Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED delivers good hardware, but weakens in the Control Center

The Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED is small and slim. It is not only the sturdy aluminum chassis that stands out in our review. The Aero 14 is only 17 mm high, of which ten percent is key travel: 1.7 mm is almost luxurious, even for many larger laptops these days. Equipped with a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 and the Intel Core i7-13700H, the device also boasts strong hardware. The small laptop's cooling pipe may be limited, but Gigabyte manages to extract stable performance out of the chips. The processor and graphics chip have up to 40 watts and 35 watts at their disposal, respectively. Moreover, there is a bright OLED display, for which Gigabyte provides very accurate color profiles in conjunction with the X-Rite Color app.

At first glance, the laptop seems perfectly suited to mobile use as a creative center. But the Aero 14 also has its weaknesses. The lack of support for USB PowerDelivery is particularly detrimental to mobility. In our tests, the Aero 14 only worked with the included, somewhat bulky power adapter. Regarding the display, you have to choose between high brightness and accurate color reproduction. But our strongest points of criticism concern the Gigabyte Control Center app, which caused a number of crashes and a lot of frustration at the beginning of our review. The program is almost essential for controlling the studio laptop. Aside from the performance profiles, more than twelve other functions are controlled here.