Asus TUF Gaming FX505DU [FX505DU-AL079] (90NR0271-M02920)

Gaming without overpayments

There are probably more models in the catalog of Asus laptops than there are bands at the indie rock festival in Glastonbury. For discerning gamers with a fat wallet, the company has released the slim and sexy ROG Strix and ROG Zephyrus, but low-cost gamers usually look in the opposite direction of the TUF Gaming family, which is distinguished by an extremely attractive combination of price, quality and power.

Gift for your money

For example, the hero of today's review, Asus TUF Gaming FX505DU, can generally boast of a performant hardware based on multi-threaded Ryzen 7 (this is an important savings factor), 16 GB of RAM (becoming a start in 2020) and a fairly powerful GTX 1660 Ti graphics card. Although it belongs to the middle level, it already has 6 GB of video memory, which is important for today's voracious toys and performance, which is a third higher than that of its predecessor GTX 1060. Translated into human, this whole colossus will easily turn even demanding resources hits like RDR2 or Star Wars: Fallen Order. In many cases, it will even turn out to encroach on the Ultra graphics settings. A thousand-odd dollars for such a complete set is a gift.

RGB backlit keyboard and HyperCool cooling system

For many gamers, $1,000 is a psychological milestone that you don't want to cross. Asus understands this very well, so for the TUF Gaming line they try to cut fat as much as possible in the form of additional ports (USB-C, alas, they did not deliver), a fingerprint scanner or fast charging. In fact, of the additional features, the laptop boasts only an RGB-backlit keyboard, and a very plump plastic case, which has been certified according to the military standard MIL-STD-810G and can be used to work in adverse conditions. I was pleased that the engineers did not fool around and save on cooling, using the same HyperCool system that has proven itself well in previous models of this family. It features a self-cleaning Anti-Dust Cooling system and an Overboost control that allows you to find the optimal balance between cooler power and noise level.

120 Hz display

In $1000 gaming laptops, manufacturers rarely put super high-quality displays, just limiting themselves to good working screens. This laptop is no exception: it has a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS display with 45% NTSC colour coverage. That is, this is far from the most colorful and colorful screen that you have seen. However, this is a laptop for toys, not serious graphics work, so it is much more important that the display has a high refresh rate of 120 Hz. I am glad that fast gaming IPS displays are slowly reaching the laptop segment.