Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED laptop
OLED is the new black, but is this screen tech a good fit for ultraportable gaming laptops?
Gigabyte’s Aero 15 XA is the first laptop we’ve seen to utilise an AMOLED screen and while our expectations were high, the 15.6-inch 4K display is somehow even better than we could have imagined. Whether you’re in the depths of a Metro: Exodus tunnel or floating above the Total War: Warhammer 2 campaign table it’s hard not to be impressed by the distinct vibrancy of this Xrite Pantone-certified colour calibrated AMOLED screen.
One of the coolest things about OLED for gaming is the extremely low (sub 1ms) latency. Unfortunately, the Aero 15 XA OLED display only runs at 60Hz, so anyone needing an ultrafast competitive screen will have to look elsewhere. While it would have been nice to see a faster panel, even if you get the Aero 15 YA with an RTX 2080 GPU,
you’d struggle to get more than 60fps on UHD Ultra settings, so there’s no real need for high refresh 4K OLED on a laptop just yet.
The Aero 15 OLED we tested came with an Intel Core i7-9750H CPU (which can be upgraded to a Core i9-9980HK), 16GB of RAM and a Nvidia RTX 2070 GPU, for a total cost of around $3,799. Adding the i9 processor will set you back an additional $600, or alternatively you can keep the i7, double the RAM to 32GB and bump the GPU to an RTX 2080 for $4,799 total. This definitely puts the Aero 15 at the pricey end of the spectrum, but if you’re happy to pair back the gaming performance you can actually nab it for as little as $2,999 when configured with a GTX 1660Ti.
Performance was as expected, with the updated 9th generation CPU offering minor performance improvements on general working tasks against its predecessor. The Aero 15 XA OLED with a RTX 2070 GPU managed to get between 49 and 75 fps on Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Middle Earth: Shadow of War respectively, using 1080p Ultra settings. If you increase the resolution to 4K you generally see frame rates between 20 and 30 fps, allowing you to just play new titles if you tweak a few things. Fortunately the OLED display still looks excellent at FullHD resolution, so the lower specced models still get great colour benefits from the new display.
We’ve spoken a lot about other features, but the actual design of the Aero 15 has been entirely reworked too, featuring a new metal top-shell, reengineered keyboard surround and tweaked vent design. The keyboard keys feel nice and responsive, the trackpad is smooth and there’s a number pad, fingerprint reader and physical webcam shutter to appease the privacy conscious. Battery life was impressive managing four hours and 20 minutes in the demanding PCMark 8 battery benchmark, which means you should get close to a full working day from it.
The Aero series is just cm thick and weighs just 2kg, so it fits neatly within the ultraportable gaming laptop category. You can get gaming laptops with similar specs for up to $700 less, but you’ll have to sacrifice a little on portability and battery life, or settle for an 8th generation CPU.