Asus TUF Gaming FX504 Laptop Review: The Best of Both Worlds with Some Compromises

Jul. 5, 2018

Note:The Asus TUF Gaming laptop comes in a Core i5, and a Core i7 variant. While the Core i5 variant is priced atRs. 73,990, the pricing for the Core i7 variant has not been announced but we expect it be around Rs. 1,07,990.

I always tell people that specs aren’t everything when picking out a laptop, a smartphone, or anything else for that matter. However, specs definitely do help form a baseline expectation from the laptop, so let’s get those out of the way first.

Design and Build Quality

The laptop doesn’t leave a lot to be desired in terms of the overall design and build quality. The lid, with its smokey-grey color and the light-up Asus logo looks pretty damn good.The chassis is sturdily built and feels like it could take a hit(although I didn’t try and drop it, so no guarantees about that).

Inside, the keyboard is surrounded by a design that I can only describe as futuristic, and the power button (which, by the way feels really good to press for some reason) is also angular, with a small red-dot lighting up to show the power’s on.Everything about this laptop, it’s keyboard, and the color choices Asus has made is very appealing.The red keyboard backlighting looks incredible, and everything else takes a middle road between screaming ‘gaming,’ and staying stealthy.

The one issue I have with the build quality of this laptop is that for some reasonthe screen has alotof flex; and I mean a lot. Just applying a small force to the screen makes it bend so ridiculouslyit feels like it’ll snap into two, or at the very least, screw up the panel. Other than that, though, the laptop is built well and doesn’t leave out anything to complain about.

I, for one, don’t think that these ports don’t suffice for everyday needs, however, it would’ve been nice to see a USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 port at the very least for the much higher bandwidth it’d afford.

The display panel has decent viewing angles as well, but like I mentioned earlier, the build quality could’ve been (and should’ve been) a lot better here. There’s a lot of flex and it’s honestly kind of scary.

That’s for media consumption though, because as far as gaming is concerned, playing without headphones will put you at quite a disadvantage.The fans on this thing can get pretty loud, even if they’re not nearly as loud as theTriton 700. I’d recommend using headphones with this laptop if you’re interested in hearing your enemy’s footsteps in PUBG or Fortnite.

For everyday media consumption, the speakers will not leave you wanting. They can get pretty loud, so watching movies and streaming Netflix will not leave you with a desire to attach external speakers into the mix.

It’s not a mechanical keyboard, and it definitely doesn’t try to fake it either. However, I didn’t find that to be much of an issue, especially since it does offerplenty of travelconsidering the relatively slimmer profile of the laptop, and it doesn’t make you feel like you’re tapping on glass when playing a game.

The keycaps also have subtle curves on top making it easier to differentiate between keyswithout actually looking at the keyboard — that comes in handy while you’re in the middle of a gunfight in Fortnite and are trying to build as fast as you can (which I suck at, by the way, but I digress).

That said, it’s not as big a trackpad as the one you’d find on the MacBook Pro, or theMi Gaming Laptop, but it’s not awfully small, like the one on Rupesh’s HP Envy. It’s also pretty clicky when you click it, and pretty smooth when you’re simply moving the cursor around. Also, thankfully, it’s not positioned awkwardly like the Triton 700’s trackpad.

It looks pretty much like a trackpad looks. There’s nothing too special to mention here, and there’s nothing wrong with it either.It’s a trackpad that looks normal, and works normally, and I like that.

In games, the laptop performs the way you’d expect it to. It can run pretty much every game out there right now, and I tried out my usual favorites including PUBG, CS:GO, and Far Cry 5 on this.

CS: GO ran without a hiccup. Even with everything set to max,the game was running smoothly with FPS values well above the 100 mark. Not that I was surprised; with specs like that, this laptop should be handling CS: GO as well as it did. Anything less than that would’ve been a disappointment, to be honest.

Far Cry 5 is once again a game that can really push a laptop to the edge, and it showed. The laptop ran it pretty well, all things considered, but once again,I’d recommend ensuring that the settings are set to a mixture of medium to high. Ultra is out of the question, obviously, but even with everything set to high you’ll notice the laptop struggling to keep up with Far Cry 5’s extremely detailed open-world environments.

I didn’t notice any signs of thermal throttling on the laptop, so I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t either. However, with 8GB of RAM, don’t push the laptop too far as it might start lagging out on you purely because it’s running out of resources — I doubt it’ll overheat even then, though.

With ‘Best Battery Life’ selected in Windows’ battery optimization settings, and the brightness set to around 70%,I was able to get around 5 hours of usage from the laptopdoing stuff like browsing the internet with around 8-10 tabs open on Google Chrome, editing some images, and watching a couple of YouTube videos.

Switching over to ‘Best Performance,’ the difference is visible. With the same kind of workload as with the previous test,the laptop lasted around 3-3.5 hours at 70% brightness.That’s pretty good as far as I’m concerned.

Pros:

Cons:

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