Gadgetory

when we last looked at the gigabyte arrow 15 we concluded that it was the perfect thin gaming laptop because well at the time it was pretty much the only thin gaming laptop that didn't make a bunch of other stupid compromises in the name of just raw performance but since then the field has opened up a fair bit with Razer refreshing the blade alien we're bringing out the m15 and a sous continually refining their zephyrus lineup so then gigabytes response to all this mounting pressure ai ai ai laptop what even is AI laptop oh if we get to that later yeah no okay so then AI laptop can a feature that we called the worst demo at CES 2019 possibly make the Aero 15 x9 stand out from the crowd and failing that is the overall design still solid at least with glass where you can instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code Linus and get 25% off glass wire at the link below looking at the arrow 15 the overall design is reminiscent of the gaming laptops of several years ago which I guess makes sense since it hasn't gotten a chassis update for about two years with that said I can't really complain about the ID from an objective standpoint the screen bezels are super narrow the chassis is nice and rigid and the design is reasonably understated so it won't give away how much raw gaming performance is inside if you're worried about that sort of thing in your board meetings sticking with a more traditional design also means more traditional i/o quite literally more of it along the sides we find loads of USB Taipei's and HDMI port and even a full sized SD card reader so you can go dongle free if you want then they also threw in Thunderbolt 3 if you're more of a dongle embrace er so that's all pretty normal so far but where the arrow 15 is exceptional is under the hood ours comes equipped with an Intel Core I 989 50 HK yes that's the overclockable one and an NVIDIA r-tx 2070 max-q meaning that it packs considerably more punch than I would expect and even in most cases recommend in a chassis this slim like we have seen much thicker laptops than this fail to cool this CPU adequately and as for how gigabyte fares although the Aero does have a better showing than the MacBook Pro it only narrowly edges out the core i7s in its competition in most tasks and occasionally even gets straight-up beaten all while hitting the thermal limits of the chip so what this basically means is you should buy the i7 model to get similar performance for less monies it might not sound as sexy and exciting but it will still be incredibly competent at video editing gaming and really whatever you want to throw at it as for the RT X 2070 max Q well since this is our first laptop with one of these we can't say exactly how it'll compare to other RT X 2070 max Q's but what we can say is that it performs pretty darn well expect to be getting lots of frames in your games with anything but the heaviest triple-a titles with r-tx enabled being capable of hitting the 144 Hertz refresh rate of the built-in display many of them even on Ultra settings perhaps more impressively is the fact that our Aero 15 X 9 managed to do this while maintaining a sort of high but still very reasonable noise level okay then what about the apparent star of the show a I cannot make the core i9 cool through machine learning sorcery or give our mirror artsy acts 20:7 t the graphical performance of a Titan no actually everything we've shown you guys so far has been with AI enabled and unfortunately contrary to the claims that gigabyte was making back at CES it does not give you any extra performance but that doesn't mean that it's pure BS either see the AI will optimize the system based on what tasks you're currently performing so if it sees that you're playing a game it will optimize for GPU performance and up the fans during a render it will optimize for CPU and then when you're just working on a word document it will optimize for low acoustics and so on and so forth now all of these modes are available on basically every gaming or a professional laptop on the market but according to gigabyte anyway 80% of users never bother changing the modes which basically means that having AI enabled is not going to be giving you a hundred and twenty percent performance it just also means that you'll be getting your 100% ish performance at a lower power level and/or noise envelope without ever having to think about optimizing any settings so then now that our expectations have been adjusted those really were some outlandish claims they were making at the show it is much more clear to me how this technology can deliver a very real benefit to the average user and the good news kind of keeps rolling here gigabyte really hit nail on the head with the display it's 144 Hertz refresh rate makes it excellent for gaming and it's Pantone color calibration makes it even suitable for prosumer level photo or video work the only other thing that I might want I guess is G sync for the hardcore gamers but for the eagle-eyed among you who are bothered by the pedestrian 1080p resolution you can simply go for the 4k 60 Hertz panel if you prefer it to comes Pantone certified where gigabyte misses the nail however and goes straight for the thumb is the webcam thanks to its spectacular placement below the screen you're enjoying just a tremendous view of my nose hairs and making matters worse I lied there's nothing spectacular about any of it the image quality is unexceptional at best and it doesn't support Windows hello it's just not spectacular at all and I know I'm harping on this a bit here but holy crap stop doing this there are plenty of other solutions the trackpad is alright though it's glass-topped doesn't flex over much it's a decent size and it uses the windows precision drivers which checks all the boxes for me putting it shockingly in like second place for gaming laptop track paestum that we've looked at recently not not bad just don't screw it up and it's all good what isn't quite as good though is the keyboard it's only fine the force required to press the keys is a little high despite the switches having no real tactile bump the key stabilization could be better and the smaller right shift key is a little bit awkward to hit honestly though it was probably a - material a couple years ago but nowadays it's just a B+ since this is another area where the competition has really stepped up their game another area the competition has caught up is in the battery life Department with alien wear and razor now boasting large capacity batteries the 94 watt hour unit in the Aero 15 x9 isn't quite as impressive anymore but given that 94 watt hours is getting very close to the limit to what you can carry on to a plane there really wasn't a ton of room for upward mobility for gigabyte here and be around six hours that you get is still darn impressive honestly it only gets beaten by laptops that have sacrificed performance making this a very potent machine for people that need both power and potency on the go as for upgradability opening up the Aero 15 we get easy access to both RAM and storage along with that massive battery which is pretty much all we can really hope for in a laptop like this so full marks there and all that means the Aero 15 is sitting in pretty good shape here standing up to basically every test we could think to throw at it even if it didn't blow me away at any point which leads us perfectly into the conclusion if money was no object honestly I would take either the razor blade 15 or alienware M 15 over this but unfortunately for all of us money is a thing and this is where the arrow 15 X 9 really flexes with our recommended config coming in at a hundred and fifty dollars less than the alien Ram 15 and two hundred and fifty dollars less than the razor blade with double the storage to boot it's really hard not to get behind the awesome versatility of this unit from gigabyte so thanks to Joan for sponsoring this video their meeting room booking devices well make booking meetings in your meeting rooms a lot easier with a Joan device outside your meeting room or conference room you can schedule a meeting from anywhere and then not have to worry about someone nabbing the conference room right as you need to go in for a call to conduct an interview or to do a presentation it easily syncs with all major calendars it's completely wireless and the Joan board gets up to a year of battery life so check them all out over at get Joan calm and use code Linus 8 to get 8 percent off show it to your colleagues and/or your boss so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video too scription also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one with 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