Aftershock Apex 15X

Is Aftershock’s 15-inch RTX unit at the top of the 2019 gaming-laptop mountain?

PRICE $ 2,768 aftershockpc.com.au

We’re a little on the fence about Aftershock’s Apex 15X. In many ways it’s a reasonable entry level gaming laptop, but when you consider it costs $2,768 on special it’s a bit of a hard sell. See as this goes to print there will still be a number of retailers trying to get through laptops with Nvidia’s 10 series GPUs. We saw an Aorus X5 v8 with an i7-850H CPU and a GTX 1070 going for $2,599 and a 2018 Razer Blade with a GTX 1070 going for $2,859, and while these units are older, they perform as well, if not better than, the Aftershock Apex 15X. That said, if you are really keen on Nvidia’s new ray tracing features then you’re going to side with this unit.

One of the first things we noticed was that the Apex 15X is wrapped in a lot of brushed aluminum, the same kind we used to give MSI grief about because it makes premium devices look cheap. And while the edge-to-edge keyboard and trackpad look nice, both felt extremely flakey. The keyboard was shallow and mushy, with either a lack of n-key rollover or just very imprecise actuations since it regularly missed producing letters while typing and the trackpad rattled on clicking, making you feel like it might break at any moment.

The Aftershock Apex 15X performed much better showing a 10% bump on the multi threaded Cinebench CPU benchmark and sitting around average on all general working tasks. Graphically it was only between 6 and 14% behind the average game framerates of the 2070 units in this roundup and it was over 5% better than the Metabox Alpha X on all gaming titles.