Review: Aorus 17G
Aorus is taking another early crack at the 2020 powerhouse gaming laptop category with a better cooling array and new 10th gen Intel chips.
A couple of years ago Aorus was producing some of the most sophisticated and desirable gaming laptop chassis available, but recently these classic designs have been stripped of all character and reassembled in Frankenstein-looking arrangements. Take the new 17G, which has four different styles of vents strewn around the cheapfeeling CNC aluminium veneer. While we’re not particularly interested in having multiple different car grills slapped on our laptop, looks aren’t everything in a gaming laptop, and I’m sure someone out there appreciates the mashup.
Fortunately there’s plenty of other talking points for the Aorus 17G, like its inclusion of gold-plated Omron mechanical switches that offer a deep 2.5mm travel distance and light tactile click on actuation. Or maybe the lightning fast 240Hz 17.3 inch FullHD display with Pantone X-Rite colour calibration certified to have colour accuracy of a Delta E <1 will pique your interest (although you’ll have to be ok with NTSC 72%, which is similar to standard sRGB).
If that didn’t do it then maybe you’ll appreciate the new Wi-Fi 6 capabilities via the latest Killer AX 1650 network card, offering up to 2.4Gbps transfer speeds on local networks.
While all of these perks are impressive, it wouldn’t be an Aorus laptop without some serious internal components and the 17G doesn’t disappoint on this front. There are five main variants available ranging from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti all the way up to an RTX 2080 Super – although, only the Aorus 17G KB variant with an RTX 2060 GPU was available locally at the time of writing. This configuration offers the more efficient Intel Core i7-10875H (2.3-5.1GHz) CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD for $3,599. While this CPU is on the more powerful end of the spectrum, the RTX 2060 is perhaps a little under-specced when you consider you’ll be wanting to push games to up and over 144Hz to make the most of the ultra-fast screen. We tested a unit with an RTX 2070 Super and that was only getting between 50 and 90 fps on modern games with ‘ultra’ settings and between 125 and 155fps on ‘low’ 1080p, so you really don’t want a GPU any less powerful or you may as well opt for a less responsive screen.
In other regions you can actually bump the CPU up from the octa-core i7-10875H listed to a Core i910980HK. While this is obviously desirable for those needing the pinnacle of performance, the octa-core i7-10875H actually performed on par with the Core i9 chip from the early 2020 Aorus 17, which should be more than enough for most people.
While a number of the components on the early 2020 Aorus 17 were considerably more power hungry than the Aorus 17G KB, the battery life was close to double on the recent update. This was more than what we’d expected, offering four hours and 40 minutes on PCMark 8 Home Battery benchmarks and more than six hours on 1080p movie playback tests. JOEL BURGESS
A powerful, no expense spared gaming rig if you can get your hands on the 2070 or 2080 Super models, but the 2060 is a little light on GPU power.