Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR YC
Nvidia’s 30 series cards arrive on gaming laptops, but there’s a long list of caveats attached to these monster GPUs.
Gigabyte once kept its Aorus branding for its most elite gaming devices, but that hasn’t been the case for a couple of years and the Aero 17 HDR YC is a clear example of this. This $5,999 non-Aorus machine is as top of the line as they come, featuring a Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU and a 10th Gen Core i9 CPU from Intel.
We were pretty surprised to see an RTX 3080 in a laptop, not just because it’s the first 30 series I’ve had my hands on, but also because of the sheer incomprehensibility of being able to fit a generally 1.5kg desktop GPU in a 2.5kg laptop. Of course the Aero 17 HDR YC doesn’t have a full desktop graphics card in it, since the Max-Q 3080 pulls a maximum of 105 Watts on this device, around a third the desktop card’s max power draw.
Nvidia’s laptop cards are a little more complicated than usual this year, avoiding clear Max-Q branding on 30 series laptop GPUs and having variable maximum power draws of between 80 and 150+Watts depending on the vendor. It’s also allowing maximum boost clock speeds to range between 1,245 and 1,710MHz on its RTX 3080 laptop GPUs, which is a big enough variability to yield very different results when gaming... so don’t expect to be able to simply look at a spec sheet and know how a laptop will perform in 2021.
The Aero 17 HDR YC’s RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU is supported by an Intel Core i910980HK CPU and an impressively compact cooling architecture that manages to fit into a foldable, 2.1cm-thick laptop. Sadly this compact cooling array can only do so much and Gigabyte decided to opt for the lowest boost clock of 1,245MHz. If you’re planning on using the Aero 17 HDR YC for 1080p gaming, it’s not really worth the investment. The Aero 17HDR YC netted fps results 28% slower than a 2080 Super in an Alienware Area 51m R2 in The Division 2 Full-HD-Ultra benchmarks and was around 12 percent behind in Total War Saga: Troy and F1 2020 using the same settings.
The Aero 17 HDR YC does however come with a VESA 400 certified HDR screen that runs at a 4K resolution, and if you dial up to this resolution you can play titles like Metro: Exodus at 4K Ultra using ray tracing and DLSS for stable 30 fps+ frame rates. This 17.3-inch display comes with full Adobe RGB compatibility, so you can use it for professional colour grading and the 64GB of RAM, octa-core CPU and massive Cuda core GPU allocation means it’ll be a suitable workstation for any processor-heavy workflow.
While Gigabyte advertises an all day battery life, like most gaming laptops, the 99Wh battery will get between 3-4 hours when in use. The unit comes with a generous array of ports so you won’t need to fork out for a dock (which is nice) and the two 1TB PCIe SSDs provide a generous amount of ultra-fast local storage.
A powerful gaming workstation that reins in performance and swaps it for portability.