The Aorus X5 v8 is a gaming laptop featuring Intel's overclockable 8850H 6 core CPU, Nvidia
1070 graphics, and 144Hz screen with G-Sync, making it a pretty powerful gaming machine.
In this review we'll take a closer look at what the laptop has to offer, check out some
benchmarks, and help you decide if it's a laptop you should consider.
Let’s get right into the specs of my unit, there’s an Intel i7-8850H CPU which has
6 cores and can turbo up to 4.3GHz in single core workloads, or 4GHz with all 6 cores.
It can be overclocked, and out of the box this one was overclocked to run all 6 cores
and 4.3GHz.
In my unit there’s 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,666MHz in dual channel, but the two slots
can support up to 32GB.
For storage there’s a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD and 2.5” 1TB 7,200RPM hard drive in this
unit, but it can take up to two M.2 NVMe drives.
For the graphics there’s there’s an Nvidia 1070 which powers the 15.6 inch 1080p 144Hz
IPS display with G-Sync, and we’ll see how this performs soon in the benchmarks.
For the network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac WiFi,
as well as Bluetooth 4.1.
The lid and interior are both a matte black aluminium and the build quality is pretty
nice, it does have some plastic parts, such as the trim around the base, but overall it
feels quite solid.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 39cm in width, 27.2cm in depth, and 2.29cm
in height, so on the slightly bigger side for a 15 inch laptop.
The total weight of the laptop is listed at 2.5kg, although mine weighed slightly more
than this.
With the 200 watt power brick and cable for charging, the total weight increases to 3.5kg,
so approaching the heavier side of things.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 144Hz 1080p IPS panel with G-Sync, a pretty
sweet combination for gaming.
I found the viewing angles to be excellent, images are still perfectly clear even on sharp
angles, and it’s X-Rite PATONE calibrated and certified.
I’ve also measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
97% of sRGB, 67% of NTSC and 73% of AdobeRGB, so pretty good compared to many other laptops
I’ve tested, I’d happily use it for content creation in addition to gaming.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding.
I then take a long exposure photo to display any bleed, so this is a worst case scenario
test.
In my unit there’s actually a fair bit of bleed as you can see here, although I couldn’t
really notice it under normal lighting while playing games, but this will of course vary
between laptops.
While moving the display there was only a little bit of flex, it was fairly solid as
it’s metal and has two large hinges out towards the corners.
It can also be opened easily with one finger, demonstrating a fairly even weight distribution.
Above the display in the center is the 720p camera.
The video from the camera looks pretty blurry, even with some decent lighting.
The microphone doesn’t sound great, and the laptop’s fans are quite audible when
you’re not talking.
The keyboard was really nice to type with, I found the keys slightly clicky to press
but quiet, here’s how they sound to try and give you an idea.
It’s an RGB keyboard with individual key backlighting, so you can apply a lot of different
effects through the Aorus Fusion software.
Throughout the video the key lighting may look like it’s flickering, that’s just
to do with the shutter speed of my camera not matching the lights, in person it looks
fine.
On the left of the keyboard there are 5 programmable macro keys which can be configured through
the same Aorus Fusion software.
This took me some getting used to, I kept hitting G5 when I wanted to press control.
There was almost no keyboard flex while pushing down fairly hard, it felt very sturdy.
The touchpad uses ELAN drivers by default and was extremely smooth to the touch, it
felt great and it has a bronze coloured Aorus logo on it.
I was able to easily install precision drivers though which made it perfect, much like the
Aero 15x.
Moving onto the I/O on the left there’s a kensington lock, air exhaust vent, mini
DisplayPort 1.4 output, two USB Type-C ports, one is Thunderbolt 3 only while the other
is USB 3.1 Gen2, and 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks.
On the right there’s the SD card slot which supports UHS-II cards, two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A
ports, HDMI 2.0 port, and air exhaust vent.
On the back there’s the power input, two more USB 3.1 Type-A ports, one is Gen2 while
the other is Gen1, and gigabit ethernet port.
There’s nothing on the front other than some status LEDs towards the right.
Up on the lid there’s the Aorus logo, it’s got a mirrored finish and lights up white
when the laptop’s powered on.
Fingerprints show up but they aren’t too obvious on the matte finish, and they’re
fairly easy to wipe off.
Underneath there’s some rubber feet which do a very good job at preventing the laptop
from moving around, as well as rise it up slightly to let cool air in.
We’ve got air vents right above the CPU and GPU in the center, and above the intake
fans.
Two speakers are found underneath towards the front on the left and right sides, and
there’s more below the display.
They sound quite good for laptop speakers, there’s a little bass from the two subwoofers
and they sound fairly clear even at maximum volume.
The laptop can be opened up easily with a hex screwdriver bit, and inside we can see
the 7 total heatpipes.
We’ve also got our two M.2 slots which both support NVMe drives, and the WiFi card slot,
as well as a single 2.5” drive bay which is populated with our 1TB hard drive.
The two RAM slots are also easily accessible here towards the back of the laptop, so it’s
pretty good in terms of overall accessibility.
Powering the laptop is a 94 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 3 hours and 24 minutes.
I wasn’t able to disable G-Sync through the software and there was no option in the
BIOS, so we’re stuck with the Nvidia 1070 graphics burning extra power as it can’t
swap over to the Intel integrated graphics instead.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 11 minutes, a fairly nice result.
The battery is quite large and it does alright despite not being able to use the Intel graphics,
but that’s generally a downside of having G-Sync.
For the first time I’ve also tested battery life while undervolting the CPU, we don’t
really see any difference in the YouTube test as the CPU isn’t really doing much work,
but while gaming it does appear that we can get a little more noticeable improvement,
although it wasn’t really anything major.
Temperature testing was done with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celsius, it’s
approaching winter here so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment.
At idle both the CPU and GPU sat below 40 degrees celsius, otherwise it was running
fairly warm.
The gaming result in green was done playing PUBG at high settings with the fans on default
speeds.
The yellow bar just above this was also from playing PUBG, but with the CPU undervolted
and CPU and GPU overclocked.
Undervolting the CPU alone was enough to drop the temperatures a little even while overclocked,
and we’ll see how this affected clock speeds in the next graph.
Full Load was tested with Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark running at the same time, and with
the fans at both default speed or maxed out the temperature was the same, as the fans
were very close to full speed already, but you’ll hear this for yourself shortly.
Finally the purple bar is the same stress test but with undervolting and overclocking
applied, and we can see this gave us just a slightly better GPU temperature.
At 90 degrees the CPU was thermal throttling, it didn’t go above this and the clock speeds
suffer as a result.
Here are the average clock speeds over all 6 cores while testing so you can see any throttling.
While gaming with PUBG at stock settings no throttling was observed, we can see all CPU
cores averaged around 4GHz which is the all core turbo speed of the 8850H.
While overclocked all cores ran just under 4.3GHz, despite having them set to 4.4GHz,
and this appeared to be due to power limit throttling, this was improved a bit with the
undervolt though.
In the stress tests there was some thermal throttling taking place, even with the fans
on maximum, despite this undervolting the CPU did still improve things quite a bit,
as shown in red the CPU cores were around 500MHz faster as a result of the CPU undervolt
and only just barely throttling.
If the GPU load was removed completely the CPU temperature would drop quite a bit into
the low 80s.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests.
Without the undervolt the CPU was power limit throttling rather than thermal throttling,
thermal throttling was only happening with a combined CPU and GPU workload.
Undervolting the CPU not only dropped the temperatures as shown earlier, but also reduced
the power limit throttling, resulting in the higher clock speeds shown here.
I did attempt GPU undervolting, but I wasn’t able to see any more than a 1 degree difference
so didn’t bother retesting everything.
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 it’s quite cool.
While gaming this increases to about 44 degrees and is a little warm to the touch in the center,
but not too bad, and I saw a very similar result while running the stress tests, however
the wrist rests and right side of the keyboard stayed fairly cool in comparison.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle the fan was still audible but it was fairly quiet.
While running the stress test and while gaming the total system volumes don’t change much,
and they were only just behind the full fan speed.
Going to full fan speed didn’t really change the temperatures as it was basically already
close to maxing out anyway and it was fairly loud.
I’ll also note that there was no noticeable coil whine while testing in my unit.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
All tests were run at 1080p with the latest Nvidia drivers and Windows updates to date
installed.
All tests were run with all 6 CPU cores overclocked to 4.3GHz, as this seemed to be the out of
the box configuration.
The spec sheet does note that it’s overclocked to 4.3GHz, so this seems to make sense, and
it was perfectly stable for me so I left it in place.
Undervolting and GPU overclocking were not done at this point.
Starting out with Fortnite I was able to utilize the 144Hz refresh rate of the display at high
settings or lower, however to me it still ran really well at max settings too.
The 1% lows can drop quite a bit compared to the averages as this game greatly depends
on what’s going on and what other players are doing, which also means you should take
the results with a grain of salt.
Overwatch was fairly similar in terms of the average frame rates, just playing with the
bots we were able to surpass the refresh rate of the display at high settings or lower,
and the 1% lows aren’t very low here so it always felt nice and smooth.
CS:GO was averaging well above what the refresh rate of the display could output, the 1% lows
drop down a lot in this test due to the smokes, but they’re still fairly high and can be
improved by dropping the settings down.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, but take the results with a grain of salt,
as like Fortnite it will depend on what’s going on in the game, so the results can vary
quite a lot, as shown by the 1% lows which are quite a bit lower than the averages.
I’ve added Far Cry 5 due to popular demand and I’m just using the built in benchmark.
The frame rate seems pretty decent, and while having a quick play it seemed to run pretty
well.
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 intensive test we’re always averaging above 100 FPS.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark and we’re seeing quite high
frame rates at all setting levels, and while the 1% lows are a fair bit behind realistically
they’re still quite high, so it should play great with the 144Hz screen.
Battlefield 1 also ran quite well, however although the average frame rates were quite
high the 1% lows can drop down quite a bit during intense fights, however to me it still
felt nice and smooth, even 80 FPS average dips aren’t that terrible, at least from
someone that mostly uses a 60Hz monitor.
The witcher 3 doesn’t really need a high frame rate to enjoy, and even on ultra settings
to me it played great, however we can improve the frame rates quite a bit by lowering settings
if needed.
Rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and the results are quite
good with over 100 FPS even at maximum settings.
Ghost recon is a fairly resource intensive game, and was again tested with the built
in benchmark.
Although ultra settings are quite low, this is always the case in this game.
At very high or lower it was definitely playable, despite the occasional dips as shown in the
1% lows.
Watchdogs 2 is another fairly resource intensive game, but is another that I personally think
doesn’t need a high frame rate to play.
I can play this with 40 FPS averages no problem, so with 1% lows higher than this even at ultra
settings it played really well.
DOOM was tested using vulkan, and even at ultra settings I was able to average above
the refresh rate of the display, to me it always felt nice and smooth even during intense
fights.
I’ve got a couple more games covered in the dedicated gaming benchmark video if you’re
interested.
Now onto the 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 I thought that these were some nice results, the Intel i7-8850H CPU and Nvidia
1070 graphics are quite a powerful combination and are able to put the 144Hz screen to work
in a number of games, although of course depending on the games you may need to lower the settings
to get the necessary frame rates.
As for overclocking, the gaming benchmarks shown previously are already CPU overclocked
with all cores running around 4.3GHz, and in games I wasn’t able to push much above
this due to power limit throttling anyway.
Slightly higher clock speeds were possible in CPU only testing, as we saw earlier.
As I was only able to apply a 120MHz GPU overclock this didn’t really make enough difference
to justify the time spent redoing all the tests, as those results depend on the silicon
lottery anyway.
I’ve just quickly got some CPU benchmarks here to show you how the popular 8750H and
7700HQ from the last generation compare with the 8850H in the Aorus X5.
We can see that it’s a decent step up from the 7th generation as we’ve got two extra
cores with slightly faster single threaded clock speeds, and we can see there’s a nice
little boost with the 4.4GHz all core overclock applied, but I plan on comparing this more
in a dedicated future comparison video.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD was getting above 2.3GB/s in sequential reads
and around 1.5GB/s in sequential writes, so it’s going quite well, while the 1TB 7,200RPM
hard drive gets around 110MB/s in both, fairly typical for a hard drive.
I’ve also tested the UHS-II SD card slot using a v90 rated card, and we can see that
it’s basically able to max it out, this now takes the lead for fastest SD slot I’ve
tested so far.
At idle the M.2 drive sat at around 58 degrees celsius, and peaked at 81 while constantly
reading and writing for around 10 minutes, so it was quite warm, but this will vary depending
on the model of drive installed.
As for the price the Aorus X5 v8 laptop comes in at around $3,800 AUD here in Australia
at the time of recording, or about $2,600 USD in the US.
It’s definitely not cheap, but that’s always going to be the case with high end
specs like this in a laptop.
So what did you guys think of the Aorus X5 v8 gaming laptop?
Overall I thought it was a very capable and powerful gaming machine thanks to the 6 core
8850H, Nvidia 1070 graphics, and 144Hz screen with G-Sync.
You’ll be able to play any game no problems on it.
This powerful hardware and lack of ability to swap over to integrated graphics does mean
that the battery life suffers, even though the battery is quite large.
The build quality of the laptop is very nice and premium feeling and I think it looks great.
The only issues I had were the temperatures and backlight bleed.
It runs fairly warm and loud even with undervolting applied, and power and thermal throttling
was a factor under heavy load, regardless it was still performing very well as we’ve
seen, and the noise can be mitigated by just wearing headphones.
As you saw this unit had quite a bit of backlight bleed present, but it’s difficult to know
if that’s common as it will vary between laptops, hopefully it’s just an issue with
this one.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the review useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.