Gigabyte Aorus 17X
The Gigabyte Aorus 17X slays the field with truly face-melting performance.
The Gigabyte Auros 17X configuration we tested was the most tricked-out configuration possible, with an i9-10980HK 2.4GHz (max boost to 5.3GHz), a GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-P GPU, 32GB DDR4 RAM, a 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD, and 2TB HDD.
Design
As far as the design goes, it has the typical stealth-bomber/ Knightrider aesthetic with RGB lighting that you’ll find in just about every other gaming laptop out there. Fortunately, the lighting on the Auros 17X’s keyboard and chassis is a bit more modest than the ‘70s Berlin discotheques found with other gaming laptops.
The two lights on the very front of the chassis look like the headlights of a car, which was obviously the look Gigabyte was going for. Other than that, there isn’t much to say about the visual design that hasn’t been said about those that have come before.
Which, honestly, is an issue in itself. There’s a lot of tweaking at the edges, but at its core, it’s the same kind of look that we’ve seen in gaming laptops for years, just much more powerful and without excessive LED lighting.
If that’s exactly the look you want, then the Aorus 17X brings it to you with all the force of a hard-charging muscle car hitting its stride. While it’d be nice to see a bit more risk and diversity in high-end gaming hardware design, the market doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. Maybe next year.
All that said, the quality of the build is phenomenal and the design execution is spot-on. The chassis feels like it’s built to race
at Le Mans and when you’re carrying it under your arm, its weight makes it impossible to forget that it’s there. And that’s without the two hefty bricks cleverly disguised as power adapters added to the scale.
Performance
Powered by Intel Comet Lake-H processors and Nvidia GeForce RTX Super GPUs, the Aorus 17X outperforms any other pure gaming laptop you can find right now.
In 3DMark’s Sky Diver test, the Aorus 17X scored a 49,993, a 20,803 in Fire Strike, and a 10,252 in the Time Spy benchmarks - blowing clear past its nearest competitors in its class.
For comparison, the Asus Zephyrus Duo GX550 we tested recently is one of the best performing gaming laptops we’d ever seen. It wasn’t benchmarked on Sky Diver, but it scored a 17,571 on Fire Strike and 7,641 on
Time Spy.
Powered by the GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-P, the Aorus 17X performed just over 18% better on Fire Strike and about 34% better on Time Spy than the Zephyrus Duo, which was equipped with a GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q when we tested it. Both systems ran a Core i9-10980HK CPU with the same amount of RAM and VRAM.
Another recent favorite of ours is the Gigabyte Aorus 17G, which we reviewed very highly. The Core i7-10875H and GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q configuration we reviewed is outmatched by the Auros 17X’s hardware, so it isn’t really a fair fight at all – but it is an illuminating one.
On our 3DMark tests, the 17G simply wasn’t able to keep up with the 17X, scoring a 34,347 on Sky Diver, a 13,950 on Fire Strike, and a 5,872 on Time Spy. The 17X ended up outperforming the 17G by about 45%, 49%, and a whopping 75%, on Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy, respectively.
In our Total War: Three Kingdoms 1080p benchmark, the Aorus 17X pumped out an average of 82fps on ultra settings and 232fps on low settings. In our Metro: Exodus 1080p test, it averaged 80fps on ultra and 173fps on low.
Meanwhile, the Zephyrus Duo GX550 managed 62fps on ultra and 202fps on low in our Total
War: Three Kingdoms benchmark and its Metro: Exodus scores – which had previously been the best scores we had ever seen from a gaming laptop in this test – averaged 59fps on ultra settings and 146fps on low.
This means the Aorus 17X ran
Total War: Three Kingdoms with a 32% greater fps on ultra and a 14% greater fps on low. While running
Metro: Exodus, the 17X’s fps ran 35% higher on ultra and 14% higher on low, shattering the
TechLife record for fps on a gaming laptop for Metro:Exodus.
For a lark, we ran the Metro: Exodus benchmark with raytracing enabled and using the highest settings possible for every option and the Aorus 17X averaged a blistering 60fps, beating the Zephyrus Duo’s non-ray-tracing record by a little more than 1% more fps.
Battery life
Big, hulking beasts like the Aorus 17X clearly require a lot of power – the RTX 2080 Super build needs two power supplies, after all – so it’s natural to think that the battery is going to be all but useless on this laptop. Surprisingly, that isn’t the case, and the Aorus 17X put in a decent showing despite its enormous power requirements.
In our HD video playback test, the battery lasted a respectable three hours and 14 minutes, which is better than many gaming laptops, but falls about 30% short of the Asus Zephyrus Duo’s four hours and 37 minutes, and makes it just past the halfway mark against the Aorus 17G’s six hours and 27 minutes.
Gigabyte thankfully doesn’t load up the Aorus 17X with bloatware the way other manufacturers are known to do. And considering the 17X’s price tag, there’s no reason to subsidize a lower retail price with thirdparty pre-installs like McAfee and the other usual suspects that budget laptops usually have to fall back on.
The Gigabyte Aorus 17X is an absolute beast. When it isn’t pumping out 60fps of ray-traced FHD graphics on its gorgeous display, it multitasks resourceintensive projects like a professional desktop. One of the most powerful gaming laptops we’ve tested, it’s price-to-power ratio makes it an objectively great value – but only if you can stomach the initial price tag. John Loeffler