PCPOWERPLAY

Gigabyte Aorus X5 v7

Gigabyte enhances an old product yet again

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PRICE $ 3599 www.gigabyte.com.au

When you’re onto a good thing, stick to it. That seems to be the motto at Gigabyte’s laptop division, as they’re constantly releasing revisions of laptops that have been around for several years. The latest is the seventh iteration of the X5, in the form of the X5 v7, and it’s quite the beast.

Gigabyte has dubbed this the world’s fastest 15.6-inch laptop, and the specs go quite a way to prove as much. But before we delve into that, let’s look at what you’re going to have fit into your backpack. Thanks to the larger screen, it’s rather heavy, but Gigabyte doesn’t have an official product page, and didn’t supply us with any specs, so it’s hard to be precise. We’d approximat­e a weight of 2.5kg or so, so it’s not exactly upwardly mobile.

We experience­d a couple of weird quirks with our review sample. Firstly, we always update to the latest drivers when testing a laptop. While the Windows Update worked fine, when we tried to update the Nvidia drivers, we kept getting an error message saying “This graphics driver could not find compatible graphics hardware.” As a result, we had to test with the factory installed drivers, Nvidia’s 382.30 drivers. Secondly, when running the 3DMark benchmarks, both tests ran in small windows, despite being set to fullscreen mode. Even Alt+Enter didn’t solve the issue, so we’d take these results with a grain of salt.

Onto the machine itself. Our review version came with a 4K display, though only a 1080p option will be available in Australia. It’s G-Sync enabled, though it only has a 60Hz refresh rate according to

it mightn’t be the most portable laptop on the market, but it certainly is fast

the Nvidia control panel. Again though, we can’t be sure that’s the utmost refresh rate due to the driver issues and lack of specificat­ions from Gigabyte.

Powering it all is Intel’s i7-7820HK CPU, which boosts from a base speed of 2.9GHz up to 3.9GHz. This is paired with 16GB of DDR4-2400MHz memory, but the real power comes from the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. Unfortunat­ely it doesn’t appear that Gigabyte has employed the new Max-Q thermal solution, as this is one loud sucker. During our harshest tests, fan noise was a rather rowdy 54dB, making it much louder than the new laptops employing Max-Q. Storage is very generous, with a 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD and 1TB mechanical hard drive.

It mightn’t be the most portable laptop on the market, but it certainly is fast. We only wish it employed Nvidia’s new Max-Q tech to keep it a little quieter, which will be rolling out in coming months. It’s also not exactly cheap, but if you want performanc­e of this level, you’ve got to be willing to fork out for it. BENNETT RING

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