Gadgetory

now the first time I covered the gigabyte ARS x7 it was groundbreaking for a few reasons number one was that was incredibly thin for a full-powered gaming notebook number two was that it featured not one but two graphics cards and finally I was incredibly impressed by the cooling and acoustics that gigabyte had achieved when you factor in how thin it was a global leader in tech recruiting is celebrating geek pride by giving away ten amazing tech prizes for more info visit the modus Facebook page or modus com okay so there was a bunch of other cool stuff as well the all aluminum housing white backlit keyboard that's actually surprisingly nice to type on the flexible storage arrangement and surround monitor gaming support made this a solid easy to recommend product for me but that's all old news fast-forward to today and the x7 has got a bit of a facelift now instead of a 3.4 gigahertz turbo CPU we get a few point 5 gigahertz turbo CPU instead of ddr3 1600 megahertz forget 1866 megahertz the macro functions buttons programmable buttons on the side are now called the macro engine programmable buttons on the side and the power adapter has been boosted from 180 watts to 200 ok so far nothing that impressive but then things get interesting this new model now supports up to 3m SATA SSDs and raid 0 and/or raid whatever you want I guess and it still has a tuna 1/2 inch drive bay for either an additional SSD or a hard drive that's a lot of storage but still not the main event no the big change is the graphics cards instead of dual GTX 760 5 ms the updated x7 has dual gtx 860m 4 gig cards which should amount to a real world performance improvement of 20% or more and has gigabyte making some pretty serious claims about how they're upgraded ARS seven can run with the big dogs and even beat the gtx 880 em conveniently we have the excellent a since g 750 jz in-house which features and only slightly slower CPU and a four gig gtx 880 m so let's find out if it's happened in a notebook is sli a valid alternative to a single more powerful GPU we'll be looking at the x7 from a few angles including raw performance power consumption and the thermals where the benefit of spreading the heat out across multiple processors in a thin form factor like this should be pretty obvious one thing that i can tell you guys already is that compared to the g7 50 jz it's definitely louder but we expected that so without further ado take it away luke sli vs single GPU notebook battle royale I'll start things off with power consumption I was kind of surprised to see only about a 5 percent difference between these two laptops due to dual GPUs and completely different form factors and all that kind of stuff one thing to remember is that your power consumption is going to be a lot more important on a laptop because you're more often going to be gaming mobile and that power is going be coming from the battery instead of the wall in terms of temperatures the x7 fell behind a little bit it was a lot hotter than our Asus JZ that we had part of that's going to play in because it's much smaller form factor they don't have as much space for things like heat sinks and giant fans but it does matter because it's going to predict the lifespan of your components inside of your laptop and really high temperatures are going to cause sweaty hands syndrome that annoying thing where your hands get really gross when you're gaming on a laptop for too long because it is very hot in terms of noise we see the x7 fall behind again but this is again due to its form factor with the JZ the big thick mass of JZ you are able to pack in big thick larger fans which are going to produce lower noise levels less annoying noise and they're going to be better at dissipating heat with the small nice slimline x7 you're not able to pack that huge fan in there and that will make it not as effective at dissipating heat louder and have a little bit more annoying noise with high pitches and last but not least we get to performance the unfortunate thing that happened with watchdogs is the SLI profile didn't exactly take properly this is a very new game and this is a problem you're going to have when you're running SLI level systems things aren't going to be properly optimized profiles won't properly work so when I was playing watchdogs only one of the GPUs was able to go through so when I was running with the same settings on the Jay Z and the x7 the X haven't got crushed because only one of the GPUs worked that being said in the future once the profile starts working it'll be fine it'll run much better like you see in Far Cry 3 and BioShock Infinite it ran completely fine and even one in Far Cry 3 by a very small margin in conclusion it comes down to what you're looking for if you're looking for a slimline gaming laptop the x7 is probably not a bad idea because it is very slimline the form factor is very nice but then you have to deal with things like higher thermals and kind of annoying fan noise but you don't have to do with more power because it's 5 percent less power but then you do have to deal with SLI problems which may or may not be fixed in a timely manner for you to play the games that you want to play so there's a bunch of different variables that are up in the air it's totally up to you and these laptops are very different when it comes down to it