The Gigabyte Aero 15x is a seriously impressive laptop, featuring a 6 core CPU, 1070 Max-Q
graphics, 144Hz screen and large 94 watt hour battery packed into such a small space.
Let’s find out what the laptop has to offer as well as how well it performs through various
benchmarks to help you decide if it’s worth buying.
Let’s start by checking out the specs of the hardware.
This is the first laptop I’ve tested with Intel’s new 8th generation Coffee Lake mobile
chips, and we’ve got an i7 8750H CPU here which has a base clock speed of 2.2GHz but
can turbo all the way up to 4.1GHz in single core workloads.
There’s 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,666MHz in single channel, however the two slots can
support up to 32GB.
For storage there’s a 512GB M.2 NVME SSD installed, but there’s also a second M.2
NVME slot so you can upgrade the storage further.
For the graphics there’s an Nvidia 1070 Max-Q, and this one has a 15.6 inch 1080p
144Hz IPS panel, however it’s also available in 4K, 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 4.2.
The lid and interior are a matte black aluminium, and overall the body of the laptop felt nice
and solid, the build quality seems quite good and I didn’t notice any overly sharp edges,
which are plastic.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 35.6cm in width, 25cm in depth, and 1.89cm
in height, so it’s fairly small for a 15 inch laptop due to the thin screen and small
bezels.
The total weight of the laptop is listed at around 2.0kg with the battery, and mine weighed
close to this.
With the 180w power brick and cable for charging, the total weight increases to 2.7kg, so overall
it’s quite light and portable.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 144Hz 1080p IPS matte panel, no G-Sync available
here, although I don’t personally miss it on high refresh rate displays anyway, it’s
more beneficial at around the 60Hz range.
The viewing angles are excellent, the colours are still clear even on sharp angles.
As you’ve probably noticed it’s also got very thin bezels on the sides and at the top,
they’re just 5mm thin.
You can attach up to 3 external displays too, using the 40gbps thunderbolt 3, mini displayport,
or hdmi ports.
I’ve also measured the colours produced by the 1080p screen using the Spyder 5 Pro,
and my results returned 93% of sRGB, 64% of NTSC and 69% of AdobeRGB, so nothing incredible
but not too bad, I’d happily use it for content creation.
The panel in the 4K model is listed as 100% sRGB, so you’ve got that option if you want
a more accurate panel.
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.
As you can see there does appear to be a little bleed here, but it’s very minor and I could
only just make it out with my own eyes, 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
the hinge mechanism runs along most of the base of the laptop.
It can also be opened easily with one finger, demonstrating a fairly even weight distribution.
As the bezels around the display are so thin, the only spot for the 720p camera is underneath
the display.
The camera doesn’t look too good even with decent lighting, still quite grainy, and as
it’s placed low you get the classic up the nose view.
The microphone isn’t that great either, but you'll be able to judge both for yourself.
Next to the camera there’s a light sensor, and the software will automatically adjust
the screen brightness appropriately based on the room lighting, personally I found this
a little annoying and disabled it, but it’s an option.
The keyboard was really nice to type with, I found the keys slightly clicky to press,
here’s how they sound just to give you an idea.
It’s an RGB keyboard with individual key backlighting, so you can apply a lot of different
effects through the Gigabyte 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 the lighting
is completely solid and does not flicker at all.
There was a bit of keyboard flex while pushing down fairly hard, but this wasn’t an issue
at all while typing normally, overall it felt fairly sturdy.
The touchpad uses ELAN drivers and was extremely smooth to the touch, it felt great.
It presses down anywhere to click, but you have to press in the bottom right corner to
right click.
I got used to this in the end, but in general wasn’t a fan, as I personally prefer the
two finger press anywhere right click system.
Moving onto the I/O on the left there’s the ethernet port, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A port,
HDMI 2.0 port, mini DisplayPort 1.4 output, and 3.5mm audio combo jack.
On the right there’s an SD card reader, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port with thunderbolt
support, two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, power input, and kensington lock.
There’s nothing on the front other than some status LEDs towards the right, and nothing
at all on the back.
Up on the lid there’s the Gigabyte logo which lights up white while the laptop is
powered on, and down the bottom there’s this carbon fiber looking texture.
Fingerprints do show up, but they’re fairly easy to wipe away.
Underneath there’s some air intakes towards the back to keep everything cool, as well
as some rubber feet which do a good job at stopping the laptop from easily moving around.
The hot air is exhausted out the back just below the monitor, so this area heats up quite
a bit as we’ll see soon.
The two speakers are found underneath towards the front corners.
They sound alright, not too bad, minimal bass but they stay clear even at loud volumes.
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 6 hours and 15 minutes.
The laptop was using the Intel integrated graphics, thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 54 minutes.
This is the best battery life in a laptop I’ve seen out of all the laptops featured
on the channel, and considering the fairly high end specs inside I was very impressed
by the huge battery.
During normal use with an ambient room temperature of 22 degrees celsius, the CPU and GPU both
idled in the mid 30s, and here are the external temperatures of the laptop where you’ll
actually be putting your hands, getting to around 30 degrees in the center.
I’ve tested gaming by playing PUBG at high settings with default fan speeds for half
an hour and the temps for that are shown in green, a little CPU thermal throttling was
observed in this test.
While gaming the keyboard area got into the high 40s but the rest was surprisingly cool,
the left and right sides of the keyboard actually felt cold.
Full CPU and GPU load was tested with both Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark running at
the same time.
With the default fan profile in use I was seeing some CPU throttling, not too surprising
considering there’s 6 cores maxed out, but keep in mind most real world applications
won’t actually act this way, this is a stress test.
Again the keyboard area is similar to before, high 40s in the center and cool sides.
The bottom of the laptop does get quite hot, so I don’t recommend using it on your lap
under high levels of load.
By manually maxing out the fans the temperatures hardly change and the throttling is still
taking place, but the overall system volume increases quite a lot, as you’ll hear soon.
The keyboard area looks about the same, perhaps just a touch cooler now.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to each of these
tests.
At idle I could only just hear the fan, while gaming it’s actually slightly quieter than
many other thicker and less powerful laptops that I’ve tested, so it seems like the max-q
graphics may actually be helping out there.
With the fans maxed out it does get fairly loud though for little cooling improvements.
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, and older Nvidia 388.92 drivers were in use.
I’m still not 100% about this, but it seems that the Aero 15x thinks these are the newest
available drivers for it, and they’re what's available through the Gigabyte website as
of a couple of weeks ago.
I tried to manually install the latest from Nvidia but it failed, so this seems to be
the newest available here.
I’ll also quickly note that as the laptop comes with single channel memory, small improvements
could be had by upgrading to dual channel in some games.
By popular demand I’ve started testing Fortnite, and with the lowest settings we’re averaging
144 FPS which fully utilizes the 144Hz display in the laptop, but I thought it felt nice
and smooth even maxed out.
Overwatch was fairly similar, we’re getting fairly high frame rates and at epic it ran
nice and smoothly for me, as shown by the fairly high 1% low frame rates.
CS:GO was averaging just under the maximum refresh rate of the display, with the 1% lows
sitting around 60 FPS so again it ran quite well.
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 will
vary quite a lot.
While I was playing it ran pretty well, no noticeable issues.
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 playing.
Battlefield 1 also ran well, and again even at max settings to me it felt nice and smooth,
with 1% low frame rates just under 60 FPS.
The witcher 3 doesn’t really need a high frame rate to enjoy, to me it ran well even
at ultra settings despite the large drop compared to the other levels.
Rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built in benchmark, nothing in particular
to call out other than it’s running pretty well.
Ghost recon is a fairly resource intensive game, and was again tested with the built
in benchmark.
The frame rate drops down a little at ultra settings, but seems pretty good at any level
below this.
Watchdogs 2 is another fairly resource intensive game, but is another that I personally think
doesn’t need a high frame rate to play.
The averages and 1% lows are fairly close together at the top 3 levels, so you might
as well just play on ultra settings.
DOOM was tested with Vulkan, and we’re able to get above 100 FPS averages at any setting
level with not really too much difference between the setting levels.
Shadow of war was another game tested with the built in benchmark, and we’re just able
to average above 60 FPS at ultra settings.
Overall the gaming results were pretty decent, however in general the 1070 Max-Q doesn’t
really seem to be powerful enough to consistently make use of the 144Hz 1080p panel in many
modern games, but it depends on the game and settings in use.
Some of the esports titles like csgo, overwatch and fortnite are able to reach high enough
frame rates to make use of the refresh rate, but in general only at the lower setting levels,
so it probably would have better been paired with a non Max-Q 1070 or above.
Personally I see this as a great laptop for content creators, and would have liked to
have seen a cheaper 1080p 60Hz option available.
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 the results.
The clock speeds of Max-Q graphics can vary between laptops, as the speeds depend on the
particulars of the laptop.
While under full load for an extended period of time at default I was averaging around
1380MHz on the core clock.
There was a little headroom to perform overclocking, in MSI afterburner I increased the GPU core
clock by 200Mhz and on average it was sitting at 1470MHz in games, but this would vary based
on the game and length played and could boost up to 1700MHz.
I was testing with the fans maxed out and the temperatures didn’t actually change
to what we were seeing without the overclock, so seems possible to get a nice little boost
however I wasn’t practically seeing much difference in terms of frame rate changes,
so didn’t bother retesting all the games with the overclock applied, but again this
will vary between laptops.
I’ve just quickly got some CPU benchmarks here, and we can see that it’s a decent
step up from the 7th generation as we’ve got two extra cores with faster single threaded
clock speeds, however I want to do this more justice in a dedicated future comparison video.
In this particular laptop all cores were sitting at around 3.1GHz while I was gaming for an
extended period, as a result of the previously mentioned throttling.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 512GB NVME M.2 SSD performed around 2500MB/s in sequential reads
and 1600MB/s in sequential writes, so really quite well.
At idle the NVME drive sat at around 42 degrees, and towards the end of a Crystal Disk Mark
run it peaked at 55 degrees with default fans.
The UHS2 SD card reader also did alright with my UHS2 card, I’ve seen better results from
other laptops but I’ve also had worse.
As for the price this laptop comes in at just around $3300 AUD here in Australia, or about
$2300 USD in the US, but this can differ a bit based on memory and drive options, as
well as other upgrades like the 4K panel.
It’s not cheap, but the laptop does have a lot of nice features and it just might be
worth it.
After using it I’m considering upgrading to it personally, but might hold off until
I test out some more 8th gen models.
So what did you guys think of the Aero 15x laptop from Gigabyte?
Overall I was very impressed with this laptop, afterall I just said I’m considering buying
one.
The build quality is excellent, the thin bezel gives it an overall small footprint, it’s
fairly lightweight considering the specs, the battery lasts for ages, the performance
of the 6 core CPU and 1070 Max-Q graphics was great and can be improved with an external
GPU enclosure thanks to the thunderbolt support and I thought the keyboard was great to use.
The only issues I had were the low quality webcam and microphone, small amount of backlight
bleed, slight thermal throttling under extended periods of load, and small touchpad issues
which honestly are probably personal preference, I’m basically nitpicking at this point.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the review useful.
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