Gigabyte Aero 14
Built on the strong foundations of a new GPU architecture.
After having our grubby mitts on some laptops sporting Nvidia’s latest Pascal GPUs, we can safely say that this architectural update makes a big difference to notebook efficiency, gaming performance and size. Though the Aero 14 has appeared in an earlier incarnation with a GTX 970M, we can’t help but feel that the Aero 14’s design was really built to house one of Nvidia’s coolerrunning Pascal GPUs — and it demonstrates what a fantastic, no-compromise portable you can create around the GTX 1060.
Nvidia’s not calling this GPU a ‘1060M’, which is not a typo, rather a new Pascal naming convention. Since you get identical memory bandwidth, CUDA cores and similar performance (less than a 10% difference) across both desktop and laptop GPUs, Nvidia’s decided there’s no need to distinguish them. To go along with this neardesktop-grade GPU, the Aero 14 also packs a top-ofthe-line Intel Core i76700HQ CPU that boosts to 3.5GHz, a 14-inch QHD display, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a generous 512GB PCIe SSD that makes load times super fast. You can boot up to the Windows login in 15 seconds and it’ll clock sequential Q32T1 read speeds of 2,193MB/s and writes of 1,580MB/s. Getting double the PCIe SSD storage of most of the competition at this price makes the Aero 14 a compelling proposition, but it’s worth noting that you will have to sacrifice a secondary HDD — and live within that speedy-butconfined 512GB capacity.
It comes in an orangecoloured variation, but we tested the subdued black scheme, which can pass as a work computer. It was able to achieve some of the best PCMark 8 benchmark results in home and work use cases, with scores of 3,579 and 4,427. This was followed by similarly good results in HWBOT’s CPUheavy x265 media-encoding test, where the Aero 14 managed to crank through an impressive 15.95fps with 1080p video.
Moving on to GPU tasks, this device pulled out a score of 5,086 on 3DMark’s graphically challenging Fire Strike Extreme — just a little lower than ASUS’s $7,500, GX700, which scored 5,881 (and features two desktop-grade GTX 980s in SLI and 64GB of RAM). In real-world tests on Batman: Arkham Knight, The Division
Far Cry Primal, offers more than what you expect at this price. It’s even VR-ready, weighs in at a portable 1.89kg and manages to pack into a sub-2cm profile. It also kept the CPU under 86ºC and the GPU under 78ºC throughout testing — and didn’t get particularly noisy either.
Much of what makes this laptop so successful is the implementation of the new GPU, but its overall composition actually makes it an interesting value proposition for those wanting a faster and streamlined portable-PC experience.