Gigabyte Aero 15X

Is the 2019 Aero 15 another one to Gigabyte the dust?

PRICE $ 3,399 gigabyte.com/au

Gigabyte was ambitious this year, adding a top of the line Core i9 RTX 2080 configuration to its Aero 15 offerings, but the gamble on this model didn’t exactly pay off,since it suffered from thermal throttling and a major price hike. We’ve looked at the Gigabyte Aero 15X here which has a loadout of an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU and 16GB of RAM. While this is a pretty standard configuration, Gigabyte does offer the largest battery of the bunch at 94.2Wh. Despite being 17.8% bigger than MSI’s GS75 Stealth 8SG, the Aero 15X’s lithium ion battery actually ran dry 14.1% earlier when running with a more intensive 15.6-inch 4K screen. We’d recommend opting to save yourself the $800 it’ll cost to bump the screen to 4K and double the RAM allocation.

The Aero 15X still has one of the smallest footprints with an envelope of 356.4 x 250mm, and it weighs in at 2.11 (impressive considering the battery allocation). While the PCMark 8 Scores here were 15% lower than average, this may be due to software iterations since all other CPU benchmarks were only about 1-2% off the average.

There are a couple of new features on this device that might swey early adopters including Microsoft’s machine learning power management system Azure AI (which can bump frame rates by 15% on some games), and a neat control centre that’ll make sure you’re never running out of date drivers.