Gigabyte Aero 14 i7-7700HQ and GTX 1050 Ti Review

Gigabyte Aero 14 There are a lot of impressive notebooks and laptops on the market these days. Of course, when you think slim, powerful and portable, you're very likely to encounter the Gigabyte Aero range. There have been a few variants of the Aero range over the years, but it looks like their latest may have gotten the balance just right. Equipped with well-proven Intel Core i7-7700HQ, we know it'll have the processing grunt needed for both work and gaming tasks. Of course, graphics are important too, and there's an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card in there too. Of course, that's not a crazy powerful GPU, but for a notebook, it'll be a nice balance between power usage and a big performance boost. With a 94 Wh battery, and some optimised hardware choices, the Aero 14 can deliver up to 10 hours of usage; more than enough for a days work in the office. Features 3 Colors Available: Green, Orange, and Black Stunning Graphics with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GDDR5 4GB 7th Gen Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor 94 Wh Huge Battery Capacity for Full-Day Productivity X-Rite Pantone Color Calibration Certified Only 1.9cm slim, 1.89Kg Lightweight 2x Blazing-fast M.2 PCIe Gen.3 X4 SSDs (Optional) Thunderbolt 3: Up to 40Gbps HDMI 2.0 + mini DP + Thunderbolt 3: 4k Output Made Easy QHD IPS Display with Wide Viewing Angle Unique Aesthetics with All Aluminum Robust Body Slim and Light Adapter with USB Charging Port DDR4 2400MHz –Up to 32GB Dolby Digital Plus Home Theater What Gigabyte Had to Say "Aero 14 features the top of the line NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti graphics. The high performance is capable of rendering more detailed 3D graphics when running resource-demanding applications. The AERO 14 gives you the power you need to tackle 3D modelling and post editing with ease. With the latest “Kaby Lake” architecture, the 7th Generation Intel Core i7 Processor outperforms its predecessor in every aspect, added with HEVC10b and VP9 decoding for outstanding 4K capabilities and extra extended mobility. Experience seamless next-generation performance." - Gigabyte X-Rite Pantone Color Calibration Certified "X-Rite Pantone is the world-renowned authority on color and provider of color systems, known worldwide as the language of color communication from designer to manufacturer to retailer to customer. In order to give every professional the most accurate display colors possible, the AERO 14 has passed the test by X-Rite™ Pantone." - Gigabyte A Closer Look The Aero design hasn't really changed much in recent years, but it doesn't have to. It's still one of the sleekest looking designs on the market today. The top has a nice matte black finish, while the rearmost section has some cool carbon fibre effect material with some orange trim. You can get the rear section finished in either green or orange too if black isn't to your liking. Down the left side, you'll find a few basics. There's an HDMI port, USB 3.0, headphone jack, and an SD card reader. The right side is well equipped too, with a Type-C, Thunderbolt, and two more USB 3.0 ports. Towards the back, there's also the power line-in. The rear is nice and tidy, with just a durable full-width hinge for the display. On the underside, you'll find five rubber grip feet that provide a small amount of ground clearance. Of course, that clearance isn't for nothing, as there's a lot of ventilation here. There are two small side vents on the front edges, and three larger ventilation sections towards the rear. Interior Design Opened up, things look pretty straightforward. They're not reinventing the wheel here, and they certainly don't need to. Towards the front right, five small LED indicators are present to show your various connectivity and activity readouts. It may be a compact design, but the touchpad is nice and large. This larger surface is going to give you plenty of control and it has clickable zones to make it even easier to use. Down the left side of the keyboard, you'll find a bank of macro keys. These keys can be programmed to deploy program launchers, gaming macros and much more. Since the design doesn't allow for a number pad, it's nice that they've thrown in some extra controls like this. As I said, there's no number pad on the right side, but everything else is still nicely spaced and the keys are full-size, so touch-typing and productivity shouldn't be affected. The matte finish display looks great, even with the power off. It's not too reflective, so should be more than usable when outdoors. Of course, with it's lovely Pantone calibrated panel, it should look great anywhere! The durable hinge is great too, and stays firmly in place at any angle. Of course, you won't use it how I'm demonstrating it, but it shows that it will stay firmly in place, even under its own weight. The panel is nice and bright, which deep blacks and plenty of detail. Thanks to the 1440p resoulution, it's going to be great for work and gaming alike. Working or gaming in a darker room? You'll be able to see those keys with ease thanks to their white LED backlighting. Testing & Methodology To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system. We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of system performance. Games Used All games are tested at both 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 2160 x 3840 (4K). Please note that for systems which do not support a particular resolution, such as 1080p laptops, we will not test the higher resolutions on those devices. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Synthetic Benchmarks 3DMark Firestrike The GTX 1050 Ti was never going to rocket to the top of our performance charts, but it's still a competitive score and pulls just ahead of the similar specification GP62. Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme The same is true for Unigine, where it beats out the MSI GP62 by a small margin, scoring 1297 points. PCMark 10 While not the most powerful GPU in the world, the i7-7700HQ is no slouch when it comes to multi-tasking. The Aero 14 scored a respectable 3822 points, putting it just behind the mighty Zephyrus laptop. WPrime 32M and 1024M Amazingly, the Aero 14 managed to set one of our fastest scores for WPrime, beating out all but one system with its score of 223.829 seconds. Cinebench R15 The Cinebench score is pretty solid too, with 151 on single core, and 729 on multicore performance. It's not the fastest score we've had, but it's not a million miles away from the top score either. Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K Even when it came to the extremely demanding 4K conversion test, it pulled way ahead of the GP62, which speaks volumes about how well this system can keep its CPU thermals in check. Storage Write Some of the impressive performance gains for the Aero 14 can be easily explained here. The M.2 storage performance is incredibly fast, scoring 2766 Mbps read, and 1381 Mbps write. Even the USB 3.0 performance is blazing fast. Of course, HDD performance is 0, as it doesn't have an additional drive installed. Read Gaming Performance The Aero 14 isn't designed to be a high-end gaming system, the GPU is more there to boost productivity and provide just enough power to enjoy some games on an evening. The 1050 Ti isn't the ideal choice for gaming at 1440p, but again, that higher resolution display is tailored towards productivity. Overall, the Aero 14 can deliver some respectable frame rates, especially given how demanding the games we test are. In Deus Ex, is scored 39.5 FPS and 26.6 FPS at 1080P and 1440P respectively. Rise of the Tomb Raider ran much more favourably, with over 80 FPS and 53 FPS. Of course, a few tweaks and you could easily get that over 60 FPS even at 1440P. Ghost Recon is a very demanding title, so I'm impressed that it hit 47.1 at 1080P and 33.2 at 1440P. That's more than playable, and you could always lower the settings a little more to improve that. Far Cry Primal faired much better though, scoring 57 and 35 FPS. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Power Consumption and Temperatures Temperatures The Aero 14 is beautifully crafted and looks sleak from the exterior. However, it's hiding a lot of ventilation on the underside, and that really helps keep things cool and running at their best. The CPU peaked at a very impressive 77 C, while the GPU peaked at 69. There were certainly no issues with throttling and the noise levels were very impressive too, much quieter than most. CPU GPU The same is true of the GPU temperatures, hitting just 69c at full load. That's incredible, given our most powerful mobile GPU to date is now also the coolest! Acoustics Things get even better when you hear how quiet the system is. It truly is quiet, with only a water cooled system and a passively cooled system being quieter. Final Thoughts Pricing Laptops rarely come cheap, and when you're looking for something that's slim, reasonably light, and that still packs a powerful CPU and a decent gaming GPU, the price skyrockets quite quickly. Add to that a QHD display, and you'll be paying a premium for the Aero 14. However, at around £1500, it's competitively priced and you can easily spend more than that for a similar specification system. Overview The world of laptops is extremely competitive, and there are seemingly endless hardware combinations available to choose from. The Aero 14 gets right down to business though, and packs one of the most popular and powerful CPUs in the laptop market. The Intel Core i7-7700HQ is very well tried and tested, and great for gaming, productivity, multi-tasking and more. It certainly had no issues keeping up with the competition in our benchmarks today. Gaming The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is a great little gaming GPU. It's perfect for a laptop as it's not crazy expensive, it doesn't run particularly hot, and it delivers a great performance boost to your day-to-day work. Of course, it's got just enough grunt to enjoy some games too, even at 1440P it delivered surprisingly good results. It's better suited to CS:GO, DOTA II, LoL, and other less demanding games, but if you want to kick back with Battlefield or something similar, it'll still get the job done. Home and Office This is a bit of a sleeper in terms of a work laptop. If you took it into a business meeting, it's sleek, slim, lightweight, and has more than enough battery life to get you through a days work. It's small enough to fit into most compact laptop bags too, making it great for travelling. However, when you're stuck in the hotel and bored, it'll play some games, let you enjoy some movies and more. The QHD calibrated display is gorgeous too, so if you're editing photos, or just enjoying your favourite movie, it's going to look great. Everything Else There are certainly a few other perks to the Aero 14. I'm very impressed with the storage performance, and the system boot times and how fast it loads games is certainly a pleasure. Even the USB 3.0 performance was pretty swift. The LED lit keyboard is nice, as is the large and responsive touchpad. Finally, little additions like the macro keys, the webcam, and the surprisingly punchy speakers all add up to a great value for money package. Pros QHD X-Rite Pantone Display Powerful i7-7700HQ CPU Respectable gaming performance Slim and stylish design Runs cool and quiet Blazing fast storage performance Good battery life Dedicated macro keys Available in multiple colours Competitively priced Cons None Neutral Screen size limits keyboard space, so there's no number pad