Asus TUF Gaming FX705DT Detailed Review

In a May 2018 PC sales report, the International Data Corporation (IDC) wrote that it expected to see more powerful traction around gaming devices next year. Asus seems to be one of the most active manufacturers working to make that prediction come true for India. Earlier this year, Asus launched the TUF Gaming FX505DY, an AMD Ryzen-powered equivalent long-lasting Intel-powered FX505 to reach gamers on a budget.

Now, however, Asus is announcing two new models in the TUF gaming range: the Asus FX505DT and the Asus FX705DT. Both are more sophisticated versions of the FX505DY, including the original upgraded internal. While the former retains its 15-inch display, the latter gets a 17-inch unit. And the larger one is exactly what we have with us today. According to Asus, the FX705DT is priced at Rs 82,990. Let’s see how Asus FX705DT works in our review.

Construction and design

The Asus FX705DT is similar in many ways to the smaller FX505DY, which includes build and design. According to Asus, the laptop is either a gold steel metal body or a stealth black plastic. Top cover sports Asus TUF Gaming’s signature “Radiating-X” design, which gives the laptop a healthier character. “A sand-blasted or brushed finish model with a metallic or plastic cover makes the model look ugly and luxurious,” Asus confidently wrote in his review guide. Like its siblings, its body is rigorously tested for durability and certified to the MIL-STD-810G standard.

The top cover shows hard wear

Our review unit was dressed in black plastic panels for the top cover and base panel. To my delightful surprise, the 17-inch body of the Asus FX705DT, despite weighing 2.7 kilograms, was not significantly larger or larger than the 15-inch FX505DY. It was easier than I expected it to be. The laptop gave me enough grip around the sides and edges. The material on the body looked very strong and hard to wear. What I particularly like about the FX705DT is its compact size of power bricks. Asus has significantly trimmed its 150W AC power brick dimensions and the difference can be felt while carrying it. The FX705DT is still a pretty big laptop, remember. This is not for frequent travelers.

Honey, I shrink electricity bricks!

You only need to use more than one finger to open the display. Once it is opened, you will see a large screen with a fairly thin bezel on either side of the screen. According to Asus, the width of the vertical bezels is 7.18 mm. The keyboard has a metallic finish brushed in black. Opening and closing the display reveals a fair bit of flex, which is a bit disappointing to notice. Some flex is also seen on the base panel, especially when typing. Overall, the build quality of the Asus FX705DT is acceptable but not significant.

Ample surface area over a 17-inch covering the abdomen

Display, audio and IoT

The Asus FX705DT’s display measures 17.3 inches diagonally. The IPS LCD panel has a full HD resolution and an anti-glare matte finish. Sadly, its refresh rate is stuck at 60Hz. This may disappoint some users, but Asus had to cut costs somewhere to keep the laptop affordable. Interestingly, the Asus FX505DT is launching the Asus FX705DT with a 120Hz panel. At 250 nits of maximum brightness, the display is bright enough for most spots. Unless there is a very bright direct light on the display, you have no reason to complain.

The bezel on both sides looks thin enough

The colors on the review unit’s display were true and balanced, never looking extra perfect. If anything, they’ve been washed a little at a time. According to our test kit, the display is capable of reproducing 96 percent color in sRGB color space and 74 percent color in Adobe RGB color space, which is quite decent. Signs of light bleeding from backlighting can be seen in the corners of the display but this is not something that can confuse you while playing a video or game.

96 percent sRGB

The sound is uncomfortable and frustrating through the laptop’s two side-firing speakers. In a quiet conference room (approximately 25 x 11 feet in size) with a review unit set up on a stable tabletop surface, songs like The Weekend’s Starboy sound soft and exciting. The voice was loud but sometimes sharp. Make low and middle noises and sometimes small noises. The overall sound output was rather shaking on the ears. Asus seems to have nailed the audio to the VivoBook S14 S406UA but goofed up with the TUF gaming series. Although the speakers are loud, they are best reserved for vocals only. You better get a good pair of headphones for gaming and movie playback.

The speakers get red accents

There is ample space inside the speaker driver but still not very good

Like its relatives, the Asus FX705DT has all its ports on the left side of the body, leaving the right for a right-handed gamer’s mouse (and a Kensington safety cable). And so, on the left, we see a round-pin power port, a LAN port, a full-size HDMI port, a USB-A 2.0 port, two USB-A 3.1 ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack for the headset. . A laptop of this price completely lost an SD card slot and a USB-C port. Owners of a DSLR need to invest in a multi-card reader. This could avoid a supervised Asus.

Dedicated indicator for flight mode: clever

All ports are open, well … next to the port

Keyboard and touchpad

The Asus FX705DT’s keyboard is quite comfortable for both gaming and regular typing. According to Asus, each keycap has a small dimple (0.25 mm in height) so that the center can be easily found. Rated for 20 million strokes, the keys travel distance is 1.8 millimeters and requires only 62 grams of ball from the user’s finger to reach the actuation point, thanks to the company’s overstroke technology. The keyboard comes with an integrated numpad but lacks dedicated keys for home, end, page up and page down functions.

Multi-color backlighting but only single zone

Unlike the Asus FX505DY, which has a single color backlighting on the keyboard, the Asus FX705DT comes with an RGB backlit keyboard. The color of the keyboard backlight can be changed at once (since it is a single-zone backlight) in the AURA sync section of the built-in Armory Crate app. The bundled app has light patterns, such as “Static”, “Breathing”, “Strobing”, “Rainbow”, etc. WASD keys are colored differently for easy viewing. The W key also has a small bump for easy gaming. Whether it was gaming or long email typing, the keyboard in the review unit felt quite at home. Surprisingly, it was not on the Asus FX505DY, which has a uniform keyboard setup.

There was unnecessary play on the touchpad of our review unit

The touchpad of the Asus FX705DT is a perfect unit. This means that the laptop receives multi-finger taps and swipes in Windows 10. The left and right mouse buttons inside the touchpad are also fairly easy to click. The only downside to the review unit was the unexpected play under the touchpad surface. I can feel the whole touchpad move inwards by about a millimeter without registering any input.

Performance

Asus FX705DT Radeon RX Vega 10 Powered by AMD Ryzen 7 3750H processor with graphics. In addition, it comes with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card with 4GB of GDDR5 video RAM. This combination is not something we have seen on laptops in 2019 so far. Onboard RAM is 8GB single-channel but it can be expanded up to 32GB. The inner motherboard has two slots, one of which is already occupied. Oddly enough, in our review unit, Windows 10 reported that only 5.94GB of the 8GB of usable RAM was usable. Storage comes courtesy of a 512GB PCIe NVMe solid-state drive.

Ryzen 7 + GTX 1650

It is easy to close the base panel cover with a screwdriver set

Single-channel 8GB RAM with space for another chip

The 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD sits on top of the WLAN card

A caddy is waiting for you to pop on a 2.5-inch hard drive

Since it is a 17-inch, there is enough space around the motherboard

In our CPU benchmark test, the Asus FX705DT performed well but did not blow our minds. The laptop scored 3550 in PCMark 8’s conventional creative test, just 8 points ahead of the Asus FX505DY. For your reference, the Asus FX505DY is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 processor with the same amount of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. In WinRAR’s benchmarking tool, the Asus FX705DT outperforms the Asus FX505DY by over 2,000 KB / s, thanks in part to its Swift solid-state drive.

In everyday use situations, the review unit performed as well as expected. Gaming laptops run smoothly with medium weight applications like Chrome, File Explorer, WhatsApp for PC, Word and Excel. Even with multiple game launchers (Steam, Epic and Origin) downloading content simultaneously, the laptop was comfortable running multiple instances of Chrome across multiple desktops. Asus FX7505DT continued to work while Lightroom was taking out about 500 photos. If anything, there was that rare stuttering in the animation but it wasn’t easy to notice. In short, the Asus FX705DT should be able to handle most computing tasks that the average customer asks it to perform. Photo and video editing should be done without any hassle.

Gaming

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650-powered Asus FX705DT is a perfect machine for playing popular titles in medium-to-high graphics settings. In our GPU benchmark test, the review unit performed better than expected. The laptop scored 7626, 19089 and 3297 points in 3DMark’s Fire Strike, Sky Diver and Time Spy respectively. The Asus FX505DY was at least 1500 points behind them all. Even with Unigine’s GPU benchmarking tool, the laptop has achieved commendable scores.

We recorded the highest frame rate on the Asus FX705DT when we played Doom and Crisis 3. Setting the graphics to high (i.e., one level above the average in any game), Doom & Crisis runs at an average frame rate of 96 and 110 frames. Respectively per second. Both figures rose to 104 and 118, respectively, when the graphics became mediocre. The actual gameplay of both games was smooth and stutter-free.

Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Rider and Hellblade: Senuya’s Sacrifice runs at about 60 frames per second. In higher graphics settings, the three games run at an average frame rate of 48, 40, and 54 frames per second, respectively. When the setting is lowered to medium, the average frame rate goes to 51, 42 and 58, respectively. The gameplay of the three games was fairly smooth and no lag free. In both settings, there was occasional stuttering in the animation but it was not a big annoyance.

The Apex Legend, though fully playable, ran with some jolt in both high and medium settings. At high, the average frame rate was close to 66 frames per second. As a result, the average frame rate has been raised to about 68 frames per second. While there was no visible gap during the Apex Legends game, the action sequence showed signs of tearing the screen. If you don’t dream of gaming in Ultra graphics settings, you’ll be able to comfortably play the most popular titles on the Asus FX705DT comfortably at about 50 frames per second at medium or even altitude.

Battery

In our standard battery benchmark test, the Asus FX705DT lasted 4 hours, 45 minutes. In comparison, the cheaper Asus FX505DY lasted 3 hours, 30 minutes in the same test In the case of daily use, the review unit does not last more than three and a half hours on the battery. Setting the screen brightness to 70 percent, enabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the laptop went from 100 to 10 percent in three hours. During the test, I was writing, browsing the web, playing music through earphones, and installing some light applications. In short, the Asus FX705DT is not a model to see if you want more than four hours of battery life.

The last row

Asus TUF Gaming FX705DT is a good choice if you want to do with gaming. If you’re into photography and video editing, the missing SD card slot and USB-C port can be frustrating. If you expect portability, size and short battery life may not make you happy. However, if you are looking for a mid-range laptop that can replace the gaming machine of your age, the Asus TUF Gaming FX705DT is not the least bit disappointing.