With its TUF series, Asus aims to combine a high-end gaming experience with both durability and affordability. The FX504GE is a more upscale configuration of the machine, yet it still manages to hit the cash register at just a penny under $1000.
Design
The biggest oddity here: “Tough” design in laptops today tends to be synonymous with a magnesium or aluminum case, but the Asus TUF is built almost entirely from plastic. (Don’t let the brushed metal look around the keyboard and palmrest fool you.) This gives it a relatively lightweight (4.9 pounds), but it feels awfully flimsy, particularly for a computer with “TUF” in its name. Black all around with metallic red accents, it’s on the demure side for a gaming rig, though it offers enough in the way of flourishes to stand out somewhat from a design standpoint. The keyboard backlighting is a striking red color, and the touchpad is fairly typical in size, nearly flush with the palmrest.
Features
Asus boasts about the virtual 7.1-channel surround sound on the FX504GE, but in my testing I found audio to be on the thin side and rather one-dimensional in most of my tests. Another unique feature to the FX504GE is the inclusion of a cooling system that is designed to filter out dust (ostensibly increasing the lifespan of the machine), and the fan can even be cranked up or dialed back to silent through the use of a function key. The keyboard is fair but a bit weaker than I’d like, with relatively limited travel and, bizarrely, a placement of the arrow keys that causes them to intersect with the numeric keypad. Finally, on the plus side, at 27mm thick, it’s slightly slimmer than the rest of the field, which when combined with its weight and a smallish power brick, should make portability no problem.
Specs
The TUF Gaming FX504GE is on the lower end of the spec configuration vs. the field. While it packs a fast 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H CPU (eighth generation) and a zippy Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti GPU, some of its other specs are underwhelming. The 8GB of RAM is particularly underwhelming, as is the 256GB SSD (with no standard hard drive for extra storage). The 15.6-inch screen (at 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution max) is standard for the field (though its brightness is underwhelming). Ports include three standard USB ports (one of which runs at ancient USB 2.0 speed), a full-size Ethernet jack, and HDMI output – and without an SD card reader or USB-C, it feels awfully behind the times.
Performance
While the performance of the TUF Gaming FX504GE is far from awful, it did fall below the average score for this category on nearly all of the benchmarks I ran. A representative sample of scores can be found below. While it was just shy of the average on general application tasks (which includes web page rendering, business productivity applications, and digital media creation work), the situation was direr on graphically-intensive benchmarks, including gaming tests, where it was slower than the field by up to 20 percent. While the system was perfectly stable, certain tasks – namely web browsing – were noticeably sluggish, with Asus’s aggressive McAfee security sales pitch popups only slowing things down even further.
Asus TUF Gaming FX504GE Category Average
PCMark 10 4395 4459
3DMark Fire Strike 6710 7465
VRMark Orange Room 3781 4703
Monster Hunter 14152 15860
Heaven 4.0 (1600 x 900) 100.5 102.0
Battery
Battery life on the TUF Gaming FX504GE, at 5 hours, 44 minutes of running time on my full-screen video test, was very good and well above the field, which largely hovered around the four-hour mark. It’s definitely good enough for the typical gamer, who typically won’t need more than a few minutes of running time away from an outlet.
Conclusion
At $1000, the upper limit of the price range for this category, I expected better things from the Asus TUF Gaming FX504GE. Its chintzy build quality is a minor problem, but the lack of key components like a full 16GB of RAM and up-to-date ports slow things down. That said, its performance failings aren’t deal-breakers, so if the quirky design and good portability of the FX504GE really appeal to you, it’s still worth a look.
