Gigabyte Aero 15X

The Gigabyte Aero 15X is one of the most interesting gaming laptops we’ve seen. It has an Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU, making it a full-blooded gaming machine to compete with a high-end desktop. It is, however, just about small and light enough to be used as a portable everyday machine. Add in fantastic battery life and a meaty keyboard and, well, you start to wonder why you wanted an Alienware 15 in the first place.

Given its semi-lifestyle angle it could do with a smoother look. But we imagine some of you will

disagree. The one part we can all agree on is that the fans get a bit loud at times, but not to an extent that puts us off this remarkable machine.

Price

Gigabyte produces some of the most affordable gaming laptops. But the Aero 15X is not one of them. Our review unit has the impressive GTX 1070 GPU, 16 GB RAM, a 512GB SSD and a Core i7 CPU. It costs a wallet-worrying £1,999. There’s also a version with two 512GB SSDs, costing £2,199.

Your other option is the non-X, version of the Aero 15 (priced £1,849), which has a GTX 1060 GPU but otherwise similar specifications.

One point to note about the Aero 15X is that it uses a special ,Maxi-Q, version of the 1070 with lower clock speeds. It’s what lets Gigabyte fit such a powerful GPU into a slim laptop. You’ll still get a big boost over the 1060 model, but not as much as the GTX 1070 of, say, an Alienware 15.

The Aero 15X has a two-year warranty, although the battery is only covered for the first year.

Design

The Gigabyte Aero 15X is the sort of laptop you could easily assume does not have a desktop-challenging graphics card inside, if it wasn’t for the rainbow keyboard backlit and GeForce sticker. It looks serious, but it’s far smaller and lighter than almost all laptops that have GPUs of this level.

It weighs 2.1kg and is 20mm thick. That’s thin and light enough to carry around in a rucksack all day, every