Gigabyte Aero 15
Strong performanceperformanc meets a dazzling screen: theth Aero is equally at home in the den as it is in the office
SCORE
PRICE £1,874 (£2,249 inc VAT) VAT from ebuyer.com
Gigabyte pitches the Aero 15 OLED as the ultimate work hard, play hard machine, with all the power and speed you might require for creative projects, alongside outstanding performance for 3D games. With a Core i710875H and GeForce RTX 2070 Super in place, neither claim seems out of order, and the Aero 15 also has the advantage of a fantastic 15.6in OLED screen.
When we say fantastic, we mean it. It’s not tuned as bright as the Razer’s OLED display – its peak brightness stops at 334cd/m2 – but it’s a close match in every other respect, with 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts, and 95.5% of Adobe RGB. Colour accuracy isn’t perfect – we measured an average Delta E of 3.32 – but it’s hardly disastrous, and HDR content looks superb. Blacks are deep and dark, while colours can be incredibly vivid. Whether you’re hard at work or streaming Netflix, the experience is great, helped by audio that’s a little brash but surprisingly powerful.
The physical design won’t be for everyone. There’s a bit of jet fighter in the styling, while the RGB-backlit keyboard, preset to a rainbow effect, is more aimed at gamers than design pros. Luckily, Gigabyte’s software supports a vast range of settings and animations, so you can easily switch the backlighting to something more restrained. You can even set up perkey backlighting schemes for design or editing apps. More importantly, the all-metal construction feels incredibly solid, with a smooth but tough hinge mechanism and a lid that feels near-bulletproof.
There’s more good news on connectivity. The Aero packs in three USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, along with one
Thunderbolt 3 connector, so you’ve got high-speed storage and general connectivity covered. On top of that, Gigabyte supplies HDMI 2 and DisplayPort 1.4 ports for external displays, along with Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 for networking, with a Killer Ethernet module onboard. Gigabyte also wins brownie points for having such a convenient SD card slot for photo and video transfer.
The Aero takes an interesting approach to storage, using one of Intel’s H10 Optaneenhanced SSDs, which combines 512GB of QLC NAND memory with 32GB of Optane memory acting as a cache. This combo promises sequential reads of up to 2,300MB/sec and write speeds of up to 1,300MB/sec, but AS SSD measured these at 1,252MB/sec and just 459MB/sec. Random read/write speeds were slightly more impressive.
We also have question marks over the keyboard. It has large, flat keys and a slightly cramped layout, partly to fit in a full numeric pad. The cursor keys can be hard to spot amongst their fellows, while the left-Shift and Ctrl keys feel undersized. Most of all, the action feels floppy, with a lack of tactile feedback as you type. It’s not a bad keyboard, but it’s below the standard set by the other models here.
We’ve no complaints about the touchpad, which is big, smooth and very responsive to taps, clicks and gestures, or about the fingerprint reader in the top-left corner, which worked flawlessly time after time.
Meanwhile, someone has made the unfortunate decision to put the 720p webcam just above the hinge. Nobody likes to share the vision of their face from such a low angle or – worse – the view up their nostrils.
Thanks to the eight-core, 16-thread Core i7-10875H and RTX 2070 Super, the Aero is one of the fastest systems in this Labs, only beaten by the Chillblast, which uses the same CPU, and the Alienware. We’d put the difference down to throttling; while the Gigabyte doesn’t seem to run particularly loud or hot – we found its output was drowned out by the Chillblast’s racket – we saw clock speeds slow during some of our more CPU and GPU-intensive tests.
The specs don’t promise much in terms of battery life, but the Aero found a respectable mid-table spot with nearly six hours in our rundown tests. Running CPU and GPUintensive apps will probably halve that, but that extra battery life over rivals may be the difference between lugging the power supply with you or not.
Overall, it’s a tough choice between the Gigabyte and Razer, with the Razer surging ahead on usability but the Gigabyte pulling past on speed and overall value. We’d be delighted with either of them.