ASUS TUF Gaming FX505D review – now with AMD under the hood

When we reviewed the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505 previously, our only qualm was its less-than-ideal battery life. ASUS has now announced new variants that come with AMD CPU and we managed to get our hands on one to review. The design is essentially unchanged, so do check out our previous review to find out more about that. In this review, we’ll be talking more about differences in specs and performance. Without further ado, let’s begin!

Specifications

Compared to the previous variants use of an Intel Core i5-8300H/i7-8750H CPU, the new TUF Gaming FX505D comes with an AMD Ryzen 7-3750H CPU instead. It also got its SSD storage bumped up to 512GB (from 128/256GB), at the expense of the 1TB 7200 rpm SATA HDD. The 8GB DDR4 RAM (clocked at 2,666 MHz ) is kept but the GPU is now an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti with 6GB of VRAM.

Improving the battery life seemed to be the ASUS’ aim here since the power efficiency in the Ryzen CPU (35W vs 45W for Intel Core i7-8750H) and Nvidia GPU (12nm vs 16nm process) are better. One last thing to note about this variant is that it uses a 60Hz display instead of the 144Hz one from before.

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Performance

For sure, gaming performance hasn’t remained stagnant. The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti GPU comes with half as many transistors, a higher boost clock, and more memory bandwidth than the GTX 1060. Although this Turing GPU doesn’t come with its RTX counterpart’s fancy features nor is the gaming performance significantly greater, this machine handled GPU-bound games much better than its predecessor. Overall, we’re seeing roughly a 10-15% increase in performance.

Here’s a table of the differences between the two:

	GeForce GTX 1660 Ti	GeForce GTX 1060
Architecture	Turing	Pascal
Process (nm)	12	16
Transistors	6.6 billion	4.4 billion
Base clock (MHz)	1,500	1,506
Boost clock (MHz)	1,770	1,708
Shaders	1,536	1,280
GFLOPS	5,437	3,855
Memory Size	6GB	6GB
Memory Bus	192-bit	192-bit
Memory Type	GDDR6	GDDR5
Memory Clock	12Gbps	8Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	288	192

Note that this spec numbers we managed to find are desktop versions, so expect the one in this laptop to be a slightly cut down version. To give you a better idea of where this gaming laptop stands, we ran our usual trio of tests using User Benchmark, PCMark 10, and 3DMark.

User Benchmark

The TUF Gaming FX505D may not be your powerhouse gaming machine but we expected it to be good enough. Indeed, User Benchmark gave it a 78% on Gaming. It’s not going to be able to play all the high-requirement games on the highest settings but it should play titles like Dota 2 or Apex Legends without a hassle. It even has SSD at 210% so that means loading speeds are fast.

PCMark 10

We got a score of 3,807 on PCMark 10, which is about average. Digital Content Creation sits at 4,631 so that means you’re not going to want to do anything like heavy video editing on this. It scored well on Essentials with 6,730 points, however, so it’s certainly up to the day-to-day tasks.

3DMark

On 3DMark’s Time Spy, this laptop showed decent numbers as well. It got a score of 4,957 and during its two runs, got an FPS of 35.79 and 31.85 respectively.

Gaming Performance

We tested the game with World War Z and the popular Apex Legends. The idea is to demonstrate that this laptop can deal with high-end games to an extent, as well as deal with popular titles that won’t tax a PC by too much. In that sense, the TUF Gaming FX505D did well with both.

First up is World War Z, where we managed an average FPS of above 60 FPS. The caveat is that you’d have to play the game on low to medium settings. However, this also means that other games of similar requirements shouldn’t be a problem, as long as you don’t mind the lowered graphical settings.

As for Apex Legends, we got it to run on high graphical settings and got FPS that ranged from 80 to 100. That’s a solid range for a smooth Apex Legends experience. There were no screen stutters either, with Nvidia G-Sync turned on for the 60Hz display on this laptop.

Conclusion

To end, we felt that the TUF Gaming FX505D isn’t so much of straight up upgrade as it is a sidegrade. The GPU is better than the original FX505 and the SSD is pretty fast, while the CPU isn’t more powerful but is way more power efficient. The way we see it, this laptop will prove more than serviceable for everyday use and a little bit of gaming on top.

The exact model number we reviewed is the FX505D-UBQ099T and it is now available for RM4,399. That’s significantly more affordable, which is great if budget is a concern for you.