Welcome back to the channel guys! Today we're super excited to talk
about the 2021 Gigabyte AERO 15 gaming and entertainment laptop!
finally a computer that's built for gamers and creatives i can't wait to show you the power
of this thing make sure to like and subscribe with notifications turned on to stay in the know
about more great products like this keep it like tears we dive into this computer's performance
and gaming benchmarks can it really edit 8k in real time we're going to talk about the wi-fi
card controversy fan noise tests design and build quality review of the internals heat tests battery
tests some cool tips and tricks and near the end our overall take on this machine listing out the
top pros and cons that you need to be aware of before spending thousands of dollars on this
machine i've also read through almost a thousand youtube comments to make sure that i address the
most common unanswered questions that people have about this computer this model has a 15 inch 4k
oled display with an i7 processor complemented by an rtx 3080 graphics card and if you want
to get super technical here's the more specific specs and dimensions so starting with the design
the arrow 15 is a very simple and minimalist design the top of the lid hosts a bright white
illuminated arrow logo complemented by a strip of carbon fiber-like material on the bottom overall
it feels pretty sturdy with its aluminum chassis and aluminum lid these strong materials resulted
in the least amount of keyboard flex that i've ever seen in a laptop this thing is solid screen
flex was about average and while the hinges felt really smooth i feel like they were a little too
loose because screen wobble was definitely above average part of this is due to these super thin
bezels which gave this computer an incredible 89 screen to body ratio by the way this screen
boasts the world's first three millimeter thin bezel display too thin for a webcam apparently
that was awkwardly placed here at the bottom stick around for our test later in the video
showing you how strange that looks stay with me though because there's some great things
that this laptop can do the keyboard layout was pretty impressive for a 15 inch laptop
the key size and travel distance was just about as comfortable as my 17-inch alienware laptop
they were very quiet as well but still had a nice solid press to them this is what it sounds like
i was actually super impressed with how they were able to engineer this keyboard to utilize
every single inch of the chassis this gave it enough room for a full-size number pad
on a 15-inch laptop unlike some laptops which just created really skinny number keys
lenovo the per-key rgb lighting was pretty cool as well as were some of the animations but one thing
that was lacking was an illuminated indicator for the caps lock and numb lock something that's
pretty standard on most laptops the touchpad was a little too small for my taste and that fingerprint
sensor while yes it's cool and worked super fast it removed even more of the usable space from the
already cramped track pad they unfortunately dedicated the entire backside of the laptop to
exhaust ventilation and put the ports on the sides so you would hope with all that ventilation that
would mean great thermals and groundbreaking performance right we'll show you those results
here in a bit the ports are split pretty evenly between the left and right sides on the left
we've got an rj45 ethernet jack a headphone and microphone jack a usb 3.2 gen 1 port a mini
displayport 1.4 and the all-new hdmi 2.1 which is capable of not just 4k but 4k at 120 hertz that's
pretty impressive and then on the right side we have two more usb 3.2 gen 1 type a ports the all
new thunderbolt 4 port which is capable of up to 40 gigabits per second eight times faster than usb
3.1 it's compatible with usbc and also supports 4k output as well a lot of people are asking if you
can charge the computer with it and the answer is no you can't next to that we have a uhs2 sd card
reader capable of speeds of up to 300 megabytes per second which is the fastest available right
now and then next to that you've got a power port and another exhaust vent if you're looking
for a future-proof machine that sd card reader the thunderbolt 4 port and that hdmi 2.1 port
should definitely put this computer at the top of that wish list moving on to the internals
starting at the top you can see we've got two 71 blade fans and five heat pipes which together are
supposed to result in 30 better cooling so we'll show you those results here in a bit underneath
that we've got our two upgradable ram slots there in the middle and next to that the infamous wi-fi
card i can't tell you how many comments i've seen about wi-fi issues with this laptop have they
fixed it in this design well it definitely appears that way i ran a test for 24 hours straight and
the results showed zero percent downtime not once did it lose connection then we've got two slots
for ssds right now we just have one but you can put another one right here this ssd drive is a
big deal as it's pcie 4 which is twice as fast as the previous generation then we've got a massive
99 watt hour battery sandwiched between two tiny little speakers so the battery should be pretty
amazing with how big it is i was actually pretty disappointed with battery life at 50 brightness
and battery saver mode i only got 1.5 hours hd streaming 2 hours of web surfing and it also took
a full two hours to recharge back to 100 display quality just wow this is where this machine truly
shines because it's an oled display the blacks just look incredible it's x right calibrated and
pantone validated so colors just look incredible thermals all this power in such a small and thin
laptop but does it get rid of the heat quick enough here are the cpu and gpu temperatures of
each game maxing them out at their highest preset settings i was actually pretty impressed with how
cool this machine was in turbo mode seriously how does it get rid of heat that quick this was one of
the coolest high-performing thin laptops that i've ever used and the temperatures on the outside of
the laptop were about average with the chassis in the 90s and the keyboard in the lower 100s
okay so fan noise i've heard a lot of complains about the fan noise are they warranted sort of the
majority of the time when you're just surfing the web they're not that loud measuring in at
only 41 decibels in quiet mode when gaming they're a bit louder at about 52 decibels
but if you force it to that insane full speed turbo mode you get a fairly loud 58.7 decibels
but honestly that mode was pretty much overkill and didn't really offer that much of a benefit
over the gaming mode performance and gaming benchmarks it's capable of dynamic boost but no
whisper mode and it doesn't have advanced optimus or amok switch and the maximum graphics power of
this gpu is 105 watts for all the creatives out there we got some pretty great puget benchmark
scores for photoshop we got a score of 832 for davinci resolve we got a score of 1063 and for
adobe premiere we got a whopping 6.82 so can it really edit in 4k we brought in some 8k
footage from the puget benchmark files and as you can see here yes it can without even down
resin the preview window we got smooth 8k however 8k red footage was understandably
not capable of real-time editing and these were the blazing fast speeds of the pcie 4
ssd card now there's no undervolting and no gpu overclocking but i was pretty impressed with how
the gigabyte software was able to intelligently choose between the modes that were best depending
on what you were doing whether it be creative mode or gaming mode and then for geekbench 5 we got a
single core score of 1548 and a multi-core score of 80-33 for cinebench r23 we got a multi-core
score of 11 851 and a single core score of 1510 and for 3dmark we got an overall score of 95.33
and a graphics score of 97.19 and a cpu score of 8601 and here are the frames per second we
got with each game at 1080p maxing them out at their highest preset settings and here are the
frames per second we got at 4k with the same max settings for the sound quality i'm just
gonna say i was pretty unimpressed they hype it up with that fancy dts-x ultra word but those tiny
speakers were on the lower end of what i've been getting accustomed to with most gaming laptops
it also wasn't very loud i tested the volume playing the best band of all time tenacious d
and it measured at only 87.9 decibels at maximum volume okay so this webcam i did appreciate this
privacy cover right here but i just could not get over how awkward this placement was well
this is probably the most unflattering and grainy webcam that i've seen on any of my gaming laptops
wow look at that when you're using the keys your fingers actually obstruct your face that is super
awkward if i'm typing or taking notes on a zoom call just a second boss let me type those notes
however because of this extra lip here on the bezel i was comfortably able to use my external
high quality webcam with this laptop instead without it covering up the screen in any way
software the gigabyte control center was probably my least favorite control center that i've used on
any of my gaming machines it offered basics like cpu and gpu percentages and memory loading and
disk used space one thing i didn't like is that you had to minimize everything just to view it
you couldn't actually click on it and see it the sorting was just kind of weird on it now this ai
tab right here was pretty cool though it uses something called microsoft azure ai
which this computer boasts is the world's first ai laptop you've got overclocking modes for creators
or gamers or if you want things to be really silent you can go into power saving silence
mode which makes things super quiet or if you're crazy you can just go straight into turbo mode
but just setting this to ai was pretty awesome because it actively selected creator mode or
gamer mode depending on whether you opened up a game or an app the manager was pretty standard
it had a lot of really redundant controls that you can adjust pretty much anywhere it offered
options for battery modes for power saver mode or balanced or high performance if you just want all
the power that you can get and then this was kind of cool a charging policy that basically
customize at what percentage you want the battery to stop charging this has been known
to prolong the overall lifespan of a battery the fusion section was pretty cool lets you select
your different animations but then you can go into custom and actually manually adjust
and change each key based on your needs and then device setting lets you select your
different thermal fan profiles but then deep control this is where it gets legit
i call this jfan mode this is my custom justin tech thermal fan mode it basically jacks your
stuff up and then in smart utilities just completely avoid smart utilities because
when it says there's a driver available it's lying every time that it said there's a driver available
it was actually pointing me to the last driver instead of the most recent one
so it was basically one driver behind on what it thought was the latest so my overall top reasons
you might want to pass on this computer number one is the small touch pad number two is the
webcam at the bottom of the screen number three no illuminated numslock or caps lock indicators
number four was the reflective screen which i prefer more matted finish
and number five was the ports coming out the sides rather than on the back
these honestly were a lot of little things though that aren't that big of a deal individually
many of these won't matter to most users my favorite reasons you should buy this machine
number one is that amazing display with its super blacks an incredibly rich color number two is its
future proof performance being able to handle 8k editing means that all you creators out there
will be able to chew through your 4k edits like butter and having the fastest ssd hard drive with
pcie 4 and the fastest port with thunderbolt 4 was just the icing on the cake of super speeds
and number three was the thermals it was a little awkward having all the cords coming out the sides
but honestly dedicating the entire backside to exhaust ventilation helped tremendously with heat
dissipation this led to low temperatures which helped prevent throttling and maximize performance
aside from several small nitpicking dislikes this is an amazing laptop that'll make both creators
and gamers happy it's on the pricey side but it is a super future-proof machine if you don't care
about creative and only gaming i recommend that you forgo the 4k version and just get the 1080p
version to maximize fps guys remember every friday i do a giveaway that randomly selects
someone who's interacted with this channel so make sure to like comment and subscribe
with notifications turned on and keep an eye out for that each week before i announce today's
winner if you're gonna be getting this laptop please remember to use my affiliate links in the
description below as i get a small commission at no cost to you for every single purchase
made i can only keep doing youtube full time with your help and the winner for this week is
alan thomas thanks for watching guys i love you guys god bless