Gigabyte Aero 15X review

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The Gigabyte Aero 15X is an Nvidia RTX Studio laptop featuring the tried-and-tested combination of the six-core Intel Core i7-9750H and GeForceRTX 2080 graphics card. It's a thin and light design, with our review model boasting 32GB of memory and a 1TB PCIE 3.0 SSD. This internal specification is more than capable of both high-end 3D design tasks as well as games. 

But is it capable enough to deserve a spot on our round up of the most powerful laptops? Let's take a look. 

The stand-out feature of the 2019 version of this laptop is the advanced 4K HDR AMOLED display. OLED display technology presents extremely bright and colourful images, and is generally touted as being more advanced than the LCD screens in typical IPS panels, capable of deeper blacks and better overall image quality. 

That said, while the OLED display in the Gigabyte Aero 15X presents a very sharp picture with superb image quality, the colour-accurate displays hardly look bad in laptops that use traditional IPS technology, so we’re not so sure the OLED advantage is quite the deal breaker you might imagine.

Thankfully the Gigabyte has retained a physical Ethernet port, joining the three USB-A and USB-C ports. We’re pleased to see an SD card reader as well, which is not something you get these days on every laptop.

The Aero 15X's OLED display presents a very sharp picture with superb image quality

One area we weren’t keen on was the design. The garish and bright default cycling RGB pattern over the keyboard backlight might be delightful for teenage boys who are looking for a loud and brash gaming laptop, but we actually found it quite distracting and harder to type on. Thankfully, however, this can be disabled with the Gigabyte Fusion software.

Similarly, the overall design feels like a step down from the metal exteriors of other laptops. We prefer the all-metal unibody of the Razer Blade 15 and the more roomy trackpad. We also found the Gigabyte Aero 15X to be quite noisy, emitting a very low hum when running 3D tests, despite the 71-blade dual fans inside it.

This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 255; subscribe here.

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