ASUS TUF Gaming Laptop FX504 15.6” Full HD IPS-Level, 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8300H (up to 3.9GHz), GeForce GTX 1050, 8GB DDR4 2666MHz, 256GB M.2 SSD, Gigabit WiFi, Windows 10 - FX504GD-NH51

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On paper, this laptop should be a decent budget gaming laptop based on its specs. Which was why I was initially disappointed when I brought it home and found out that it was beyond slow, much slower than the old laptop I was replacing. I struggled with it for several days, googling fixes for the "100% disk" issue and disabling services, running windows updates, removing bloatware, just hoping it would become zippy and I could get to gaming. Nothing really helped, and it was unresponsive to the point where it was unusable and I was on the brink of bringing it back. Not wanting to do that, I finally settled on trying a clean install of Windows - not the factory reset, but installing Windows from the image on Microsofts website. Doing this ensures that youll get Windows without any bloatware or other settings that are bogging the computer down. However, this will not include some essential drivers so it will require some additional work once Windows is installed. Heres some tips for this process in case it may be of use to any of you: [ Before Re-installing Windows ] -Back up any files and anything else you may need. -Record your Windows Product Key (From File Explorer, right click "This PC" > Properties). The installer should automatically pull your Product Key from the BIOS, but better to be safe than sorry. -Optional: Go to the Microsoft Store > My Library and download the two free games (Age of Empires & Gears of War) that came with this purchase. This way they will be in your library and available for download as long as you sign into your account. I do not know if they will otherwise be available when doing a fresh install by this method (If you do the restore to factory settings, you can still download them) -Optional: I recommend also installing an M.2 PCIe 3x4 NVMe SSD card for much faster performance. If you opt for this, I recommend installing it prior to running the Windows installer so that you can put Windows on the SSD right away, unless you plan on cloning the HDD later. These can be a bit pricey. I bought a WD Black because it was cheaper than Samsung 970 EVO and it is performing well. [ Now Re-Install Windows ] You will need a formatted USB Drive w/at least 8 GB. -Google "Windows Media Creation Tool" and download the tool from Microsofts website. This tool will create a bootable USB drive for you that you can use to re-install Windows on your PC. -When ready, shut down your laptop. Boot to the BIOS by pressing and holding "F2" and press the power key. Set the boot priority to your USB drive. Save and exit ("F10"). -The laptop should boot to the USB drive and run the installer. -When it comes to partitions, I deleted everything except the Recovery partition. This is a failsafe so that you can restore to factory settings. If you installed an SSD, make sure you select that drive to install Windows on. Note: This installation will not come with the laptops WiFi drivers. Connect by an ethernet cable or put the drivers from the Asus manufacturer website on a USB drive so that you can install the drivers as soon as Windows is installed and get your internets! [ After Installing Windows ] There will be some drivers you need to install to get your computer up and running. -Run Windows Update. There should only be a few updates since the Media Creation Tool installs the latest version of Windows 10. -Go to your laptops page on the Asus manufacturers website and download any drivers you need. VGA is mandatory since it will install the drivers for your Nvidia GPU and Geforce Experience for automatic driver updates. Run Geforce Experience once downloaded and make sure you update to the latest Game Ready driver. -Go to Intels website and make sure you at least install the HD graphics driver. -Open the Nvidia Control Panel (right click Desktop) and set the Nvidia card to the default graphics card. Laptop will use the Intel card for regular browsing, but switch to Nvidia for things like gaming. -Optional: If you put an SSD in your computer, you can also go to "Disk Management" and create a volume on the 1 TB HDD so you can have that for storage! With that, your laptop should be all set up pending any further customization or adjustments youd like. Hopefully it should be running great as well. After I did all of the above, my laptop is lightning quick and gaming on it is awesome. It also looks cool (although I would prefer a thinner bezel around the screen). The GTX 1050 works well for all the games Ive tried, with no lag and few frame drops that Ive noticed. Granted I do not play many graphics intensive games but it does the job well for games like Sea of Thieves, Civ V, and MapleStory 2. Getting it there was just a hassle and almost not worth it. When I buy a new laptop from a brand like Asus and with specs like these I expect it to run smoothly out of the box with minimal setup on my part. I expect to do some updates of course, but this was ridiculous. Because of this Id rate it around 3.5 stars - performs great when you get it there but wayyy too much hassle. Battery life is also terrible lol. But Im very happy with it now and hopefully I could save you guys a little bit of time. Feel free to share any tips you may have!

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Right now I am kind of disgusted. This came with a free download of COD4; however, it takes up 177gb!!! and since it only comes with a 256 SSD, I cannot even play the game that the "gaming" PC came with. Ridiculous to call this a gaming machine when you cannot play a game.

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At the current offer for $800, I received a Black Matter FX504GE-ES72: Some straight up facts I did after buying this mid-priced beast; I re-installed Windows 10x64, because the factory installed version of Windows 10 is bugged with constant 100% CPU usage. I purchased another 8GB 2666Mhz SDRAM and a 1TB SATA-3 SSD (Samsung is my preferance and then comes WD) but if you got spare cash and want to do a further upgrade, pick up a PCI-E NVME SSD M.2 2280 500GB or 1TB, and you will develop your inner craving for the need of speed, cause once you go NVMe you wont go back to HDD or even SSD. You will NOT find a laptop with the quality of these specs at $800, if you do, PM me, and Ill go buy the new laptop. 1. i7 - 8th Gen (2018) Hexa-Core processor - 9/10 [This is a solid piece of hardware, only thing better is the latest i9 processor; the current 8th Gen i7 8750H gives the 7th Gen i7-7700K a solid competition, when all things are considered equal. NOTE: You need adequate cooling & air-flow to NOT have thermal throttling issues; Majority of gaming laptops with solid specs will have thermal throttling when there is not sufficient cooling & air-flow. A good analogy is having to fill your vehicle tank with premium grade 93 versus regular 87 gas; You know your vehicle just runs better with the good stuff.] 2. 8 GB 2666 Mhz DDR4 SDRam - 7.5/10 [This is a solid performance ram, only thing that could have been done better was to offer a 16GB version instead] 3. SATA-3 PCI 256 GB SSD - 7.5/10 [The SATA-3 PCI SSD performs extremely well, however I was hoping for a 500 GB version instead, Read/Write speeds for me ranged from 450 MB/s to 540 MB/s; If you are coming from a standard 7200 RPM HDD, the performance of a good SSD will show you what youre missing out on life.] 4. 4 GB 1050Ti GTX VGA - 7.5/10 [This is a decent video card that will allow you to run most games released over the last few years @720 upwards depending how you tweak your settings, and for anything less than the 1060 GTX, I wouldnt get less than the 4GB VRAM; Therefore, I think this should be a defacto minimum at this price range for the laptop.] 5. 1080P 60Hz IPS-level Screen - 8/10 [Definitely any day better than a regular TN display, and asking for the 120Hz 3ms IPS alternative, would also be asking for a bump up in the price; At this price, its definitely good above average 1080P 60Hz IPS-level Screen.] 6. Gigabit Wi-Fi 802.11ac - 8.5/10 [This is excellent when paired with an excellent router supplied by a fiber optic connection; Otherwise, your speeds are always going to be limited by the throughput of your router.] 7. Keyboard - 8.5/10 [This is a great keyboard, responsive, feels firm, and something that you know will last a while and can take a pounding during aggressive gaming sessions; The red backlight that can be controlled is a lovely feature.] 8. Cooling - 7.5/10 [Design wise with the dual fans, anti-dust tunnels and the 3-speed fan boost, I am able to maintain temperatures reasonably, in fact better than expected with Overboost mode; I read a lot about thermal throttling problems, however, after reinstalling Windows 10 and the drivers, I have 0 thermal throttling problems. Important to Note: I picked up a cooling stand, for additional improvement to air-flow under the laptop.] 9. Battery Life - 6.5/10 [This is a high performing laptop, EXPECT a minimal battery life roughly 2 hours, and dont expect to be able to play games with good fps on battery, thats difficult to achieve unless you intend to set your battery settings to high performance; Imagine a Bugatti Veyron, at top speed, running outta gas in 12 mins flat.] 10. Audio - 7.5/10 [Its clear, loud enough, but majority of the time, Im using headphones; The audio card is good, the DTS gives you some interesting options, overall a defacto standard offering at this price.] 11. Build Quality and Construction - 8.5/10 [Well built, lighter than I expected, all-round high quality solid plastic, definitely above-average build and quality when compared to regular laptops from HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo & Asus. 12. OS Support [Windows 10x64] - 9/10 [After some optimization to Windows 10x64 for visualization, privacy & SSD, I now have an extremely fast & snappy-responsive laptop, average boot time @8 seconds, with stock Windows 10 and fps of 100-140 on Dota 2 with the highest settings, this Laptop is rock-solid designed purely for Windows 10 currently, with little to no Linux support; not surprising since the TUF FX504 series was recently released in Q1 2018 for the first time.] Important to Note: This is not an under-volted laptop, this is a high performing machine, more like a portable desktop; Therefore, you should expect to get a cooling stand to help air-flow under the laptop and with the 3-speed fan on overboost, expect to hear the fans whirring away at 50 to 55 decibels. If youre looking for a quiet laptop, my suggesting is an an under-volted i5/i7 8th Gen processor with a (U) after the processor number; These processors are designed to maintain lower temperatures and with the right graphics card you should be able to play a decent number of games with varying frame-rates & settings. [Follow - Up Suggestion - based on what I did] When you receive your brand new Black Matter ASUS, it is imperative you do the following, Log in with a MS account and assign those value games to your MS account > Download Laptop drivers from the ASUS drivers site and store them on a USB > Format the SSD, because the Win10x64 that ASUS puts on their laptops comes software installation issues > The user below, SAKU, has a simplified guide on Re-installing Windows 10. After you-reinstall Win10x64 and re-install the drivers, You will have a BEAST of a Machine, not the one you dreamt of in your dreams, but the one You definitely Needed. Special Note: For anyone who wants to install Linux / Ubuntu, I recently installed Linux Mint 18.04.1, pretty straight forward, took about 30 mins in total. You need to disable fastboot and secureboot in Bios. You will face trackpad issues during installing and freezing, this is to due to the lack of Nvidia drivers active. So have a mouse ready. Install your fav. distro and shutdown, Restart PC and on GRUB screen, highlight over distro and press E, scroll down to where the command line starts with Linux and ADD command [nouveau.modeset=0], Enter distro, Install Nvidia drivers first and reboot PC, then install Ukuu and install latest Kernel LTS 4.19.11 to have your trackpad functionality restored. Then, google how to enable TRIM for SSDs to improve your SSD performance/longevity on Linux. In Linux, everything except the fans work; Unfortunately, after several days of researching ways to implement fan control on the 4-wire fans, I came up with no solution; I need someone more capable than me to come up with some kernel support for the 4-wire fans. Therefore, I had to uninstall Linux due to no fan support; However, if you use Linux without the Nvidia graphics card, you should be alright. Therefore my satisfaction with Linux support on this laptop is a 5/10. Overall my satisfaction with this Windows 10x64 Laptop, Black Matter - FX504GE-ES72 is 8.5/10 [I use it for gaming and programming]. Would I purchase this again? and Recommend? I would!! with everything written above.

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A warning to anybody thinking of buying this laptop: they did not ship it properly. The laptop itself comes in a cardboard box, which sits inside the shipping box. They did not put bubble wrap or air packs in the box, so there is two inches of room on either side of the laptop box. Worried right away about the hard drive from all the jostling, but I still wanted to keep it. Box was dented and a little crushed in on one corner and unfortunately the screen was broken with a huge blemish on the right side of the screen from what looked like a direct impact like they dropped it, so I just returned it. The laptop itself is really aesthetically pleasing, lightweight, and felt durable. I also didn’t realize that If you do get this, you’ll need to install a SSD or it will suffer from speed and performance issues and the disk will fill up.

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This laptop is an absolute beast!!!! I am running Planetside2 on Ultra AND I turned on EVERYTHING...smoothing, fog shadows, ambient occlusion, bloom enabled, even motion blur!!! Zero lag 60+fps!!! I am not kidding!!! The screen is absolutely stunning! The 256gb solid state is super fast. There are zero moving parts inside this laptop!!! Windows 10 is running from the SSD so basically even web browsing is like 10 times faster than normal. You will be super proud as I am to own one of these. The fire in Planetside2 is so bright that I literally jumped back! The screen is so amazing! Anyway, as of October 8 when I purchased this on Amazon it is a brand spanking new model. Did I mention it even has a 6 core i7 intel processor??!! Buy this beast and experience games in Ultra like never before!!! I promise!!!

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I would like to preface this by saying the only issue I have had with this laptop, is the excessive, and aggressive McAfee software it came with (which I consider a computer virus anymore as it has popups, difficult to remove, slows the computer, and is annoying just like one), it was quickly removed and would appreciate ASUS dumping support for them. As for the other reviewers complaining of having to add a SSD or poor performance... I would say.. A. This comes with an excellent SSD already, but if you are looking for adding a ton of games on it, you should have been aware 256 gigs is not going to last too long (with games like Conan Exiles running 60 gigs anymore), and B. This is probably the best laptop you can get for this price range at the time of writing this, that being said, I found the performance of this laptop to be way above average, capable of running Warhammer 2 Total War, Rainbow 6 siege, and various other games at max settings with no hickups whatsoever. Im obviously an ASUS fan but do consider myself a critical reviewer, and have bought them for the last 10 years. Out of all the laptops I have purchased from them, this one feels the most robust, and well made yet. Like my laptops I have bought before (all of which are still running and functional at the same speed as day 1), I expect this one to last. Would like to also add, that if you are like me and have complained in the past about the weak/quiet sound system on ASUS laptops; I was happily surprised that this laptop comes with a much better sound system than previous iterations of ASUS. I would say if you are a gamer, and your expectations are appropriately set to the price range, you will not be disappointed with this laptop. I do recommend if you plan on installing a large amount of games, opt for paying a bit extra for another hard drive.

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There are no touchpad drivers easily found that will work on this for earlier versions of Windows 10. Other OSes wont even install.

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Bought this laptop for my girl friend to replace her 5 years old computer which is basically a brick. Although she doesn’t really play any games, but who would say no to a decently equipped laptop for less than $800? We haven’t really put this laptop up to heavy use yet but so far we are pretty satisfied. One thing that is a little lacking are the small SSD and RAM. But I guess you get what you pay for, I’m not really upset about it because they are easily upgradable. There is a 2.5” bay for HDD I plan on put in a larger 2.5” SSD, and a spare slot for another RAM whenever I feel like the 8GB RAM isn’t enough.

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The laptop is one of the most affordable with the 6-core I7-8750H processor. The price is hard to beat, so Id point out a few things that might make one consider alternatives. Id also share my experience in replacing the SSD, as well as Linux installation. Quirks you might consider: - the build quality is so-so. It feels like a $300 budget laptop. - In particular, the hinge of the screen seems to be a bit flimsy. - all 3 USB ports are on the left side. One might prefer to have at least one on the other side. - There is no USB type-C either. - I dont particularly like the keyboard layout. Specifically, there is no light indicator for Num Lock. The Num Lock is so close to 7/Home key that I often mis-press Num Lock when I want to press Home. The Right Ctrl and Right Shift are also aligned such that I often mis-press Ctrl when I want to press Shift. - I do like the night-friendly red keyboard backlight. Linux: I tried installing Ubuntu (dual-boot) but to no avail (version v18.04 and v18.10). The touchpad did not work, as others have reported. I was prepared to use a USB mouse. More importantly, the installed Linux one wasnt quite functional either. It booted, but I ran into problems from getting stuck in login, getting stuck in opening some apps (Firefox), getting stuck in restart, etc., depending on the installation. Upgrading SSD tips: The 256Gb SSD model ships with a M.2 SATA SSD with somewhat pedestrian performance (for SSD). I replaced it with a much faster M.2 NVMe SSD (Samsung Evo 970). If you go for the same route, bear in mind there was only 1 slot for M.2 SSD, so you have to replace the supplied SSD with the one you purchase. The screw for the SSD mount is quite tight. So make sure you use the correct screwdriver: a #1 screwdriver: I got stuck trying to use a #0 screwdriver. For the supplied 256Gb SSD that I took out, I got a M.2 SSD to USB port adapter / enclosure. It is bulkier than regular thumb drives, but is significantly faster as well. Others: - if you do a fresh windows installation (Sakus review detailed it), I can report that you can still download the two supplied games from Windows Store from the fresh copy with a brand new windows 10.

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I purchased this laptop for my mothers christmas present, she loves to play farmville and I wanted her to enjoy being able to actually play it. For those who dont know, farmville is extremely resource intensive (google farmville specs) She was upgraded from a 1.7ghz amd duo core 2gb ram with internal graphics to this. Needless to say she cant get over how fast things load, I smile everytime I see her on it because of how much fast it does everything, its almost on par with my desktop haha. I did have to delete some useless programs and mcafee... I dont know why anyone would still use mcafee but other than having to uninstall a few things, everything is as described and I would definitely recommend to get this while its still so cheap.

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