Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox today we're taking a closer look at the gigabyte Aero 15x from 2018 which was launched alongside Intel's new H series coffee-like processes a couple of weeks ago we've already covered the new CPUs in depth and you should definitely check out that video if you haven't already so today we'll be focusing more on gigabytes top-end new laptop I looked at the original era 15 last year and was pretty impressed with most aspects the era 15 X between 18 isn't a massive change from what gigabyte established with the original model but we do get some key improvements to hardware and other changes that refine the laptop and gigabyte is key to stress that this isn't just a gaming laptop but a machine designed for productivity and that shows with features like an X right certified display that I'll get into later the key piece of new hardware is of course the Intel Core i7 8750 H which brings six cores to laptops for the first time and presents a decent upgrade over the older quad core Core i7 7700 HQ particularly for productivity the GPU options stay the same an nvidia geforce gtx 1060 in the base model and a gtx 1070 max q in the area 15 X version we're looking at today the SSD is still 512 gigabytes and we get a single 16 gig stick of daily are for one of the other key improvements is the new 15.6 inch 1080p display this new panel will no doubt be used across a wide range of laptops as it provides a 144 Hertz refresh rate at this size for the first time previously we were limited to 120 Hertz on most laptops so the 24 Hertz increase is nice for those who like to game at the upper end of frame rates and you don't get g-sync with this display which I thought was a little strange though is likely to keep costs down juice Inc would have improved the smoothness of games particularly when running below 60fps but provided you're pushing into the 80 plus FPS range not having adaptive sync isn't a massive issue in fact let's talk a bit more about this display because it's one of the interesting aspects of this laptop similar to the last model the new era 15 X has super slim bezels around three of the sides which makes the overall size of this laptops more and maximizes the screen real estate you can get in the available space I really love this sort of design I wish more companies would opt for this similar type of bezel set up it does have a few drawbacks though most notably the webcam position below the display gives you a rather unpleasant angle in your video calls I don't personally use the webcam very often so it's not a big deal for me but anyone that is a frequent user it should be aware of this trade-off gamers get to enjoy the 144 Hunt's refresh rate of this panel but professionals don't miss out at all either the error 15x like its predecessor is X right Pantone certified meaning the display is factory calibrated to the srgb standard this is a key feature for professionals that demand color accurate displace and while the calibration is provided through a simple software profile it's better than the complete lack of calibration you get with most laptop displays as the panel on the 2018 aro 15 X is different to the last gen model some aspects to display performance have changed brightness has increased to around 320 nits up from 218 it's and that brings a small increase in contrast as well viewing angles are still quite good too thanks to calibration average temperature and gamma are almost spot-on with a relatively even performance across the grayscale range my arrow 15 X unit is less accurate than the original arrow 15 I tested an average greyscale Delta a of 1.6 - as opposed to 0.5 - with the previous model but both results are under 2.0 which is still pretty good it's also likely that just one display profile was created for all area 15 X laptops so there will be some natural variance between units saturation and color checker results in at a de of 2.34 and 2.59 respectively so around 1.0 higher than with the original area 15 not as rock-solid accurate as I'd like to see as we got with the original while it was a little bit more accurate but still a pretty respectable result and certainly a lot better than most laptops gaming laptops in particular often fairly inaccurate but the error 15 X is good in this regard and provides that extra fresh track 2 which is always nice to see enough about the display though you're probably sick of hearing about calm and fire results by now let's talk design and construction which hasn't changed significantly compared to the original arrow 15 the body is a mix of metal and plastic with several seams around the place that doesn't quite give it the same premium feel as the best metal body laptops the good news is the body is extremely solid with basically no flex in any area even if you're mashing the keyboard speaking of the keyboard once again you get an individually RGB LED backlit keyboard with a solid tactile feel and of course a handy numpad I really like how this keyboard feels to type on so it's perfect for whacking together a word document and naturally it's good for gaming too the ELN trackpad is okay there was still prefer a higher-end trackpad with better more precise tracking if you're like ports the area 15 X has got plenty of them three USB 3.0 type-a ports I found about three USB C port Ethernet HDMI 2.0 mini DisplayPort one point for a single 3.5 mm audio jack and a fast UHS 2 SD card reader the air 15 X is chassis is still very portable at 18 0.9 millimeters thick and approximately 2 kilograms heavy not including the necessary power brick of course it's not the slimmest all lightest laptop I've seen with these specs but it's more compact extremely solid and far more portable than cheaper thicker gaming laptops after all you're paying for the portability and gigabyte certainly has delivered here amazingly these sorts of dimensions have been achieved without skimping on the battery which remains at a huge 94 watt hours want to know what the inside of the air 15 X looks like well let's take a look with the t6 screwdriver and a spudger it's pretty straightforward to remove the bottom panel exposing again a standard layout here the battery sits at the bottom while there's a dual fan cooler with two heat pipes at the top sending heat away from the central GPU and CPU to the remarkably tiny heat sinks in the front right corner you'll spot a spare M naught to spot compatible with nvme and sided drives while there's also a free dim slot yes the air 15 X comes configured with single channel memory considering the extra before you can get with dual channel memory which I'll go through in a moment I'd highly recommend grabbing an extra 16 gig stick of ddr4 2666 and slotting it straight in unfortunately with current memory prices this could cost you as much as 200 US dollars and while it's nice gigabyte leaves a freedom slot for you to upgrade to 32 gig out of the box performance is reduced so let's talk performance we've seen how the kora 78758 performs before in a dual channel memory configuration in my original review of that CPU so if you missed it head back and take a look at all of those charts particularly if you're thinking of immediately upgrading your air 15 X to dual channel memory I also Chuck the dual channel results in the upcoming benchmarks for quick and easy reference he will be focusing on the eye 78758 with single channel memory and how that differs from the dual channel results and later we'll discuss gaming as low memory bandwidth hasn't impact there as well where the memory bandwidth has an effect on performance does depend on the application in Cinebench x264 encoding handbrake and Excel there is a marginal difference between the Aero 15 X and what we previously established with the best-case performance for the chorus of an 87 50h this isn't that surprising encoding and rendering test largely don't require high bandwidth and neither do Excel calculations decompression also seems largely unaffected with just a 1% performance difference in 7-zip though compression is hit fairly hard dropping by 20 and 23 percent respectively in our 7-zip and winrar benchmarks that's a pretty significant difference for just increasing memory bandwidth so if you have workloads that are compression heavy you'll benefit the most from adding in that second Ram stick Adobe apps also like additional memory bandwidth premier encodes at 10% slower and Photoshop filters like the iris blur ask 16% slower with just one stick of RAM that's a considerable difference in premiere in particular where you might be waiting a while for an encode to complete MATLAB is well known to suffer with low memory bandwidth falling behind by 19% across the various PC mark Suites the aro 15 X was slower than our best-case eye 78758 results by 2 to 5 and considering the multi workload nature of PC mark this is a fair result is some tests are not affected by the reduced memory bandwidth and others can be hit a bit harder on average across all our productivity workloads the single channel area 15 X is 5 percent slower than our dual channel cry 78758 configuration essentially that's the performance you're missing out on by not having that second stick of RAM inside the arrow 15 X which is why most companies tend to opt for dual channel out of the box in their sort of laptops it's also the data you'll need when tossing up between a range of AI 78758 laptops if you can find one that's dual channel out of the box you can expect 6 percent more performance than the arrow of course it's also worth comparing the new eye 78758 arrow 15 X to the older one with the i7 7700 HQ inside the original arrow also uses single channel memory and in workloads that are not affected by the GPU as our two arrow 15 review systems did have different GPUs inside we are seeing significant gains in multi-threaded tests like Cinebench and video encoding performance is typically 35 to 55 percent faster with the new six core CPU and that's a massive performance job and definitely gives you a reason to upgrade even if you're rocking a system from just one generation ago if you're moving from an i7 7700 HQ laptop with dual channel memory performance gains are lower on average though again a number of typical productivity workloads are unaffected by memory bandwidth as for gaming again if you're interested in a detailed breakdown of how the error 15x performs with the i7 8750 h gtx 1070 max Q and dual channel memory check out my original review of the ISO 78758 to save rehashing a bunch of stuff I covered in that review here I'll just be going through some performance summaries so you can see how single channel memory effects results and how it compares to last gen systems in general single channel memory does have a rather significant effect performance was down in many games by 10 to 15 percent and the biggest losses were up to a twenty-nine percent drop in one percent lows a handful of games were unaffected by the drop in memory bandwidth but in general you'll find most games are at least more susceptible to lowered performance as I mentioned earlier to get the most out of the error 15x in gaming you really want that second stick of ddr4 compared to a last gen system with the core i7 7700 HQ we previously established an average performance gain of around eight to ten percent in games with the new chorus of an 80 750 H provided you have dual channel memory however the error 15x with its single channel memory struggles to outperform a dual channel 7700 HQ system on average there are some games that show roughly a 10 percent performance gain and there are others that actually show a performance decline and those are the games that are most heavily affected by memory bandwidth interested in storage performance well my review model came with a 512 gigabyte Toshiba nvm a PCIe SSD which is actually a bit slower than the 512 gigabyte SSD in the original error that said it still performs well in sequential workloads and whilst not as strong as other nvme drives and ran a performance it should suffice for most typical workloads plus there is a spare I'm not to thought if you wanted to chuck in more storage as just 512 gigabytes can be a bit slim let's wrap up the round of testing with some thermal and noise performance after all we saw the cooler earlier and that thing is pretty tightening the thermal performance isn't fantastic but it does fall within normal results we've seen from other gaming laptops running the CPU at 90 degrees and the GPU at 79 degrees during our watchdogs 2 session however the cooler does run loud which seems to go against in videos max-q principles so not sure what's going on there while quiet at idle the cooler roars into action during gaming pumping out 48.8 DBA of noise from 50 centimeters away similar laptops were reviewed tend to fall more around the 43 DBA range so no doubt the error 15 X has to push more air across its tiny heatsink to effectively cool the components inside oh and battery life that is probably something I should put in this review the area 15 X has a monster 94 watt hour battery which is larger than most gaming laptops of this size and class after all the laptop is positioned for not just gamers but also those that want to use this laptop for productivity tasks on the go looking at the results we are seeing a notable improvement over the original era 15 that isn't a surprise considering the cpu still packs the same TDP I wouldn't say Bachelor life is fantastic or as good as top and ultrabooks looking at these results however it is still pretty decent for a 15-inch laptop with powerful internals naturally when running intensive applications the high-performance processor will cut your battery life quite drastically but in lower power workloads like web browsing the over 15 X does put up a good show for the model we tested the error 15 X comes in at 2299 u.s. dollars and a bit over 3200 AUD that is a high price to pay compared to the cheapest gaming laptops with this hardware inside however the more portable and compact you go the higher price you usually have to pay most of the area 15 X is main competitors such as the msi ge62 5 stealth thin and the new asus rog Zephyrus also come in around this price of very similar specifications I still quite like many aspects of the Aero 15 X including its small bezel display the X right Pantone certification of group which is you know awesome for creative professionals and the general compact portable nature of the chassis not a lot has changed since the original era 15 in this regard but minor improvements in a range of areas is always nice however to get the most out of the hardware in this laptop you really need to upgrade it to dual channel memory it's disappointing gigabyte didn't include dual channel memory out of the box I can understand wanting to make it easy for consumers to add in more ram with ease but it does hurt performance in both productivity workloads and gaming the new 6 core processor in this laptop is the key feature and it does provide impressive performance gains in some tasks but it is held back a bit by the single channel memory configuration and still recommend the error 15x as it has a lot of strengths and the memory bandwidth issue is pretty easy to rectify but there is more intense competition this time around I'm very curious to see what a soos and MSI's competing laptops provide when I check them out in the coming weeks that's it for this review if you like our laptop content don't forget to subscribe for more consider supporting us on our patreon at patreon.com slash hardware unboxed and i'll see you in the next one