Gigabyte AeroAe 15 OLED XC
The glorious OLEDO screen is the star of thisth powerful 15in workstation, but you pay the battery-life p price
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Until this month, OLED displays have been a rare sight on laptops. This issue we have two: the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC here and the Asus ZenBook Flip S on p59. The Aero is part of Gigabyte’s professional line of “Creator” laptops and it combines the attractions of OLED with Pantone certification and a fearsome specification.
My sample came with the GeForce RTX 3070, but it’s also available with the 3060 and 3080. Like the Asus ROG Strix G15 ( see p50), it’s accompanied by an Intel Core i7-10870H, while 32GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD round off its key specs.
The 15.6in OLED screen is the star here: a 4K resolution, HDR 400 certification and factory calibration for the DCI-P3 colour space are all alluring features. It’s a stunning display that delivers crisp, vibrant colours and a deep, true black that only OLED screens are capable of. Brightness peaks at 406cd/m2, and in combination with OLED’s inherently perfect contrast it’s usable outdoors.
This is a wide gamut display, stretching to 170% of the sRGB gamut and 121% of DCI-P3. Colour accuracy is good for an OLED panel, but note
“It’s a truly stunning display that delivers crisp, vibrant colours and a deep true black that only OLED screens are capable of”
that it’s only accurate within the DCI-P3 colour gamut (to an average Delta E of 1.87). If you’re a professional photographer working in Adobe RGB or a videographer looking to grade in Rec.709, you’ll need to recalibrate.
Also note that this is a 60Hz panel, so gaming frame rates are never going to exceed 60fps. If you’re outputting to a monitor, however, you can enjoy fluid frame rates at 1080p: it stayed above 100fps in all of our benchmarks, bar Hitman 2. There’s even enough power here to game at 4K if you’re willing to drop some settings. In Wolfenstein: Youngblood, it achieved 62fps at 4K with ray tracing disabled and I achieved a 54fps average in Hitman 2 by adjusting settings from High to Medium.
In our benchmarks, it put in a mid-table performance compared to Ryzen 5800H machines, but its 224 score is faster than the similarly specified Razer Blade 17 Pro ( see issue 311, p54), which scored 207. This suggests better thermal management.
The design has a brutal elegance to match the brutal power within. Clad all in black, with angular vents on the left, right and rear, it’s an attractive laptop. It’s also slim at 20mm, and
2kg is light for such a powerful 15.6in machine. Build quality is solid and creak-free and, despite the compact chassis, it’s packed with all manner of sockets and ports.
On the left edge are full-sized HDMI 2.1 and miniDisplayPort 1.4 video outputs, next to a single USB-A 3.1 socket, 3.5mm headset jack and a 2.5Gb Ethernet port. On the right, there’s a pair of USB-A 3.1 ports, a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 connector and a high-speed, UHS-II SD card slot.
Things went downhill once I started using the
Aero 15 day to day. The chassis’ sharp edges look fantastic in photos but dig into your hands when you’re carrying the laptop around. Nor is the keyboard the best to type on. Keys have plenty of travel, but the layout is cramped thanks to a number pad on the right, which squeezes the main keyboard left and starves it of space. The touchpad is on the small side (105 x 70mm), but it – and the embedded fingerprint reader – work fine.
The less said about the webcam, the better. It’s placed in the raised plastic bulwark just above the keyboard, providing murky image quality and an unflattering angle. Battery life is another weakness. Despite housing a massive 99Whr battery – the highest capacity you’re legally allowed to take on a plane – the longest it lasted in our test was 5hrs 50mins. No doubt you could extend that by dimming the display, but it still trails behind its Asus rivals this month.
The Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC is a fine laptop. The display is glorious, there’s enough power on tap to run any creative application you fancy and you can even game at 4K. But I can’t help wanting more from this machine. Perhaps it’s due to the underwhelming keyboard, maybe the lacklustre battery life, but I think it’s more to do with a multitude of small annoyances that eat into the Aero’s appeal. 8-core 2.2GHz (5GHz boost) Intel Core i7-10870H processor Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM
15.6in non-touch OLED display, 60Hz, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C 3 x USB-A 3. 1 HDMI 2.1 mini-DisplayPort 1.4
2.5Gb Ethernet UHS-II SD card reader 3.5mm mic in 3.5mm headphone out
99Wh battery Windows 10 Pro 356 x 250 x 20mm (WDH) 2kg 1yr C&R warranty part code: XC-8UK5450SP