Aorus 15 XE5: Excellent gaming performance, excessive power consumption

Gigabyte opted to give the compact gaming laptop a black plastic chassis with smooth matt surfaces. The machine doesn't feature any extravagant design elements, but the slim bezel gives it a certain air of elegance. A Thunderbolt 4 port allows you to expand the system by adding an external GPU or a docking solution. The latter might end up being necessary as the laptop only has one USB-A port.

The combination of Core i7-12700H, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop and 16 GB of DDR4-4800 RAM running in dual-channel mode equips the XE5 with enough power to handle all kinds of demanding tasks, such as video editing, rendering and gaming. A lightning-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD (1 TB) provides the necessary storage space and ensures short load times. There is also space for a second PCIe 4.0 SSD.

The hardware inside the laptop allows for QHD gaming at high to max settings. It is also possible to use higher resolutions if you connect the XE5 to an appropriate monitor – it can drive up to three external displays at the same time (1x HDMI 2.1, 2x DisplayPort via USB-C). The matt QHD display on the laptop has a wide viewing angle, fast response times, solid colour reproduction and great colour coverage.

Too bad the XE5 draws too much power at idle and at low load. However, the laptop doesn't have this issue when running on battery power and manages to last around 6 to 7 hours in real-life use – which is quite respectable.

Besides the review configuration (with an RTX 3070 Ti), Gigabyte also offers two other Aorus 15 models: one with an RTX 3080 Ti Laptop  (Aorus 15 YE5) and another with an RTX 3060 Laptop (Aorus 15 KE5).

You can head on over to our Aorus 15 XE5 review for more information and benchmark results.