I recently got a Gigabyte Aero 15x laptop for editing 4K videos, and some people questioned
the 1080p screen. In this video I’m going to compare two identical Aero 15x laptops,
the only difference being that one has a 1080p screen while the others is 4K, to see what
sort of differences there are and help you decide which to get.
Gigabyte sent over an Aero 15x with a 4K screen to see these differences, all specs were the
same, the only difference was the screens. With the 1080p screen you have the advantage
of a faster 144Hz refresh rate, while the 4K screen is limited to 60Hz, so if you’re
mostly going to be using the laptop for gaming you’d be much better served by the 1080p
144Hz screen.
I’ve benchmarked a game just to show the performance differences between 1080p and
4K.
CS:GO is a game that runs quite well at 1080p regardless of settings or hardware, but even
with this game in 4K the frame rates drop significantly and it’s not running that
well in this particular test. In this example the game was tested on the same laptop, just
with the resolutions changed, so literally the only thing changing is the resolution.
It is worth noting though, that as a stock Aero 15x it’s running single channel memory,
so we could see some nice improvements with dual channel.
Depending on the game 4K gaming may be possible, but is definitely not recommended. You could
always run games at 1080p on the 4K display though, they’ll look fine as the resolution
scales down perfectly, but you’ll still be limited to the 60Hz refresh rate. For most
games you need a high end PC to stand a chance for 4K gaming, so I don’t think it’s something
you should consider in a laptop, even with the nice specs we’ve got here, and I’d
argue there is less to gain with 4K gaming with a 15” monitor anyway.
In terms of colour gamut though, Gigabyte note that the 4K display has 100% of AdobeRGB,
a fair bit higher than the 1080p model. Straight out of the box I did notice the colour difference
with the 4K panel, it just looked like the colours were more saturated and vibrant. I
also asked my partner to do a blind test and she instantly picked out the 4K panel as looking
better.
The differences can be seen in the results that I got with the Spyder 5 Pro, the 4K panel
was definitely better, a bit ahead in terms of sRGB but then well in front in terms of
both NTSC and AdobeRGB colour gamuts.
But wait, there’s more! The 4K panel is also better in terms of brightness and contrast
ratio, as the 1080p panel has a 300 nit brightness while the 4K one is 400 nits, so it’s better
in all measured aspects.
Both the 1080p and 4K models come colour calibrated out of the box, but this trend of the 4K panel
having better colour gamut is something that I’ve seen with other laptops too, so worth
checking if you’re purely after content creation. That’s not to say 4K panels are
always guaranteed to be better than the 1080p options, just that I’ve noticed they tend
to be better, so make sure you check.
More pixels also require more battery power, as there are more individual pixels that need
to be controlled and displaying different colours, so in theory I’m expecting to see
worse battery life with the 4K laptop. As both laptops were identical in terms of 94
watt hour battery and hardware components with the only difference being the screen,
I’ve run a couple of battery tests on each. I did the battery tests with my 1080p aero
before my recent upgrades.
In the gaming test I’ve tested The Witcher 3 capped to 30 FPS, so same workload, but
the 4K laptop was running the game with a 4K resolution, so in theory more work for
the GPU to do which results in the battery not lasting quite as long. At 1080p the battery
lasted for 36% longer. The second test involved just leaving both laptops completely idle
with the screen brightness maxed out at 100% on the Windows desktop. The idea of this test
was that it would show the differences between a 1080p screen and 4K screen in terms of power
draw, which is why the 1080p laptop was only 10% better this time. Both still last for
over 7 hours in this test, there’s less work for the GPU compared to playing a game
at 4K which is why there’s less of a difference, however it’s worth noting I did leave the
1080p laptop at 144Hz so it’s possible that we could have saved some more power running
both at 60Hz, and both laptops were using the Intel graphics during this test.
There aren’t many use cases I can personally see for 4K laptops like this, for most games
with laptop hardware gaming at 4K isn’t really practical, and as we’ve seen on battery
power uses more GPU power to run. I can only think that it may be useful for things like
photo editing, and maybe some video editing depending on what you’re doing, but even
then I think more of the gains come from the higher colour accuracy, brightness and contrast
panel rather than the resolution differences, the 4K one just happens to be better in other
ways as well, but it is of course personal preference.
Personally I’m perfectly fine editing with a 1080p laptop screen, Adobe Premiere is perfectly
fine to use. I transcode all my video footage to 720p proxies anyway so that I can edit
much easier because it’s less strain on the system, I never actually need to view
the 4K footage at any point during the editing process, but that’s just my workflow, you
of course may be different. I export the video, watch it back at 4K then upload it, but realistically
I don’t need the full 4K resolution to get any of this done.
Editing photos on the other hand may be more beneficial, as you may want to get in close
to the pixel level, so seeing more could be useful. It’s also worth remembering that
while at home or in the office you can always just plug in a larger higher quality monitor
too, so realistically you’d only be making use of the better 4K screen while travelling.
Technically you can fit more in the screen if you lower the scaling in Windows, for example
with the scaling set to 200% with a 4K resolution this is what Premiere looks like, and this
is the same as 100% on the 1080p laptop. Here’s what 150% scaling looks like with 4K, so you
can see we are able to fit more things in the same space, and now here’s what 100%
on 4K looks like. I don’t know about you, but at this stage we’re getting too small
for it to really be great to work with, and if I’m honest I personally found 200% at
4K nice for me, which is the same as running my 1080p laptop at 100% anyway, so I don’t
really gain anything here unless I want to squint.
So with all of that in mind how much extra does the 4K Aero 15x cost compared to the
1080p version? Prices will change over time, you can check up to date pricing using the
links in the description. At the time of recording, here in Australia there seems to be a $400
AUD difference, or around $250 USD. So is this worth it, considering it increases the
total cost by over 10%? I think it really depends what you’re doing, if you’re using
it for content creation, especially professionally, then yeah I think it’s worthwhile, but you
can still definitely get by without it. For other tasks like gaming I don’t think it’s
worth it though, as in most games you won’t get great performance and at 15 inches I feel
like 4K overall just doesn’t help that much unless you’re sitting quite close to it.
That said if I had the choice to pick between 1080p and 4K today for a video editing laptop,
I’d go with the 4K Aero 15x and just run it with 200% scaling, as it does look nicer,
has better colour gamut, brightness and contrast, so none of the benefits I’d get actually
come from the resolution difference.
Let me know which you’d pick in your laptop down in the comments, 1080p or 4K and why?
Everyone has different requirements so I’d be interested to hear, and of course if you’re
new to the channel don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.