Aorus 17 YA Gaming Laptop Review: Extreme performance, extreme noise

Gigabyte has manufactured the Aorus 17 case from aluminum, which gives the notebook a very high-quality and robust exterior. The workmanship is of very good quality everywhere, showing no uneven gaps or unclean edges. Various places across the whole notebook are accented by some design elements, and illumination that can be individually adjusted rounds up the overall impression. However, we should note that not only is the Aorus 17 very large for a 17-inch notebook, but it is also clearly one of the more bulky models among the gaming devices. 

While the Aorus 17 YA is deeper than all the other competitors in our test field, in terms of its weight, height, and width, it is even surpassed by the Acer Predator Helios 700.

The Aorus 17 YA offers a large amount of connections, and among those, the two power ports stand out. All of the USB ports support the 3.1-Gen1 standard, and among the Type-C connections, there is also one that supports Thunderbolt-3, and one USB port also supports DisplayPort. While the placement of the connections is good in general, the central placement on the left and right side might lead to some cables being in the way.

When inserting a storage card into the card reader of the Aorus 17 YA, half of the card will stick out, so that the card cannot remain in the device when transporting it. Using our Toshiba Exceria Pro SDXC 64 GB UHS-II reference storage card, the UHS-II SD card reader achieves very good read and write rates, placing the gaming notebook from Gigabyte at the top of our test field.

In addition to Gigabit LAN, users of the Aorus 17 YA can also connect to networks wirelessly. To do this, there is a Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650X WLAN adapter, which reached very good speeds of 687 Mbps during reception and 743 Mbps when transferring data using our Linksys EA8500 reference router. 

With 2x2-MIMO antenna technology and support of the 802.11-ax standard, the Aorus 17 YA is also well-equipped for future WLAN technology.

Gigabyte does not offer any accessories that are designed specifically for the Aorus 17. However, you can purchase general peripheral devices and gaming accessories from the website of the manufacturer.

Gigabyte offers buyers of the Aorus 17 YA a warranty period of 24 months.

A ClickPad is used as the mouse replacement in the Aorus 17. This offers a very comfortable surface, allowing you to precisely navigate the mouse pointer. Some slight pressure on the pad will reliably trigger a left or right mouse click, producing a soft clicking noise as feedback.

The equipment of our Aorus 17 YA test unit is targeted towards ambitious gamers who do not want any compromises in terms of the performance. With Intel's Core i9-9980HK, 32 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, it is the highest configuration, but configurations with an Intel Core i7-9750H and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2060, or GTX 1660 Ti graphics card are also available. In addition, there are various options to configure the working memory and storage.

The Aorus 17 YA achieves very high values in the synthetic benchmarks of the system performance. The 17-incher leads the test field here as well, achieving results that are significantly above the average of all the gaming notebooks we previously tested.

You can find out about the performance of other devices in our CPU benchmark page.

Gigabyte has equipped our test unit with an Intel 760p SSD offering 1 TB of storage space and a Western Digital SATA HDD with a capacity of 2 TB. In addition, there is also an empty NVMe/SATA slot, where you can insert another storage module.

In the storage benchmarks, the built-in SSD achieves read and write rates that are good on average and at the same level as the other gaming laptops in our test field. You can find out about the performance that other storage solutions achieved in our tests in our HDD/SSD benchmark list.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 is currently the most powerful mobile graphics card, achieving values that are correspondingly high in our benchmarks. Even though compared to other laptops with this graphics card, the values are above the average, some RTX-2080 notebooks such as the Acer Predator Helios 700 are able to achieve even better values. However, the performance is still excellent, overall.

You can find out on our GPU benchmark list, what GPU power you can expect from other notebooks with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080.

In games as well, the Aorus 17 YA delivers results that correspond to its hardware. In current games, it achieves high frame rates throughout, that are more than enough for gaming in Full-HD resolution. There should also be sufficient performance reserves for 4K gaming using an external monitor. However, at this point, high detail levels might still lead to the occasional stutter. Here as well, the fan profile setting strongly contributes to the frame rates. For example, during "GRID (2019)," the high FPS value was achieved using the "Gaming Mode." In contrast, the average value was about 10 FPS lower in the "Normal" setting.

You can find out about the performance achieved by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 in other games in our games list.

Our constant load test with "The Witcher 3" shows that when using the Aorus 17 YA over a prolonged time period, gamers only have to expect a small drop in the performance.

The Aorus 17 YA becomes very loud. Even in the "Quiet Mode" of the fan control, the fans occasionally start during idle operation and then become clearly audible. Under load and with the "Gaming Mode" profile activated, the background noise becomes extremely high, clearly surpassing the measured values of all the comparison devices in our test field.

During our stress test (FurMark & Prime95) that runs for about an hour, the CPU temperatures rise to a maximum of 85 °C (185 °F). The clock speed remains at about 2.7 GHz, meaning that it does not go below the basic clock speed of the Intel Core i9-9980HK. Users therefore do not need to expect any limitations due to temperatures being too high, even after prolonged usage.

The speakers of the Aorus 17 YA produce a medium amount of volume but hardly any bass. The sound spectrum emphasizes the mids and is quite suited for the occasional reproduction of media contents. However, because of the high fan noise, particularly during gaming, users should use headphones, since even external speakers have to be turned up very high to be heard against the noise of the cooling system. 

Our measurements for the Aorus 17 YA determine a power consumption of at least 34 watts during idle operation and up to 386 watts under load. This is the highest power consumption in our test field. 

Gigabyte includes not one, but two 330-watt power supplies with the Aorus 17, since only in this way, a sufficient amount of power can be ensured under load. For operation under moderate load, one power supply is sufficient to run the gaming notebook. However, when using 3D-heavy applications or playing games, the second power supply definitely must be connected.

In our realistic WLAN test, the Aorus 17 YA achieves a runtime of almost 4 hours. With this, the pleasantly large 94-Wh battery does not last quite as long as other notebooks in this class. In the direct comparison with the Acer Predator Helios 700, which is equipped with the same GPU and a slightly weaker CPU, the battery life appears appropriate. Note that our battery life measurements were performed using the dGPU graphics-switch mode (Control Center), where the Nvidia GPU is active.