Gigabyte Aero 17 XA HDR Laptop Review: This is a *Really* Good 17-inch Laptop

Overall dimensions are very similar to the ultra-thin Asus Zephyrus S GX701 with differences of only 2 to 3 millimeters at most. They even weigh about the same at 2.5 to 2.6 kg. While the Razer Blade Pro 17 is thinner and heavier for a denser feel and the MSI GS75 is even smaller and lighter, the Aero 17 is still much more portable than most other 17.3-inch laptops in the market.

The Aero 17 series is Wi-Fi 6 ready with its Killer AX1650 WLAN for theoretical transfer rates of up to 2.4 Gbps if your wireless router can support it. The AX1650 benefits from Killer Control Center 2.0 features not found on the standard Intel AX200.

We experienced no connectivity issues during our time with the unit. Performance can be faster than what we've recorded below as our test server is limited by a 1 Gbps line.

The bottom panel can be easily removed with a T6 Torx screwdriver and a sharp edge. However, keep in mind that some stickers must be torn to remove the screws which could potentially impact the manufacturer warranty.

Users have direct access to the the batteries, both M.2 storage bays, both DDR4 SODIMM slots, and the WLAN module.

The clickpad is slightly smaller (10.5 x 7 cm) than the one on the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15 (10.5 x 8.5 cm). Even so, its surface is smoother than the surrounding palm rests for a uniform glide with almost no sticking regardless of movement speed.

Our main complaint about the clickpad is that its integrated mouse keys are a bit on the spongy side. The shallow travel requires more force than usual to register an input as well which could be fatiguing if clicking repeatedly. We would have preferred dedicated mouse keys to better differentiate the Aero series from the Aorus series especially since the Aero series caters more to professionals.

Color space is wider than any 144 Hz or 240 Hz IPS alternative to appeal to professionals. On the other hand, this comes at the cost of refresh rate as the 4K UHD SKUs are limited to 60 Hz. Gigabyte promises 100 percent AdobeRGB coverage which is similar to our 87 percent recording of the AdobeRGB 3D space.

Further measurements with an X-Rite colorimeter prove just how accurate Aero displays can be out of the box. Even without any end-user calibration, average grayscale and color saturation deltaE values sit at just 0.9 and 1.31, respectively, when up against the AdobeRGB standard. Most multimedia laptops would be lucky to have deltaE values this low after calibration.

Outdoor visibility is better than other 17.3-inch laptops due to the brighter backlight. Even so, glare from the sky will still be prevalent as shown by the images below unless if working under shade. We recommend a high text scaling setting especially since this is a 4K panel.

Unlocked CPUs are a mixed bag on laptops because they are generally unable to maintain their super-fast clock rates for extended periods and this continues to be the case on the Aero 17. When running CineBench R15 Multi-Thread in a loop, the initial score of 1594 points drops to 1333 points by the second loop to represent a performance dip of about 16 percent. Even so, this is still about 27 percent faster than the Core i7-9750H even after accounting for any performance throttling.

The Eurocom Nightsky RX15 ships with the same Core i9-9980HK CPU as our Aero 17 and yet it is able to consistently outperform our Gigabyte by about 10 percent because its processor able to maintain faster clock rates for longer as shown by our graph below. It may be minor, but the smallest of details become important when looking at these high-end configuration options.

See our dedicated page on the Core i9-9980HK for more technical information and benchmarks.

PCMark benchmarks rank our Gigabyte in the same ballpark as other gaming laptops with GeForce RTX graphics including the Alienware m17 and Asus G731. Overall scores are slightly higher than these alternatives likely due to the faster multi-thread performance of our octa-core Core i9 CPU.

We experienced no software or hardware issues during our time with the test unit. We did notice, however, that waking from sleep would be unusually slow each and every time. It takes about 6 seconds before the Windows login or lock screen appears when lifting the lid.

There are two M.2 2280 slots available whereas many other 17.3-inch laptops offer at least one seondary 2.5-inch SATA III bay. This makes the Aero 17 lighter albeit more costly to upgrade.

Our test unit comes with a single 512 GB Intel SSD 760p SSD. Gigabyte frequently advertises "Intel only" components and so it's unlikely that we'll see other configs sporting Samsung, Toshiba, or SK Hynix anytime soon. Sequential transfer rates are nearly 2x faster than the Intel SSD 660p as found on the Asus G731GV while being slower than the Samsung PM981 when it comes to reading and writing of smaller 4K blocks.

See our table of HDDs and SSDs for more benchmark comparisons.