Some laptops have their cooling system under the keyboard, which makes it extremely hard to reach, but this one right here ranks as one of the easier ones to service. Now while we are very satisfied with the temperatures we saw when we reviewed the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505D, if one day you want to replace the thermal paste, it’s not going to be that hard. What we don’t know is whether it will support M.2 SATA drives, but those drives aren’t really relevant anymore nowadays. Do note that it only supports the common M.2 2280 form factor and not the rarer M.2 2260 or 22110 size.
Or, a more affordable alternative would be the Phidisk WrathKeeper M.2 PCIe Gen3 x2 NVMe or the Kingston A1000 M.2 PCIe Gen3 x2 NVMe SSDs.
#Asus live update graphics not working upgrade
What’s really cool about this is the PCIe Gen3 x4 support, allowing you to upgrade with high performance M.2 PCIe SSDs like the Samsung 970 EVO if you want. Out of the box, there’s a 512GB Intel 660p M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe SSD in it. There’s a M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 slot here in the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505D. Just throw in a new drive, and you are set. ASUS kept this 2.5″ bay empty, so throwing in a 2.5″ drive won’t need any migration or backup. We have our Phidisk WrathKeeper here which we can slot into the 2.5″ bay. Of course, with a 2.5″ bay, it means that you have the option to pick either fast SATA SSDs, or opt for more storage, but slower HDDs. ASUS provided us with three screws in the box, allowing you to secure your drive in the caddy. Two screws hold in the caddy for the 2.5″ drive. You can max out the memory support with 32GB DDR4 2400 RAM (16GB x 2) if you want, just so that you can feed Chrome better. That’s something to note when getting your new SO-DIMMs: you won’t gain anything from spending more for faster RAM because 2400 MHz is the limit. ASUS threw in DDR4 2666 MHz RAM here, but due to the limitations of the AMD Ryzen mobile processors, they only run at up to 2400 MHz. Unlike some of the thinner and lighter gaming laptops produced by ASUS, the RAM here are all slotted ones, none of those non-upgradeable soldered RAM here. The amount of heatpipes are similar to ASUS’ higher end models, which is probably why we saw nice temperatures when we reviewed the laptop.
Once it’s all off, you can take a breather and marvel at the beautiful contrast of the bare copper heatpipes against the blue PCB in the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505D.