review: Asus 'TUF Gaming' FX504G
2023.03.08 (updated : 2023.08.27)
We bought this laptop for my wife in the autumn of 2018. As she was moving into currency trading and needed a laptop with a GPU, a numeric keypad, and a large screen. Unfortunately, this laptop is anything but "tuf" - it's a disaster.
As a laptop with a GPU, you would expect that the system is configured to use the GPU for whatever purpose you put it to. It wasn't the case with this system, however. My wife's currency trading apps were very sluggish, worse by far than they'd been on the antique Macbook Air she'd been using previous. I looked into it and discovered that I needed to download a software utility to manage the GPU. This isn't the end of the world, and we shortly had the software running with the GPU.
But the system performance was still quite poor. The FX software does a lot of disk activity, and I quickly learned that the "hybrid" SSD/hard drive in the laptop was the bottleneck. So, shortly after buying the PC I was out of pocket for an NVME M.2 drive. This improved the performance a great deal, but it also added substantially to the price of the whole system.
The laptop passed out of warranty after a year. Right on cue, it developed hardware problems. It developed a strange hyper-flexibility in the hinges, which started making cracking noises. Within a matter of weeks, the hinges had clearly separated from the frame of the lid. Asus support was no help, the retailer (Canada Computers) was no help, and my wife's supposed trading system was a wreck. I'd lost my job and had found another in Japan, so we decided to put off replacing it as long as we could. We went to Laptop Specialist to get it looked at, and we were told that the hinges were made of plastic. The hinges had become detached from the entirely plastic lid, and the only thing that could be done was to use some rivets to reinforce the thing.
That's what we did, and for a time it worked well enough. But inevitably the plastic around the rivets began to give way, and within three years we had replaced the laptop. Not because of its age or because it didn't function, but because the lid's hinges had fallen apart. They call it "TUF" but I can't imagine what they mean.
the trouble with Asus
If this was an isolated matter, it wouldn't be so bad. But I'd bought an Asus AX1500 router that was highlighted in a "Lifehacker" article and found that after a year its performance had dwindled to the point that it was underperforming a separate Wifi router I had from the 806.11n days. Something has gone wrong at Asus and I can't recommend their products.
That makes two of us. Or potentially more than two of us, if by the use of the term 'chix' in your email address, you're implying the presence of more than one person behind this comment.
Dunno why I'm so slack, honestly. One hobby ultimately gets in the way of another, I suppose.
2003
i think that who ever owns this web should update a lot more