Gigabyte's enthusiast gamer brand, Aorus, has never skimped on hardware for their acme-of-the-line laptops. The brand new Aorus X5 v7 is no exception: it brings an overclockable Intel Kaby Lake CPU, powerful GeForce GTX 1070 graphics and fifty-fifty a high-resolution display to a sleek and compact chassis. While it doesn't qualify as an Nvidia Max-Q laptop, the extra size that pushes it but above Max-Q spec has ensured an uncompromised gaming experience.

For hardware, we're looking at a quad-cadre Intel Core i7-7820HK processor; and yep, that is a One thousand-suffix, indicating the CPU tin can be overclocked. GTX 1070 graphics with 8GB of GDDR5 is paired with a loftier-resolution G-Sync brandish: either 2880 10 1620 or, in the case of our review unit, 4K resolution. 16GB of RAM is standard, but again Aorus went all out with their review unit, kick that up to 32GB. Storage comprises of an M.2 SSD and a hard drive.

The Aorus X5 v7 isn't a Max-Q laptop, but that doesn't mean it's outrageously large. In fact every bit far as GTX 1070 laptops go, this machine is on the smaller side with a thickness of 22.9mm and a weight of 2.5kg. It's a 15.half dozen-inch unit, besides, so the overall footprint isn't massive which makes information technology easy to carry around. Although keep in mind you'll also need to bear the 600 gram power brick if you want to make total employ of the beastly hardware inside.

While some aspects to the X5'south chassis have changed in this iteration, the base construction is largely identical. The lid and keyboard environs, which are central areas to the build, are fabricated from magnesium with a matte end. The material feels solid and looks pretty good, although the construction is far from seamless: the edges and some parts of the display assembly appear to be plastic, and many areas are formed past joining together several different pieces. You're non getting the aforementioned premium unibody blueprint as a laptop like the Razer Blade, though the Aorus X5 withal looks pretty good.


The visual design is a mix of gamer elements, like aggressive vents and strange angles, equally well as more understated sections. The chapeau, for example, looks fantastic with its subtle embellished meridian and the striking illuminated Aorus logo. I'm not as keen on the vents above the keyboard, which expect a bit messy. And that enormous shiny Aorus logo printed on the trackpad? I'd prefer that wasn't at that place.

The X5's cooling solution consists of many vents to provide enough airflow to the i7-7820HK and GTX 1070, but perhaps non as many as announced at first glance. Fans at the superlative left and right corners draw air through vents on the height and base of the laptop, which is exhausted through the back and sides. The vent that surrounds the illuminated Aorus logo power push button, besides as the side vents at the forepart of the laptop, are used for the multi-speaker setup.

The speakers used in the laptop aren't anything amazing. They're adequate book, but they lack depth and bass, and so they're not keen for music playback. They are serviceable to watch YouTube videos, only for gaming I'd recommend a headset or external speakers.

The X5 v7 is equipped with a fantastic array of ports. The left has an HDMI 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports and an SD carte du jour reader; the right has a mini DisplayPort one.3 port, two 3.5mm audio jacks, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and a USB 3.1 Type-C port; and the back has the ability port, Ethernet and two more USB 3.0 ports.

I just have two minor complaints here. It'south hard to tell the difference between the Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Type-C ports without looking at the tiny logos printed next to them. Also, the placement of the HDMI port is a little strange, as attaching a HDMI cable volition encroach on mouse infinite. Having the display outputs forth the rear would be better.

The keyboard used on the X5 v7 is Gigabyte's new laptop design I first saw on the Aero 15. Its travel altitude is good for a gaming laptop, with a nice clicky response to the rubber dome keycaps. The corporeality of forcefulness required to activate each key makes it a bully option for both typing and gaming. The layout is good, specially the large size for the left modifier keys. The numpad is a welcome inclusion, although it is a bit close to the main keyboard.

Aorus includes RGB backlighting with the ability to individually customize the colour of each central. You tin accomplish awesome furnishings through the Gigabyte Fusion utility, and y'all can also create profiles for each game that illuminate just the keys required for the game. The utility and customizability isn't as well featured as Razer's competing offer, though it'south nice to encounter another laptop with total RGB keyboard lighting.

The trackpad is a garbage ELAN unit. I'm not going to spend much time on it because, especially at high resolutions, its tracking performance is poor. You lot'll demand to use a mouse with this laptop.

The display is one of the best aspects to the Aorus X5 v7. Most gaming laptops opt to employ boring 1080p displays, which often don't get the most out of the hardware within them. The X5 v7 comes in 2 display options, and neither are 1080p. You can get a 2880 10 1620 WQHD+ display, or a 3840 x 2160 UHD display, both G-Sync and both IPS. My review unit was the UHD model, and then it was no surprise to observe it had just a maximum refresh charge per unit of sixty Hz, but G-Sync here is hugely important for a smooth gaming feel.

Similar the Gigabyte Aero fifteen, the Aorus X5 v7 display is Ten-Rite Pantone certified, which ways this laptop comes with an sRGB-accurate display profile that tin exist toggled in the Command & Control utility. About gaming laptops are poor in terms of their display accuracy, but thanks to the X-Rite Pantone profile, the X5 v7 is actually quite decent in this regard. Non as good as the Aero 15, but below a dE2000 value of 2.0 across our color tests and with an average color temperature that'southward near accurate.

Calibration comes at the expense of brightness: the X5 v7 is merely capable of 265 nits of brightness, and the IPS' panels contrast ratio of 1041:1 is but okay. For those that require a fully-calibrated display, I was able to achieve fantastic results with SpectraCAL CALMAN 5, pushing a dE2000 average of below 0.7 across the board. That's dead accurate every bit far equally I'thou concerned.

Organization Performance

The Aorus X5 x7 includes slightly different hardware than what nosotros commonly see in gaming laptops. Most gaming machines opt for Intel's Core i7-7700HQ, which is a locked quad-cadre, 8-thread processor with a base clock of 2.viii GHz and a maximum boost clock of 3.8 GHz. The X5 v7 uses a higher-cease Kaby Lake quad-core: the Core i7-7820HK, which is clocked at two.9 GHz with a boost to 3.9 GHz.

Normally a 100 MHz clock speed increase isn't anything to get excited about, but the i7-7820HK is a K-series processor, then it tin can be overclocked. Out of the box, the Aorus X5 v7 makes use of this capability, pushing the clock speed up to iv.2 GHz for single-core workloads, and around 3.8 GHz for all-core workloads. Sometimes I observed all-core clock speeds dip to 3.half dozen GHz during sustained usage, simply that's still a 100 to 300 MHz overclock, which is nothing to sneeze at in a laptop class factor.

The GPU is a GTX 1070 with 8GB of GDDR5. Equally has always been the case, the laptop GTX 1070 is slightly different to the desktop part, with more CUDA cores (2048 compared to 1920) at a lower peak rated clock speed (1645 MHz compared to 1683 MHz). The performance of both chips is very like.

My review unit was kitted out with 32GB of Thou.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-2400, although I believe 16GB is the norm for this laptop. Inside the laptop are two M.two slots, though only 1 is occupied, in this case with a Toshiba THNSN5256GPU7 SSD, which is a 256GB NVMe PCIe unit. So you can install more than than just 3 games, the X5 v7 too includes a 1TB HGST 7200RPM hard bulldoze.

Equally you'd expect, system operation is a flake higher than what I've seen in the past from gaming laptops that pack the i7-7700HQ. Clock speed differences of upward to 400 MHz do pb to better performance in some situations, specially rendering workloads like Cinebench and the x264 Benchmark. Here the CPU can be up to 20 percentage faster, which is a decent margin that does help when it comes to games.

Storage performance is decent, though nothing hugely outstanding as most gaming systems these days include fast Grand.2 drives with sequential operation above i GB/s. A larger drive would exist nice, though equally I mentioned before, there's a spare M.two slot within for upgradeability.