Aorus 17H i7-13700H & RTX 4080 Gaming Laptop Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Obviously, this isn’t going to be a cheap laptop, it’s a flagship gaming laptop with the latest and greatest hardware on the market, so it’s priced to reflect that. the Gigabyte AORUS 17H 17″ FHD 360Hz i7 GeForce RTX 4080 Gaming Laptop is available on Scan, with a 360Hz display, 16GB of DDR5 and a 1TB NVMe SSD, for just £2248.99. There’s a similarly equipped model with a 240Hz display and RTX 4070 for £1898. I couldn’t see the i9 model, but something in the ballpark of £2500 wouldn’t surprise me.

Additionally, these laptops come with a 2-year warranty as standard, which is pretty fantastic, as many laptops on have a 12-month warranty, so that’s pretty reassuring.

Overview

This laptop is an absolute monster, it’s total overkill for most people’s needs, and possibly for their wallets too. That being said, as a gaming desktop replacement, this is going to get the job done and then some, but only for the few people who really need flagship gaming performance and an eSports-level experience in a portable package. If you’re just going to play a bit of Battlefield for fun, and some single-player games like The Witcher 3, 360 Hz is likely not what you need in a display, and higher resolutions may even be preferable, such as the RTX 4070 model which comes with a QHD panel.

This laptop does come with some compromise and sacrifice though. For starters, it lights your money on fire when you order one. But hey, flagship GPU hardware being expensive as hell is nothing new to the market these days, so I won’t hold Aorus up for that issue. Flagship performance means high power usage and plenty of heat too, and this laptop eats lightning and craps thunder. When maxed out, the GPU will sit at 80c, and it’ll warm your hands nicely on those colder days, or make you sweat harder on warm days. It’s loud too, not that I was expecting silence, but if you’re maxing out the performance, you’ll want headphones. Lock the FPS to something more sensible though, and it’ll cruise along at 60 FPS without breaking a sweat, literally. Also the power cable on the right side? Seems a bit off to me, given most mouse users are right-handed, that’s about 3cm of space I would like back, please.

Should I Buy One?

Overall though, it’s *lots of swearing* fast, seriously. For work, rendering, gaming, it doesn’t matter, this is a true weapon of performance that’s going to run rings around most high-end desktop systems. If you absolutely have to game at ultra-high refresh rates on the go (but within thinking distance of a plug socket), this is the ticket. I can’t see such an extreme being that appealing to everyone, but if you take your gaming seriously, or even professionally, there’s nothing else out there that comes close that you can still fit in your backpack and travel with.