently-powerful, ruggedly-built laptop.