Gigabyte is best regarded for its Aorus gaming PCs and shows, but it also makes the Aero variety of laptops for imaginative buyers. Needless to say, Gigabyte’s encounter with substantial-stop graphics ensures that the Aero laptops deliver extraordinary overall performance. Having said that, they also exploit the company’s encounter of engineering and cooling units to squeeze that substantial-stop overall performance into eye-catching, slimline patterns that continue being impressively neat and silent even when functioning demanding graphics software.
Functions & design
The Aero laptops are offered with both fifteen-inch or seventeen-inch shows, and equally FHD and 4K resolutions, but we examined the top rated-of-the-range Aero seventeen HDR XC, which has a seventeen.three-inch IPS display with 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels, 254.5dpi). Even with the big display and substantial-stop specification, Gigabyte has managed to continue to keep this laptop down to just 21.4mm at its thickest issue. The business offers a fat of roughly two.5kg for the Aero’s aluminium casing, despite the fact that our overview unit came in at closer to 3kg. Even so, that should not be a deal-breaker for a desktop alternative method which is probable to commit most of its time indoors.
The 4K show is admirably dazzling and sharp, and supports HDR 400 to offer rich, vivid colours. It did sometimes glimpse a very little in excess of-saturated to my eye, predominantly on skin tones when streaming video clip, but Gigabyte states that it supports a hundred{36a394957233d72e39ae9c6059652940c987f134ee85c6741bc5f1e7246491e6} of the Adobe RGB colour gamut, so it will be ideal for a broad variety of graphics and style and design duties. It truly is a disgrace, although, that there’s no mention of the DCI-P3 regular, which is widely used for specialist video clip editing, as this laptop’s overall performance tends to make it very well suited to substantial-stop video clip operate much too.
The Aero seventeen HDR XC is run by a 10th-era Main i7 processor with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and graphics courtesy of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 with 8GB of video clip memory. The seventeen.three-inch display is a 4K IPS panel. There are USB three.two ports, a person Thunderbolt three USB-C port, HDMI two.one and mini-DisplayPort one.4 connectors, three.5mm audio in and out jacks, an SD card reader, a electrical power enter and an RJ-45 Ethernet port.
Pictures: Gigabyte
The build good quality of the Aero seventeen HDR XC is also extraordinary. The 3mm bezel encompassing the glass panel assists to continue to keep your aim on the substantial-good quality show, but the panel remains awesome and firm, with just plenty of flex to support it cope with the occasional bump when it’s on the transfer. There are big cooling vents on the again, and on equally sides of the laptop, but Gigabyte’s ‘WindForce’ cooling method, which consists of two, 71-blade fans, merely created a very low, gentle hum even when the Aero was consistently looping as a result of demanding Unigine Valley graphics assessments.
That stable style and design means that the keyboard feels incredibly cozy. It truly is a full-sizing unit, with numeric keypad, and the firm keys in fact truly feel like they’re pushing again when you press on them. The laptop’s matte-black style and design is not specially eye-catching, but the Aero borrows a number of methods from its gaming stablemates, with the Fn+Place essential combo providing some multi-coloured eye-sweet from the keyboard backlight.
The Aero seventeen HDR XC is very well connected much too: the show could not support DCI-P3, but HDMI, mini-DisplayPort and Thunderbolt three ports offer a number of possibilities for connecting an external monitor. There are also 3 USB three.two ports, a slot for an SD memory card, three.5mm audio jacks for microphone and headphones, moreover the latest Wi-Fi six (802.11ax) and Gigabit Ethernet for wireless and wired networking respectively.
Gigabyte’s Fusion RGB For every-Critical Backlit Keyboard has a firm motion, and can do some fancy again-lights outcomes.
Image: Gigabyte
Price tag & options
Gigabyte won’t make it straightforward to invest in its solutions. The company’s site lists a fairly complicated variety of configurations and possibilities for the Aero laptops which include, as pointed out, fifteen-inch and seventeen-inch designs with both FHD or 4K resolution. Final year’s ‘XB’ designs are also nonetheless offered with 9th era Intel processors, although this year’s ‘XC’ designs transfer up to 10th era processors, as very well as a wide variety of Nvidia GPU possibilities. Having said that, you can’t invest in direct from Gigabyte in the Uk, although its online keep for the US presents a incredibly confined variety, so you may need to have to store all over for the specification you need to have from the company’s 3rd-social gathering distributors.
We examined the Aero seventeen HDR XC, which costs £2,249.seventeen (ex. VAT £2,699 inc. VAT) or $two,609 with an 8-core Core i7-10870H processor functioning at two.2GHz (up to 5GHz with TurboBoost), alongside with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. That selling price also incorporates an Nvdia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card with 8GB of focused video clip memory. Gigabyte states that Main i9 processors and GeForce RTX 3080 upgrades are also offered, despite the fact that we hadn’t located these online at the time of crafting.
Performance
The Aero seventeen HDR XC provides heavyweight overall performance for graphics and style and design operate. Its Main i7 processor recorded Geekbench five CPU scores of 1300 (single core) and 7600 (multi core), which put it along with very similar seventeen-inch workstation-course laptops such as Dell’s Precision 5750. But it’s the GeForce RTX 3070 GPU that genuinely stands out: the Aero accomplished a rating of 150fps when functioning the Cinebench R15 graphics test, but on the more demanding Unigine Valley benchmark it pulled way ahead, continuously hitting 118fps, which tends to make it a person of the most strong mobile graphics workstations we’ve reviewed.
Battery lifetime, inevitably, is more modest. Gigabyte rather vaguely offers ‘up to 8hrs’ lifetime for the 99Wh battery, but even when making use of the Main i7’s built-in UHD Graphics to view streaming video clip online we were being only in a position to get just in excess of the six-hour mark. To be good, you can most likely get a full 8-hour day out of the Aero seventeen HDR XC if you’re making use of built-in graphics and you’re not online the full time. But, of system, making use of the more strong discrete Nvidia GPU will lower battery lifetime fairly substantially, depending on the variety of software you’re functioning.
Image: Gigabyte
Conclusions
If battery lifetime is your main precedence, then Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Professional (2019) still retains the crown among the substantial-stop, big-display laptops. But if you basically need to have a strong desktop-alternative laptop that can tackle a broad variety of graphics and style and design operate, then Gigabyte’s Aero seventeen HDR XC is a great selection that’s competitively priced for its current market.
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