In the midst of the sleuth of gaming laptops launched by ASUS lately, notably in their ROG and Strix lines; ASUS pulled in a sneaky one with the FX503, which is the laptop that we will be reviewing today. Why are we calling this laptop a sneaky one? That is because it indeed is. The FX503 looks like a classic understated laptop, meant to be your corporate workhouse. In no sense it portrays what it really is deep down; i.e., a mid-range gaming laptop. In fact, the FX503 brings you a part of both worlds. Well, almost. Let dwell in deeper to see what the ASUS FX503 is all about.
Build and Aesthetics
For a laptop that packs quite a punch, the FX503 is pretty nimble in size, with a highest thickness of 2.4 centimetres with the lid closed. That is still a little higher than ASUS’ excellent Zephyrus notebook, but still pretty good. The FX503 will fit most small sized backpacks with ease. It is easy to carry by itself, weighing a meagre 2.5kg. By gaming laptop standards, that is pretty good.
The colour theme on the FX504 is black with red accents, in line with the ROG branding, even though the FX503 isn’t technically an ROG product. The chassis and basic structure of the laptop is very similar to the Strix GL503 gaming laptop. The only differences is the brushing pattern on the body, the power key, and the absence of the ROG specific programmable keys. Considering that the FX503 is priced lower than the Strix, the form factor gets a thumbs up from us for value addition.
Coming back to the aesthetics and the build, the back panel is kept with minimal details and a lot of understatement. There are four indented lines that make out the shape “X”. The pattern on the lid is straight brushed aluminium in black. ASUS has been growing relatively fond with this pattern, as we have seen the same in their other models. With the lid closed, the power, standby and the hard drive LEDs are visible at the bottom. I like this neat little addition by ASUS, of shifting the LED indications from the sides to the top. This makes for a more intuitive laptop experience. ASUS went with a design that doesn’t attract many fingerprints, and we’re glad for that.
The FX502 features a bunch of generic I/O connectivity ports: a unified audio port, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, a single USB 2.0 port and an Ethernet port.
Display
Opening the lid up, you are greeted with a 15.6″ 1080p TN panel. ASUS went for thick bezels on this one. Its a shame that thin bezels come only under a mid-high and high prince range, and since the FX503 is a budget laptop, you will have to do without it. The refresh rate supported by the screen is 60Hz. No point for GSYNC and 144fps since the hardware present just isn’t powerful to drive those many frames per seconds. The screen is matte anti-glare. The colours are bright and well saturated. Even under sunlight, the display didn’t give us any problems in particular.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard on the FX503 is absolutely a pleasure to use. It is backlit with typical ASUS Red LEDs. The backlight isn’t as clear and evident as we would have liked it. The illumination and inconsistent and the light leaks through the spaces between the keys. Still, in absolute darkness, you will be able to make out which key is which. Everyone at the iLLOffice commented on how smooth the keyboard was. It came to the point where everybody wanted to use it for their content writing. Rarely do we find a keyboard that feels better than the Macbooks, the FX503 is one of them that actually does.
When it comes to gaming performance though, things change. We would have loved an even more tactile feedback from the keys. The travel times between keys is good, regardless. Just, some more tactile keys would have been great. ASUS highlighted the WASD keys for a more ‘gamey’ feel. Arrow keys are isolated from the rest of the keyboard to avoid mistype.
The touchpad is OK. That’s all. Just OK. Its nowhere close to the Macbooks for sure, and we definitely would recommend using a dedicated mouse with the ASUS FX503 laptop. The touchpad would do for general browsing a light work. It’s smooth to finger glides and supports multi-touch gestures. The clicks feel fine too, you don’t have to apply too much force. We would have liked a better placement of the touchpad though, as sometimes, we felt the using the touchpad extensively while typing was a little awkward.
Audio
ASUS has improved their speaker quality over the years, and the FX503 is a direct result of that. The laptop has a pair of speakers that sound impressive. They provide balanced sound output at all volumes. The sound doesn’t crackle at high volumes, and at low volumes, the details aren’t lost. They still are no replacement to proper speakers or headphones, but they can pass through for light YouTubing. Unlike the ROG laptops, you don’t get any dedicated application for sound modes, which signifies that ASUS is using generic sound drivers and speakers on the FX503.
Performance and Gaming
Th FX503 comes with a 2.8Ghz Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD combo. Pretty impressive specifications these. We tested the laptop across multiple stress scenarios. The most daunting one was opening upto 20 tabs, which included around 10 YouTube tabs streaming 1080p video, 5 flash heavy tabs, 1 tab streaming 4k and 4 generic WordPress tabs. Even this scenario didn’t bring the laptop to its knees. It ran as smooth as it did with no browser open.
The laptop boots up almost instantly. The SSD records a read speed of 480MB/s, which isn’t top notch, but isn’t bad either. Our Geekbench 4 test yielded scores of 12376 for multi-sore and 4182 for single core.
The FX503 contains a GeForce GTX 1050Ti graphics card with 2GB GDDR5 RAM. This is Nvidia’s budget GPU, and we think that this is the prefect graphics card for a laptop. It’s small, has minimal power requirements and doesn’t blurt out hot fumes. In our GPU benchmark tests, OpenCL yielded a score of 77938. This is a good score.
With the GTX 1050Ti, you can run all modern games such as GTA V, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided alright, just, with the graphics settings toned a couple of notches. None of the games mentioned will be able to run smoothly at maxed out settings. If you’re looking for that level of performance, look elsewhere. The FX503 is meant for light weight gaming.
Battery Life
Due to the presence of a i7 processor and GTX 1050Ti graphics card, our expectations from the battery weren’t high. This is a 64Wh 4-cell battery. 3-4 hours of battery backup on general usage isn’t a good score in today’s day and age. Well, performance comes at a price, that is all we can say.
Heat
The FX503 has dual fans unlike most laptops. This means, the CPU and GPU have separate heat sinks, while in most laptops, they share the heat sinks. This allows each fan to cool the respective component individually, using the copper vents that run through the CPU and GPU. That is the technology supplied by ASUS. In real life scenarios, the laptop does become considerably hot, especially when gaming and performing heavy tasks. The area above the keyboard is what becomes hot. This doesn’t affect the typing experience though. The laptop noticeably gets pretty loud too, because of the dual fans running at full throttle.
Others
We liked the 720p webcam. It does a decent job in capturing enough light. Still, your smartphone would provide much, much better pictures. The ASUS FX503 comes with Windows 10 Home edition. ASUS has kept the bloatware to a minimum. They have gone the way to supply WPS Office, McAffee Live Security and WinZip preinstalled.
Conclusion
The ASUS FX503 is a well rounded laptop indeed. It is meant for people who are looking for gaming and multimedia, but are not willing to sacrifice portability and office work. In that way, the FX503 is a pretty robust device. We like such hybrids, as more and more people are using their laptops for all rounded work and entertainment. The FX503 offers a pretty good 15″ screen, so you can use it for movies too. The specifications are good enough to ensure that the laptop will last you for 3-4 years without really slagging in performance as it ages. The i7-7700HQ is a great processor, supporting all the latest Intel features and top notch performance. Even the SSD included is zippy.
The ASUS FX503 is available on Flipkart for ₹79,990. That is not a bad price considering what this laptop is offering you. If you’re looking for a laptop that will suit for your college work, office work, movie watching and a little bit of gaming; in short, a good robust all rounder, the ASUS FX503 is the one for you.
