The FX503 is a budget gaming laptop from ASUS, so let’s see what it’s got to offer and
help you decide if it’s worth it.
Starting with the Specs I’ve got the Intel i7-7700HQ CPU here, although it’s also available
with the 7300HQ, both are still great options for gaming laptops.
I’ve got 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz in dual channel but 8GB configurations
seem to be common, and a 128GB M.2 SATA SSD and 1TB hard drive installed for the storage,
no NVMe support here unfortunately.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1050 4GB which runs the 15.6” 1080p 60Hz TN panel,
but it also seems to be available with the 1060 or a 120Hz screen.
For the network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac WiFi,
as well as Bluetooth 4.2.
The lid and interior are both a brushed black plastic, but despite this overall the build
quality still felt pretty decent.
The dimensions of the laptop are 38.4cm in width, 26.2cm in depth, and 2.4cm in height,
so fairly average for a budget gaming laptop.
It’s listed with a weight of 2.5kg, and mine weighed closer to 2.6kg.
With the power brick and cable for charging included this rises up to 3.1kg.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p TN panel, no G-Sync available here
though.
The viewing angles of the screen weren’t great, not too bad side to side but the colours
shift quite a lot when looking up or down, which is typical from TN panels.
The screen doesn’t get that bright either, around 222 nits when at 100% brightness with
a 120:1 contrast ratio so it also looked fairly washed out.
I’ve measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
57% of sRGB, 41% of NTSC and 44% of AdobeRGB, so on the lower side but fairly similar to
many other gaming laptops I’ve tested.
The 120Hz panel claims to have 72% of the NTSC colour gamut so it seems like you’ve
got the option of a higher quality panel.
I’ve taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test,
and we can see that in this instance it looked perfectly fine with no issues detected, but
this will of course vary between laptops.
There was a little screen flex while intentionally moving it, but overall it was fair sturdy
as the hinges are placed towards the far left and right corners.
Opening the laptop with one finger was also possible, demonstrating a fairly even weight
distribution so it shouldn’t easily fall off your lap.
Above the display in the center is a 720p camera.
The camera wasn't too bad and the microphone sounded about average, but seems to pick up
a little of the laptops own fan noise.
The chiclet keyboard has red backlighting which can be adjusted between 3 levels of
brightness or turned off completely.
It’s got 1.8mm of key travel and the WASD keys have clear sides allowing them to be
seen easier.
Otherwise the keyboard was great to type with and I didn’t personally have any issues
with it, the keys were on the quieter side to press, here’s how they sound to try and
give you an idea.
There was some keyboard flex while pushing down hard on the plastic body, but this was
never actually noticeable under normal use, overall it felt sturdy enough.
The red power button is found towards the top right of the keyboard, and in the center
appears to be some more air intakes.
The touchpad was smooth to the touch with red accenting to match the black and red theme.
It worked pretty well, the whole thing can be pressed down to click and there are also
separate left and right buttons.
As for the I/O on the left there’s the power input, gigabit ethernet port, HDMI 2.0 port,
two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and 3.5mm audio combo jack.
On the right there’s just an SD card slot, a third USB 3.0 Type-A port and Kensington
lock.
The speakers are found on the left and right sides towards the front, and they actually
sound pretty decent as far as laptop speakers go, a little bass and not really tinny until
you get into the higher volumes.
The back just has the air exhaust vents towards the left and right corners, and the status
LEDs are also viewable here with the lid closed, while the front has nothing at all, it’s
just completely smooth.
Up on the brushed plastic lid there’s the ASUS logo in the center with a mirrored finish.
Fingerprints show up on both the lid and interior, they’re a little harder to wipe away once
dirt gets into the grooves of the finish.
Underneath there’s some air intakes towards the back to keep everything cool, as well
as some rubber feet that did a good job of preventing it from moving around while in
use.
Accessing the internals is very easy, the first panel can be removed by simply removing
one phillips head screw.
This gives you easy access to one of the two memory slots, M.2 drive and 2.5 inch drive
bay.
The rest of the bottom panel can be removed by taking out a few more screws, this is required
if you want to access the WiFi card, second memory slot or the battery.
Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 64 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching
YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 6 hours and 56 minutes, a surprising result making
this one of the best laptops I’ve tested in this test.
The Intel integrated graphics were in use here thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 55 minutes, and it sat at 30 FPS the whole time without dipping.
Overall the battery life seemed quite good considering the size of the battery and the
price of the laptop.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celcius, it’s
cold here as it’s winter in Australia, so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment.
At idle both the CPU and GPU were fairly cool as the fan was still running, as shown in
light blue toward the bottom of the graph.
Working our way up the graph, the gaming benchmarks were tested with Watchdogs 2 at high settings.
The temperatures were pretty decent regardless of fan speed or CPU undervolting and didn’t
change too much, so we’ll move up to the stress tests.
The stress tests involved running Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark at the same time to try
and fully utilize both CPU and graphics.
The temperatures were the same with the auto or overboost fan profile in use as shown in
dark red and pink, the fans were running the same regardless and the CPU was thermal throttling
here at 95 degrees.
Once we apply a -0.150v undervolt to the CPU the temperatures drop a bit and performance
increases as the thermal throttling has been removed.
These are the average clock speeds for the same temperature tests just shown.
Like the temperatures shown before in the gaming results the clock speeds didn’t differ
too much here, at least in this game, all running fine in any case.
Moving to the stress tests we can see that while thermal throttled in the dark red and
pink bars all 4 CPU cores were averaging around 150MHz below the 3.4GHz all core turbo speed
of the 7700HQ CPU, but with the -0.150v undervolt applied to the CPU we’re able to remove
all throttling and get full performance even in this heavy stress test.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any
GPU load, they’re the same so this just confirms that there was no throttling of any
kind here, we only see the thermal throttling when adding the GPU load.
Likewise here are some GPU only tests in the Heaven benchmark, we’re getting a nice boost
with the 250MHz overclock applied, and we’ll see how this performs in games soon.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle the
body of the laptop is sitting in the low 30s, so fairly cool.
While gaming and under stress test the center rises to the mid 40s but the sides, in particularly
the WASD keys stay very cool in comparison.
It gets into the low 50s right up the back but you shouldn’t really be touching there
anyway.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
It was fairly quiet at idle, and while gaming or under stress test while undervolted it
was around the same, louder but still quieter than many other gaming laptops I’ve tested.
Without the CPU undervolt and the stress test though it gets quite loud.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks.
All tests were run at 1080p with the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows updates to date
installed.
The graphics were also overclocked 100MHz out of the box, so I left this in place, but
we’ll see how overclocking further goes later.
Fortnite was running pretty well, above 60 FPS on average with high settings and I did
find epic fairly playable, just not the best experience, I’d definitely look at running
with lower settings here.
Overwatch was tested playing with the bots, and it was running well at all setting levels,
above 60 FPS on average even at epic settings with the 1% lows not too far behind, no problems
at all with this one.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, you’ll definitely want to play this one
at lower settings to get the higher frame rates, as shown by the 1% lows there are frequent
dips in performance which just seems to be typical for this game.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and the average frame rates are pretty decent,
no problem at all running this game with decent frame rates.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and again running pretty well
at all setting levels, above 60 FPS at ultra settings in this test.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, the results weren’t too bad,
still running pretty well at the lower settings but this is a more demanding game.
Assassin’s Creed Origins was another that was tested with the built in benchmark, and
I don’t think it needs a really high frame rate to play, it should run alright at the
lower settings, but again it’s another demanding game.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay, so this should be a worst case scenario,
realistically you’ll probably get better results than this while actually playing,
and even in this test still above 60 FPS at ultra settings.
Testing Battlefield 1 in the first campaign mission ran pretty well, the results at ultra
and high settings don’t look too great but I actually found it to play alright, with
medium settings or below needed to average above 60 FPS.
DOOM was tested using Vulkan, and no issues at all with this one, close to 60 FPS even
at ultra settings and it played pretty smoothly.
Ghost Recon was tested with the built in benchmark and is a more demanding game, you’ll definitely
want to play this and other resource intensive games at lower settings.
Now for some benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
Overall the laptop is going alright in games, you just need to run with lower settings in
most cases due to the 1050 graphics, at least at 1080p.
Personally I’d probably be looking at a 1050Ti for myself, but it depends on the games
you play and the settings used, as shown by the range of titles tested results really
vary based on these factors.
As for overclocking all of the gaming benchmarks just shown had a 100MHz GPU core overclock
applied, but I was able to get this higher using MSI Afterburner.
I’ve just retested PUBG with both the graphics overclock and CPU undervolt applied to try
and give us best performance, and we’re just seeing a small improvement to performance
here, but keep in mind the default results were already with a 100MHz overclock applied,
so that closes the gap a little.
These Cinebench results give you an idea of CPU performance, and as discussed earlier
I wasn’t seeing any throttling under a CPU only workload, so there’s no difference
here with or without the CPU undervolt, the undervolting only helped in a combined CPU
and GPU load.
Just for reference I’ve also included the newer 8th gen 8300H CPU for comparison which
is a little ahead, but that’s also available in the newer ASUS FX504 laptop.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 128GB M.2 SATA SSD was getting above 500MB/s in sequential reads
and around 330MB/s in sequential writes.
Here are the speeds for the 1TB 5,400RPM hard drive that was installed, on the lower side
for this type of disk.
I’ve also tested the SD card slot using a V90 rated card, so the card shouldn’t
be the bottleneck and these speeds aren’t too bad.
As for the price here in Australia it goes for around $1500 AUD, although this particular
model has half the amount of memory, unfortunately I couldn’t find pricing for the 16GB model
I’ve got here.
Same deal in the US, the 8GB model on Amazon is around $900 USD, but you can check the
configuration options and up to date pricing using the link in the video description.
So what did you guys think of the FX503 gaming laptop from ASUS?
I’m happy to see that the older model at least didn’t have the same power limit throttling
issues that I noted in the newer FX504, I’m guessing that was introduced with the newer
8th gen CPUs.
It’s a pretty decent gaming laptop, personally I’d probably be looking at the model with
1060 but that’s just me, it’s also got a pretty good battery and the graphics overclocked
quite well in my unit, otherwise the only issue I had with it was the screen quality,
it didn’t get that bright and combined with lower contrast it just looked washed out,
although I suspect that would be less of an issue in 120Hz screen.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like to let me know
if you found the review useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.