In this video I’ll be upgrading my Gigabyte Aero 15x laptop, I’ll be replacing the thermal
paste with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, as well as upgrading the memory, WiFi card and adding
in a new SSD. I’ll go through all the selected parts and tell you why I’ve picked them,
and I’ll also show before and after performance in terms of thermals, gaming, and video editing
to show how the upgrades help.
As you may know I recently got a Gigabyte Aero 15x laptop, primarily to be used for
editing these videos while travelling. Out of the box the Aero 15x comes with one 16GB
stick of DDR4-2666 memory, so it’s running in single channel. As I’ve shown in a previous
video, we can get a nice performance improvement with dual channel memory.
First I’ll go through all the parts I’ve bought for the upgrade, walk you through the
upgrade process, then go through some benchmarks to show the before and after differences.
After contacting Gigabyte support, they advised that only the following memory kits are officially
supported. If you’re looking at upgrading memory I’d highly suggest going by this
list, as there are many stories online of people trying to install other modules only
to find they don’t work. I’m sure other modules out there do work, but if you can
get officially supported memory then may as well to avoid possible problems, but more
on this later.
My laptop has the 16GB stick of V-Color memory listed down the bottom, originally I thought
I’d just buy a second stick of it and be done, but as it turns out no one really seems
to be selling them, they seem a little rare which sucks. My next plan was to buy two replacement
sticks then sell the V-Color one later.
I found that Amazon were selling the Kingston memory listed on the supported list, so bought
two 16gb sticks from the US shipped here to Australia, you can check the links in the
description for updated pricing on everything I used in the upgrade too.
Out of the box the Aero 15x also came with a 512GB NVMe SSD which performs pretty well,
but it does have two NVMe capable M.2 slots in total. While this is honestly probably
enough space for me, SSDs have lowered quite a bit in price lately, and I thought having
a nice large amount of space for me to dump video files onto would be useful. With this
in mind I bought a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO for the second M.2 slot, so it’s an NVMe SSD
although write performance will drop if the cache fills up. I did consider buying a PRO
drive to avoid this issue, but honestly for video editing I’ll mostly be doing reads
rather than writes so I think this is perfectly fine for my use case, and the slightly lower
read and write speeds are still pretty high.
The Aero 15x also comes with an Intel Wireless-AC 8260 card, which has a max speed of 867 Mbps.
I’ve picked up a newer 9260 card for just $15 which doubles this max speed to 1.73 Gbps,
and it achieves this with multi-user MIMO, which will of course depend on the wireless
access point we’re connecting to and what it supports. The 9260 card also has Bluetooth
version 5 while the 8260 has version 4.2, so that also gives us double the speed and
four times the range for bluetooth, so for just $15 we’re pretty much doubling all
our wireless capabilities, again you can find up to date prices in the description.
If you caught my Aero 15x thermal testing video, you’ll remember that under high levels
of load I did see some thermal throttling, although I could reduce this for the most
part by undervolting the CPU. To try and improve this, I’ve bought some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
paste to repaste the CPU and GPU, as it’s got one of the best thermal conductivity ratings
for non-conductive paste. Liquid metal is also an option and would give much better
results, but I decided not to take that path here. I’m not sure if I’ll need them,
but I’ve also bought some EK 0.5mm and 1mm thermal pads, as the heatsinks also come into
contact with VRM chips, but we’ll see that once we get inside. If you’re getting pads
I’d suggest looking for Fujipoly which have higher thermal conductivity, unfortunately
I wasn’t easily able to buy them in Australia.
Now let’s get into the actual upgrade process. To open the Aero 15x up you’re going to
need a TR6 screwdriver bit, use it to remove the 13 screws and take off the bottom panel,
I did this using a plastic pry tool. At this point I’m going to unplug and remove the
battery before getting to work and then start unscrewing the screws holding the heatsink
in with a phillips head screwdriver.
Quick disclaimer before we get into the repasting, I’ve never done this before so this is my
first time, this isn’t meant to be an in depth guide, I’m just showing what I’ve
done.
You can remove the old paste with isopropyl alcohol and a cloth, but I’ve got some Arctic
Silver ArctiClean, which has both a thermal material remover and thermal surface purifier.
The first bottle is used to remove thermal compound while the second is used to prepare
the surface for new thermal material, but these are by no means required, this is just
what I’m using.
You can see that in addition to the CPU and GPU dies, there’s thermal compound on a
few other chips too. My concern going in was that a thicker paste may have been used here
rather than the same paste as the CPU and GPU, which would be required if there was
a bit of a gap between the chips and heatsink. While removing it, it did appear to be a bit
thicker. This is why I decided to use some 0.5mm thermal pads, but it may have just been
possible to use some other paste instead. I was also concerned about the thickness of
the pads, if they were too thick I might risk improper contact with the CPU and GPU, although
this is pretty unlikely as the pads should compress under pressure, and 0.5mm is pretty
thin anyway.
After cleaning all surfaces, cutting and applying the pads I applied the Kryonaut paste with
the provided tool onto the CPU and GPU dies. Next I put the heatsink back in place, screwed
it in and plugged the two fan cables back into the motherboard, so with that complete
let’s look at the before and after differences.
Unfortunately there was almost no temperature difference after the repaste, the only difference
I saw was just 1 degree lower after the repaste on both CPU and graphics while gaming, but
otherwise it seems like the original paste was about the same, still thermal throttling
even with the CPU undervolted when under high load at 90c.
When we look at the actual clock speeds though, apart from exporting a video in Adobe Premiere
I was actually seeing slightly lower clock speeds after the repasting due to the thermal
throttling, so a bit sad that I get less performance now with the same temperatures, I guess the
next step would be to try again in case I messed it up somehow or go with liquid metal.
Installing the second M.2 SSD was straightforward, simply remove the screw, plug in the drive,
and screw it in place. The speeds from the new drive were actually a fair bit better
compared to the original disk, I could have swapped them to use the faster one for the
primary drive but this is fine.
Next up the WiFi card, first up you’ll want to carefully lift up the two antenna cables
attached to the card, keeping in mind which cable was on which connector. Unscrew the
WiFi card and remove it, insert the new WiFi card, screw it in, and reconnect the antenna
cables in the same order. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to properly test the WiFi
card upgrade, as my wireless access point is pretty old and can’t properly make use
of the features.
Now let’s talk about the final and most difficult upgrade, the memory. As mentioned
before I originally planned on installing two new sticks. Unfortunately when I did this,
the laptop would just boot with a black screen and was not usable, a common problem others
have reported when attempting memory upgrades with this laptop. I’m not sure why this
was the case, considering I specifically bought memory listed as supported, it also didn’t
boot with just one of my new sticks installed, either stick in either slot did not work and
both didn’t work together. The only combination that I found to work was the existing V-Color
stick in the opposite slot it came in with one of my new sticks in the first slot and
this was with the latest FB08 BIOS. In this configuration it’s apparently running at
DDR4-2400 rather than 2666, so not perfect, but the times are CL17 and will do for now
as I still get the benefits of dual channel and also now a total of 32GB.
I let memtest run for 24 hours just to try and check for any obvious problems with the
memory, and after all passes completed there were no errors detected. I’m not really
sure why I have to use the original V-color memory, but I guess at least it works.
I’ve tested a few games to see how going from single to dual channel helps improve
performance with the Aero 15x.
Far Cry 5 was tested with the built in benchmark, and we can see there’s a fair improvement
with the dual channel memory. At ultra settings there was a 15.7% improvement to average FPS,
and a larger 27.8% improvement to the 1% low.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical benchmark, and there was a larger 44% improvement to
average FPS with all settings maxed out, while there was an 18% improvement to the 1% low.
PUBG was tested with the replay feature, and I used the exact same replay with both single
and dual channel memory. At ultra settings there was a 28% improvement to average frame
rate, and a larger 38% improvement to the 1% low.
I’ve also tested exporting a 4K video with Adobe Premiere, and we’re seeing the dual
channel memory complete the task over 20% faster than the single channel configuration,
so we’re seeing quite a bit improvement with dual channel despite the suboptimal speeds.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the upgrades, the increased SSD space is nice, the extra
WiFi speed may be useful when I’m in a hotel uploading 4K video, and the dual channel memory
configuration will help improve gaming and video export times. It’s not ideal that
the paste change didn’t help as much as I’d hoped with the thermal throttling that
happens even with the CPU undervolted, other people reported mixed results including improvements
to no change, so I guess my paste was alright from the start, still interesting to know.
It could be worth attempting again with the pads removed and using paste instead, but
to be honest I can’t really be bothered experimenting further, so for now I’ll just
leave it as it is, as I’ll need it in working order soon for CES.
Let me know what sort of upgrades you’ve got planned for your laptop, and hopefully
some of the information has been useful, as I know many of you were waiting for this video
before upgrading your own laptops, so I’d definitely be interested in hearing, especially
your experience with memory upgrades, the Aero 15x in particular seems to be pretty
picky, and as usual if you’re new here don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos
like this one.