Asus TUF Gaming FX504GE [FX504GE-E4086] (90NR00I3-M08950)

Best Design Award Winner

The Asus TUF Gaming FX504GE is one of the most stylish and well-designed laptops in this price range. Thanks to a neat embossed lid, a massive radiator grille, a red stripe along the screen and a red keyboard backlight, it becomes immediately clear that we have a gaming laptop in front of us. But if you turn off the backlight, or reduce it to a minimum, then the FX504GE turns into an attractive everyday machine. Not without reason, in 2018, he won the prestigious award for the best design from Reddot.

Robust body

The case of the laptop is assembled on five, it does not twist, does not crunch and does not play. Although it is entirely plastic, there is not an ounce of metal in it. The keyboard also makes a pleasant impression, it is convenient to use it both during work and in the heat of battle with an army of enemy orcs. Perhaps the only inconvenience is that the plastic is unnecessarily easily soiled and can collect traces.

Hardware to match the appearance

The filling of the laptop matches the appearance: a six-core Intel Core i7 Coffee Lake generation (frequency 4.1 GHz), 8 GB of high-speed DDR4 memory (frequency 2666 MHz), a pumped version of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card with 4 GB of video memory and a 256 GB SSD drive. For a gaming laptop under $1000, this is one of the most powerful bundles of hardware that can not only provide comfortable FPS in all modern games, but also provide a good start for the future. Fortunately, the laptop has an additional slot for RAM, and when necessary, you can safely throw in another 8 GB bar.

The only bottleneck of the system may be the limited volume of the SSD, which can not accommodate more than 7-8 game distributions. In this case, you will either have to slightly limit yourself in collecting the game, or install an additional HDD drive. Considering the speed boost that an SSD gives, neither is a problem in our opinion.

High quality IPS display

In gaming laptops under $1000, manufacturers rarely install super-quality displays, just limiting themselves to good working screens. This laptop is no exception, with a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS-class display with 45% NTSC colour coverage. For comparison, the top model of this line has NTSC coverage of about 94%. But it also costs several times more. If we evaluate the display with its classmates, it is quite decent, with large viewing angles, high contrast and an average margin of brightness.

Sophisticated cooling system

It is important to understand that a gaming laptop is not only powerful hardware and a bright screen. The quality and thoughtfulness of the cooling system plays an equally important role, because the more the laptop heats up, the greater the chances of failure of any part of the laptop. And with that, the FX504GE is perfect: it is equipped with HyperCool technology, which combines a self-cleaning Anti-Dust Cooling system with an Overboost function. It consists of three modes, the choice between which allows you to find the optimal balance between the power of the cooler and the noise level. In the latter case, the laptop works almost silently, which is rarely seen with such a filling.

Decent battery life

The FX504GE has a fairly standard 48Wh battery, but the energy efficiency figures are very good for a gaming laptop. With average screen brightness and average load, the laptop lasts up to 4 hours, and when switching to balanced mode and 20% brightness, this time can be increased to 6-7 hours. In games, these figures will fluctuate noticeably depending on the game itself, the quality of the graphics and the brightness of the screen. On average, it will be 1.5–2.15 hours.

Of the minor inconveniences, it is worth noting the lack of a preinstalled operating system. DOS only, hardcore only.