Aorus 15P YD
Aorus is first past the post with Intel’s 11th gen H series processors, but is this top shelf gaming laptop a real winner?
Gigabyte is good at being first in our review door when a new processor lands, but the 15P YD arrived alongside Intel’s own (nonfinalised) reference model, which is pretty amazing for a ready-to-buy gaming laptop. It means it’ll be APC’s first laptop with one of Intel’s 11th generation Core H-series processors. The 15P YD features an i7-11800H CPU, which will likely be the most commonly adopted processor among gaming laptops.
If we compare this new processor with 16GB of RAM to an Aorus 15P we tested in March, with an i7-10870H and 32GB of RAM, you’ll see raw performance gains of between 12 and 15 percent, a number we’ve become pretty used to seeing in generational updates. This puts it pretty much perfectly on par with AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H in processing power and general computing tasks.
While it hasn’t really changed the gaming equation much – in fact, you could probably argue it’s gone backwards thanks to lower peak boost clock speeds – it’s a step forward for productivity uses, and will churn through the most demanding workloads.
The other standout features on the Aorus 15P YD are a surprisingly fast SSD and the returning 99Wh battery (the largest you can check-in on US flights). In sequential read and write tests the Samsung Gen 4 PCIe SSD managed 7,014MB/s and 5,093MB/s respectively. A figure we had to check since we’ve never seen storage run faster than about 5GB per second on a laptop. To put that in perspective, you’d be able to relocate your 70GB install of Cyberpunk 2077 in around 10 to 15 seconds.
The Aorus 15P YD has a 15.6inch Full HD IPS display that can be configured with a 360Hz panel, but we’ve only seen 240Hz options available locally. Either way these displays are professional E-sports level with minimal response times. The 15P YD also includes a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU which gets close to 60fps running Metro: Exodus at 1080p Ultra with ray tracing and DLSS on, so you can expect 100fps plus on any Full HD first person shooters and 200+fps on less demanding online competitive games.
Despite having a giant battery, the device’s lifespan wasn’t overly large, lasting just 2 hours and 15 minutes under load and four hours and 17 minutes in 1080p movie playback. Gigabyte does feature an AI software that runs in the background and switches your PC into different states for performance or longevity benefits, but we had this disabled for our benchmarking. With this on you might be able to stretch battery life out a bit, but we wouldn’t recommend going anywhere without the charger.
The keyboard is really nice to type on, but is much softer than anything going for a more mechanical feel and the unit includes Wi-Fi 6 and all the latest interface and networking options. At close to 3cm thick and 2.2kg it’s definitely of gaming laptop proportions, but it’s actually amazingly weighted considering it’s running a RTX 3080 GPU. It also looks deceptively sleek in its uniform matte black metal chassis.
An impressive E-sports gaming laptop that lands at a fair price.