Gigabyte Aero 15 (2018)
A gaming laptop with the air of professionality.
Confining a 15.6-inch Pantone colour-calibrated 144Hz screen, a full-sized keyboard, dedicated Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU and a generous 94Wh Li-Ion battery within a slim 35.6 x 25 x 1.9cm chassis, is an impressive feat of engineering. Add to this an Intel Core i7-8750 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SATA SSD and the 2018 Aero 15 has an extremely impressive spec sheet for a device that weighs a little over 2kg. Squeezing all this into an ultrabook has led to some undesirable details like a below-screen webcam, and the keyboard is a little more cramped and off center than we’d like, but these are minor details in the scheme of things. While the Aero 15 has an RRP of $2,999 (on sale it’s $2,699) you can upgrade to an Aero 15X with a GTX 1070 GPU and a PCIe connected SSD of the same size for $3,399 (sale $2,899) for specs that line up with MSI’s GS65 Stealth. The Aero was still our highest performer in the Cinebench Multi-threaded benchmark, netting about 4% more than the Razer Blade 15, which came in second. While the Aero 15 has generous GPU power for a professional ultraportable, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 model is middle-ofthe-road when it comes to performance against today’s gaming laptops. While it’ll get around the 60fps mark for most games released before 2017 on Ultra 1080p settings, it only hits a 35fps average on Ghost Recon: Wildlands. That’s 10% and 24% lower than the GTX 1070 GPUs get on the MSI GS65 and the Razer Blade 15, respectively. This is made up somewhat by an impressive 6:17 hour working battery life for general home tasks.