Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware box sitting beside me today is perhaps the surprise packet of the year it's the gigabyte arrow 15 now I've used to bunch of gigabyte laptops in the past and I haven't been too impressed so when I got my hands on the air of 15 I was blown away by the quality of this laptop not just for gamers but also for professionals this is a really solid device and it's probably the best laptop that gigabyte has ever made the hardware inside will be pretty familiar to most of you we're looking at an Intel Core i7 7700 HQ processor along with an nvidia geforce gtx 1066 gigabyte GPU so it's well tuned to 1080p ultra kali gambling we're also seeing 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory and a 512 gigabyte SSD in my review net here there are a couple of other configurations available depending on your region with a 4k model coming in the future but at least as far as most aro 15s go this is the hardware that you're beginning as always I want to start by talking about the design I think most of you will have noticed straight away the display I mean it's a 15.6 inch display the gigabyte has gone with the Dell XPS approach of completely removing the display bezels leading to an awesome viewing experience I wish more gaming laptop manufacturers would produce laptops with slim bezels we've seen guys like Razer with the massive bezels around the display of the Razer Blade but gigabyte has gone you know what we don't need bezels in our laptops bezels don't make any sense we want to give the best viewing experience possible let's just get rid of them let's make the display feel all the available space and what it's led to here is an awesome looking device I mean thanks to the slim bezels gigabyte does claim the Aero 15 only takes up the space of a 14 inch laptop I will say it is slightly larger than my 14 inch razor blade however it is definitely smaller than most 15-inch gaming laptops on the market and it's not just in terms of its footprint but also in terms of its size and weight at just 2.1 kilograms and 19 millimeters thick we're looking at a reasonably portable device now it's not slimmest or lightest gtx 1060 laptop or lightest 15.6 inch laptop on the market MSI's GS 63 VI is slimmer and lighter in both regards however we are seeing a much larger battery in here we're looking at 94 watt hours and still an extremely portable device with a smaller footprint than some of its competitors on the market I think this is well suited to taking around four portable workstation use or whether you just want to game on the go gigabyte has really hit the nail on the head with the portable design here with the arrow 15 the build quality is much better than most gigabyte laptops I've used in the past thanks the use of aluminium around most areas of the device the lid is reasonably understated as well no significant amounts of gamer style here although you can purchase this laptop also in a green and an orange variant which are certainly extremely vibrant though I prefer the more black and understated look of the era 15 that I was provided with around the edges the plastic that they've used there and the sort of designer has a few seams isn't as nice as some of the aluminum unibody with designs of seen from other companies but it's still far better than the all plastic bodies the gigabyte has used in the past and at least as far as some of the things like IO are concerned gigabyte has really nailed it here with things like three USB 3.0 type-a ports HDMI 2.0 Ethernet yes full-sized Ethernet inside this 19 millimeter slim laptop of an SD card slot Thunderbolt 3 USB type-c and a 3.5 mm audio jack and mini DisplayPort so a lot of ports to be found this laptop and for creative professionals that require that SD card slot or for those that want to attach you know multiple displays through one cable provider through Thunderbolt 3 the arrow 15 has all of that then you can't really complain about the i/o that gigabyte has provided the one downside to these slim bezel laptop designs is the positioning of the webcam it has to be placed below the display on the arrow 15 and it does lead to an awkward angle sort of those they use their webcam often you might not be too happy with the webcam placement here and also the speaker system in Hera fifteens pretty tinny although that's to be expected from most gaming laptops I was pretty impressed with the keyboard that gigabyte has included here we are looking at rubber dome key caps courses is expecting a laptop this thing but the travel distance is reasonably good and has a very cliquey response that leads to a great typing experience it's also of course well suited to gaming and you get full RGB backlighting support that's customizable through gigabytes fusion utility not as good as the Razer synapse utility for you know adding a whole range of features and functionality to your RGB keyboard but you still get a quite a large range of customizability available here as far as the trackpad is concerned kike byte has once again gone for eel and hardware I've used a ton of eel and track pads in the past and all of them have been garbage but on the area of 15 it's actually surprisingly solid the tracking experience is good it's not as good as some of the other options that we've seen and support for gestures is reasonable as well which is a big surprise from the eel and trackpad and it makes it reasonably easily use on a day to day basis though of course the gamers are most professionals I'd still recommend plugging in an external mouse to get the most out of the arrow 15 it's not just games the gigabyte is targeting for the area of 15 it's also creative professionals thanks to its x-ray Pantone display certification x1 is a well known color calibration company in fact they make the tools that I used to test all displays that I receive and what this certification means is that the arrow fifteens display is factory calibrated to the srgb spectrum out of the box I was a little bit skeptical because I tend to think color calibration at the factory doesn't always work too well but when I got my hands in the air 50 it blew me away with its color accuracy as we move into spectra Cal Cal Man 5 we can see just how decent this display is 280 nibs of brightness is a little bit lower than I'd normally like but a contrast ratio of 1200 to 1 and reasonable viewing angles tend to make me think that this 15.6 inch 1080p panel is more IPS than TN although it is limited to just a 60 Hertz refresh rate but when we're looking at color accuracy white level average of 65 20 K is basically dead accurate and an average grayscale Delta 80 mm value of just 0.5 6 is fantastic for a laptop this is by far the most accurate display that I've tested in a laptop so far with the value of under 1 Oh consider indistinguishable from true accuracy and therefore suitable for professional users color performance was also excellent in our saturation sweeps the area 15 report on average Delta mm value of one point one six well in our custom color checker test we saw an average value of one point five three so it doesn't quite hit the under one point Oh mark that ID like to see if they're creative professionals but the area fifteen still blows all the other offerings on the market completely out of the water and even with third-party calibration you can't achieve significantly superior results to what the area 15 provides out of the box so for creative professionals if you want to do color accurate work the Aero fifteen really is the only laptop I've tested that actually comes close to providing that experience directly out of the box it's time to talk about the stuff that you guys I'm sure I'm most interested in the performance so inside this laptop as I mentioned earlier core i7 7700 HQ quad core CPU as well as the geforce gtx 1066 gigabyte GPU you might have unit 16 gigabytes of ram and a 512 gigabyte SSD but if you open up the laptop you will find that it is just a single channel configuration there's a spare dim slot available if you just simply slide in another dim and go straight up to 32 gigabytes with no worries and there's also a free em not to slot allowing you to easily expand on the storage pretty easily although 512 gigabytes out of the box is still reasonably decent one thing you won't find here no 2.5 inch drive base slot but again the free em no 2 spot should be enough for most people who want to upgrade the storage in the future and it's reasonably accessible simply by removing the base cover anyway let's dive into some benchmark graphs and we'll start off as always with pc mark we'll take a look at the home workload and the gigabyte arrow 15 here performs around the same mark as a lot of other i7 7700 HQ devices and this is largely the same in their creative workload posting a very reasonable score here for something with the gtx 1060 inside of lers don't want to use this device as a workstation the pc mark work test reveals another very soild score for the area of 15 moving on to our encoding benchmarks and as this device is targeted towards creatives encoding videos and so forth might be you want to do on the area of 15 and at Cinebench are eleven point five squares very solid on both the multi-threaded and the single threaded test no performance concerns here and again the 7700 HQ falls among the range of other laptops with this CPU that we've tested in the past in our x264 encoding benchmark another fantastic solid results from the i7 7700 HQ it blows out any alterable completely head over water so if you're after doing stuff like video editing you'll definitely want to upgrade to the quad-core 7700 HD that a laptop like this provides in the winrar compression benchmark this laptop does suffer from having just a single channel memory implementation so it's a little bit slower than other laptops with a 7700 HQ inside they're still a solid showing nonetheless and you see similar results in MATLAB which can be a bit memory bandwidth limited as well so for those who are engineers yeah sorting in extra deem into that device give you 30 gigabytes of RAM and also improve memory bandwidth might improve your overall experience here solid-state performance was outstanding the 512 gigabyte SSD and my device was a samsung s m96 one PCIe nvme Drive so I see sequential read and write speeds above 1.5 gigabytes per second not quite as good in the random results but still very solid and falls among the range of other gaming laptops that I've reviewed moving on to 3d mark we just want to see how the gtx 1060 performs up against a range of other devices make sure it's working perfectly here any times by benchmark there's no surprises here with the gtx 1060 performs as expected it's around 30% slower than the gtx 1070 if you wanted to spend more money and get a laptop with that GPU inside but it is around 45% faster than the last generation gtx 970m and GPU limited workloads so there is definitely a reason to upgrade from those older generation laptops to something with the gtx 1060 inside revealer to Gambia we'll first start with some of the older titles in Tomb Raider ultimate preset 55 frames per second average with a 1% low of 41 FPS puts it in the same range of other gtx 1060 laptops in Metro last light very high preset a seventy-six FPS average is a very solid result with a 1% low of 53 FPS in this situation in BioShock Infinite another game that runs really well on the GTX 1060 just over 100 FPS at 102 fps and we're seeing a 1% low of 49 fps pretty typical for this laptop in this game Middle Earth shadow of Mordor 87 FPS average here at maximum quality settings with a 1% low of 62 FPS so in this older title you'll be getting a fantastic experience on the era of 15 in Grand Theft Auto 5 we're seeing a average frame rate of 57 FPS at maximum quality settings with a 1% low of 40 fps you might want to drop the things a little bit to achieve a higher 1% low but nevertheless this laptop does run Grand Theft Auto 5 very well in rising the Tomb Raider which is the most intensive benchmark in our suite here a 29 FPS average is below 30 fps so it's not delivering a fairly playable experience by any stretch you'll want to drop the settings down here to the high level which delivers around a 63 FPS average with a 44 fps 1% while making it very playable in Deus Ex mankind divided we're seeing an average frame rate of 39 FPS with a 1% low of 32 fps so not the best experience here on aqua settings so in order to drop it down to the high quality settings those frame rates are boosted significantly but if you're keen on 30 FPS gaming you know the are two types 1060 isn't too bad here and again the GTX 1060 inside the area 15 is well-suited to 1080p very high to ultra quality setting gaming across a range of games especially for those that want to be targeting around the 50 to 60 FPS mark you will need to drop the quality settings from some times but the r15 provides a very solid gaming experience nonetheless in quite portable form factor I also wanted to talk about the cooling solution because gigabyte has done a really good job of keeping the Aero 15 cool and quiet under operation to be clear it's not silent I mean the fans do spin up and you can hear them but I've definitely heard louder gtx 1060 laptops the razor blade being one example of a laptop that's slim and portable but very larger in operation the Aero 15 is nowhere near as loud and our unsymmetrical err in i-264 systems stability tests the cpu sonnet just 86 degrees Celsius while the GPU is at 75 degrees Celsius which is very cool for a GTX 1060 laptop with this hardware inside and when you get into a gaming session the CPU temperatures drop even further to around 78 degrees Celsius so a really fine result from the cooling inside the area 15 and a testament to gigabytes high quality cooling solution engineering cases laptop cool and reasonably quiet viewing gaming that's what you want to see in terms of battery life there's an enormous 94 what our battery inside this laptop I expected to pull a little bit better than it did considering how large the batteries but it still manages to obliterate some of the other Finan like GTX 1060 laptops on the market like the msi gs70 form quite as long as the razor blade does with similar hardware inside but still nonetheless a flawed result the force towards the lower end of ultrabooks in terms of a comparison there I think most people will be satisfied with the battery life of this is laptop provides off the charge it's not nearly as bad as some other gaming laptops on the market at the end of the day the Aero 15 is genuinely one of the best gaming laptops on the market at the moment it has a fantastic design with those slim bezels around the sides and the display itself is XY Pantone certified which means it is color accurate out of the box the hardware info is fantastic I 770 700 HQ and the GTX 1066 8 gigabyte are well suited to gaming at 1080p around ultra quality settings at 60fps and of course if you're a creative professional this laptop is very well suited to rendering videos and doing all those sorts of things so you'd expect from a quad-core CPU also seeing decent battery life from the 94 watt hour cell and some upgrade ability with the free m dot 2 slot and a freedom slot inside this laptop the keyboard very solid very quickie and with full RGB backlighting and eland trackpad surprised me a lot in terms of how not awful it is so gigabyte has really hit the nail on the head with the error 15 and it is by far the best that they produced so far in terms of pricing the arrow 15 is priced around the same as the razor blade so in the US that's 1900 US Dollars and in Australia $2,900 reduce however at that price you do get a 512 gig SSD compared to 256 gig in the razor blade I really think you need 512 gig to you know actually be able to restore more than just a few games and in the razor blade that will cost you a few hundred dollars more so the area 15 is pretty much a cheaper alternative to the razor blade and it packs largely the same sort of quality it's portable it packs fantastic hardware decent battery life and you know that X right Pantone certified display blew me away out of the box it's a really solid device from gigabyte and one that I can highly recommend anyway that's it for this review of the era of 15 I really hope and I have to send it back anytime soon it's a fantastic device and I do want to spend a bit more time with in anyway you can check out the written review on taxbot comm links to our patreon are below if you want to support the channel and I'll catch you in the next one