Gigabyte Aorus 17 HDR

Is Gigabyte’s bigger ultra-portable pro laptop as airtight as the Aero 15?

There aren’t any 4K OLED panels for 17.3-inch laptops this year… so unlike its smaller sibling the Aero 17 has to settle for either a 4K IPS panel from AUO or a 144Hz FHD IPS screen from LG. Considering the 4K display can reproduce 100% Adobe RGB colours and that both the Aero 17’s screen offerings come with a Pantone XRite certified colour scheme, it’s not exactly much of a sacrifice, even for colour-conscious creatives. The higher-res version even carries a new VESA HDR 400 certification, which means it is capable of reproducing a larger range of colours than regular SDR monitors at a peak brightness of 400 nits.

The range starts with the entry Aero 17 SA which comes with the FHD screen, an Intel Core i7-9750H CPU, 8GB of RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1660Ti GPU, and goes for $2,599. While that might seem reasonable for a 17-incher, the Aero 17 SA only offers half the RAM of similarly priced competitors and the identically specced Aorus 7 SA is readily available for $500 less at $2,099.

At the other end of the spectrum the Aero 17 HDR YA gets the 4K HDR display, a Core i9-9980HK CPU, 32GB of RAM and an RTX 2080 GPU, which will set you back a hefty $6,299. We tested the Aero 17 HDR XA, which is largely the same as the above but with 16GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 GPU for $4,999 (which is still rather pricey for the specs).

Having only 16GB of RAM on a laptop with an overclockable i9 CPU is an unusual configuration that we haven’t seen before. This handicap actually puts the Core i9 Aero 17 HDR XA 10 to 15% behind our average of comparable Core i7 gaming laptops in PCMark 8 home and Work benchmarks. It also limits the PCMark 10 performance bump to between two and eight percent against this i7 average. That said, the bigger form factor seems to have allowed Gigabyte to appropriately cool the Core i9 which scores between 43.5% and 26.8% better on multi-core CPU benchmarks than earlier Aero 15 Core i9 variants we have tested. You also see similar 40% performance boosts in CPU heavy tasks like media encoding when compared to anything running a Core i7-9750H.

Even though this thermal throttling has been curbed considerably, you still only get about half the potential performance boost that this chip is capable of. Compared to a much beefier MSI GT76 Titan, which scores between 15 and 36% better on multi-core and media encoding benchmarks, it’s clear that Core i9 is still too hot to be worth the cost in a compact gaming or professional laptop like the Aero 17.

The Aero 17 HDR XA performed as expected in gaming benchmarks with the RTX 2070 spitting out more than 48fps averages across all our modern game benchmarks on 1080p Ultra graphical settings. If you want to play in 4K you’ll have to drop the graphical settings a little since 4K Ultra nets just 23fps averages on titles like Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

Battery life is better than the former Aero 15 i9 variant, but the Aero 17 HDR XA still only manages two hours and 41 minutes in PCMark 8’s Home battery benchmark. While the screen is good, almost everything else about this laptop is pretty standard, making the entire range overpriced – a trend we haven’t seen from Gigabyte to date.