- The array of laptops we lined up to take a look at
Nvidia's new Super RTX mobile GPUs didn't make it in time
because of a little global pandemic.
So (snaps fingers) new plan.
Gigabyte sponsored this video to show off the Aorus 15G
an all new design from them that they claim is the
gaming notebook redefined.
But for us it also happens to house a brand new 10th Gen
CPU from Intel and a shiny new RTX Super GPU from Nvidia.
So we're gonna use it to take a closer look
at Intel's claims about how much faster 10th Gen
designs will be compared to gaming laptops
from three years ago.
Have CPUs really gotten that much faster?
Or is something else at play here?
Spoiler alert, it's something else.
(electronic music)
When questioned Intel acknowledged that
the comparison to three year old laptops was not
really apples to apples.
And while we have gone from 7th Gen all the way to 10th Gen
mobile CPUs, a big chunk of that performance
is coming from the graphics card improvements
in that time.
But that doesn't mean that both sides
aren't contributing here.
The brains of our unit, is an Intel Core i7- 10875H.
Now as far as we can tell, it's pretty much just a refined
9th Gen chip with slightly higher clocks.
But guys a laptop with eight CPU Cores that can boost
up to two of them to 5.1 gigahertz is nothing
to sneeze at.
It's now faster than anything you could have bought
for your main stream desktop three years ago,
let alone something you could have got in a laptop.
The improvement over last Gen is pretty incremental though
so I can see why Intel compared to a laptop
from three years ago in their slides.
Our new i7 seems to have marginally better
single threaded performance than our 9th Gen i9
and actually ends up losing slightly
in multi-threaded applications.
If we're gonna see big improvements in CPU performance
over last Gen it looks like it's up
to the laptop manufacturers
to throw some seriously thick thermal and power
delivery solutions at the 10th Gen designs.
There are two main areas that the new 10th Gen CPUs
might help with gaming performance though.
The first is Thermal Velocity Boost, or TVB.
Originally introduced in Coffee Lake H,
TVB has existed recently in desktop chips,
but it was actually disabled by default
and it's probably best known for the multi-core enhancement
fiasco a year ago when Asus motherboards that enabled it
by default performed much better
than their real default counterparts.
Well now this feature is available on almost every
10th Gen mobile chip and is probably what helped our i7
beat the old i9 in single threaded tasks.
The secondary of the 10th Gen processor will help
improve gaming performance is by including 16 PCI
express lanes for the graphics card.
This is actually the first time ever that laptop GPUs
are going to be getting a full 16x interface to play with
instead of the eight lanes that they're accustomed to.
How much of a difference will that make in the real world?
Probably not a whole lot outside of some specific
professional workloads, but it is nice to see nonetheless.
Now let's talk Super, the 2070 Super in the Aorus 15G
gets 256 more CUDA cores than its non-super cousin.
And as for the clock speed, well, as usual that's going
to depend largely on the laptop manufacturer.
Since on mobile the amount of power and cooling available
actually makes a much bigger difference to how fast
the GPU will go than Nvidia's spec sheet does.
Maybe the most interesting feature of the Super mobile GPUs
is the inclusion of Dynamic Boost, which balances
the load between the CPU and GPU based on the task.
So here's how the concept works.
Let's say some laptop, X, has 140 watts of cooling available
with a CPU that can draw up to 70 watts and a GPU
that can draw up to 100.
Clearly 170 watts is greater than 140.
But for most situations, that doesn't really matter
because there are very few workloads where a CPU
and a GPU would both be fully utilized at exactly
the same time.
So say in a visually demanding game, like
Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
the GPU is gonna get its full 100 watts of power
while the CPU jogs along at 40 watts or so
and everyone stays nice and cool while you get
the most FPS out of your game.
Then you go and boot up CS:Go and you're a pro
and you need at least 400 FPS to hit your elite flick shots.
Well your CPU's gonna pin it at five gigahertz,
while your GPU takes a nap in the shade.
It's up to manufacturers though to make sure
that there's enough power available to take advantage
of this.
So Gigabyte has enabled this by including a 230 watt power
adapter to drive the CPU and GPU at over 170 watts combined.
These power management improvements by the way will work
with both Intel and AMD CPUs,
which is excellent in theory.
Now let's take a look at the real world.
In practice our RTX 2070 Super was able to net us
about a 10 to 15% performance improvement in games
compared to a similar class non-super laptop, nice.
Of course in most situations a desktop RTX 2070 Super
will beat it in battle,
but surprisingly in Rainbow Six: Siege,
the Aorus 15G actually pulled off a W against
our i9-9900K equipped desktop.
Now I'm certain that if we took the time to overclock
the 9900K or even just enable multi-core enhancement
it should win.
But it does go to show you just how much performance
is being strangled out of these mobile chips these days.
Impressively the Aorus 15G was able to put up these numbers
without us having to apply a turbo profile or anything
like that.
Gigabyte has employed Microsoft's Azure AI
to automatically switch between power profiles
that optimize for power and cooling in a heavy task,
quiet during lighter loads, and then extended battery
while on the go.
Another feature of this Super GPU update is advanced
Optimus, OG Optimus was designed to switch between
a powerful Nvidia GPU for gaming and an efficient onboard
GPU for lighter tasks, but it had some drawbacks.
Neither G-Sync nor High Refresh Rate displays
could use it.
Well Advanced Optimus apparently fixes those issues
and while the Aorus 15G here isn't equipped with G-Sync
so we couldn't test that, it was able to get seven hours
on battery while its display was refreshing itself
240 times per second.
Quite impressive, although some of this is probably due
to Gigabyte including a massive 94 watt hour battery.
Gigabyte claims it's possible to get over eight hours
of battery life and if you were to turn down the refresh
rate that actually seems very attainable.
Now let's take a closer look at the star of today's show.
The styling of the Aorus 15G strongly reminds me
of the Civic Type R with its spoiler like accents
and heaps of venting dedicated to airflow.
For a gaming laptop it's still a little well gamery,
but if it's too much for you the Aero lineup
will greet you with open arms.
It sports a very solid IO with three Type As,
Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet and a full size UHS-II
SD reader and Gigabyte seems especially proud of
the fact that you can connect three 4K displays
via the full size HDMI, mini display port,
and Thunderbolt port.
I mean given there's a 240 hertz panel with pantone
calibration already attached to it,
most people probably won't bother buying something separate
unless they're trying to get some work done
in between gaming sessions.
But, hey, it's there.
The most interesting part of the Aorus 15G
has got to be its fully mechanical keyboard though
with slim clicky on run switches.
Now if I'm being honest this keyboard broke my brain
a little bit when I first started using it
because you do have to use it kind of more like
a real desktop keyboard.
This does mean that you'll be giving up
some of the fun tricks
of more traditionally cramped laptop keyboards
where the key caps are right next to each other,
like quickly swiping across adjacent keys.
But the extra travel and the clickiness did lead
to a definite increase in typing accuracy
once I got used to it.
In many ways you could see it as the complete opposite
of Apple's butterfly switches.
Apple's are bursty and quick, perfect for sending IMs
whereas these are a much more deliberate feel,
like I'm sitting down to start a thesis.
Now given they're made by Omron
and rated for 15 million presses,
they should hopefully also be the opposite of
Apple's for reliability too, zing.
As for the pricing, Nvidia surprisingly didn't adjust
their Super lineup upward so the RTX 2070 model
of the Aorus 15G comes in at $2000,
while the 2070 Super version is 2200.
So it gets a better GPU and an upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.
What this basically means is that the RTX 2070 Super
is occupying roughly the same price as the old RTX 2070.
The 2070 is actually about the price of an old 2060,
and the new 2060, which is faster than the old 2060,
but lacks super branding for some reason,
is looking quite compelling at a price similar
to the old 1660TI.
Basically if you're looking for a new gaming laptop
you're going to be getting a bit more bang
for your buck than you would've a couple months ago,
which is awesome.
Wanna know what else is awesome?
Gigabyte, thank you for sponsoring this video
and especially managing to get a laptop in our hands
at least close to the Nvidia Super mobile launch.
So thank you guys for that and you can check them out
at the link in the video description.
If you're looking for another video to watch,
maybe check out our original super coverage.
There you go.
How much better our Super GP is.
Now you'll know for sure.