Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED (2020)
A killer laptop for work and play.
$4,399, www.gigabyte.com
The design of the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED (2020) is functional and attractive. As this is primarily a pro laptop, its design is muted enough that you won’t get strange looks if you whip the laptop out at meetings or in the office.
It has an all-black design, with an illuminated ‘Aero’ logo on the lid. With dimensions of 355 x 248 x 19.8mm and a weight of 2kg, this is an impressively thin and light laptop considering the powerful specs inside.
That’s slightly thicker than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and the same weight. However, the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED offers a far better selection of ports than Apple’s Pro laptop. On the left-hand side you get a full-size HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort, USB 3.0, Ethernet, and an audio jack for a headset.
On the right-hand side are two more standard USB ports, a USB-C port, an SD card reader and a power port. Unlike the MacBook Pro you can’t charge the laptop via the USB-C port, but in all other respects the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED beats the Apple laptop when it comes to port selection.
We’ve often complained how the MacBook Pro – billed as a laptop for professionals – only comes with four USB-C ports. For professionals who use older peripherals, or photographers who need a card reader, it means you’re going to have to buy an adapter.
However, with the Gigabyte
Aero 15 OLED this isn’t necessary. Need to connect it to a monitor or projector? Use the HDMI. Taken photos on a digital camera and need to edit them? Plug the memory card straight in.
This makes it a much more versatile professional laptop, and while it is slightly thicker than the MacBook Pro, it’s not huge, and it shows that you can still have a slimline laptop without sacrificing ports.
Performance
As you’d expect of a laptop with this kind of hardware, the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED performs brilliantly, both when running creative apps and for gaming. The new RTX 2070 Super mobile GPU (as well as the RTX 2080 Super) offers a decent upgrade over the previous non-Super variant, and combine this with the new 8-core Intel processor and you’ve got an incredibly powerful laptop that can handle multiple tasks at once without too much issue.
While the RTX line of GPUs are primarily gaming-focused, there are creative benefits to them as well.
As an ‘RTX Studio’ laptop, the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED comes with Nvidia’s Studio drivers, rather than its game-ready ones, and these are tuned for creative applications, so the likes of Adobe Premiere Pro, Redcine-X Pro and Autodesk perform especially well.
Digital artists, 3D modelers and game developers can use Nvidia’s ray tracing features to create scenes with believable lighting effects, and the Aero 15 OLED can handle editing raw 8K video files