This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
The Gigabyte Aorus 15 is a good entry level gaming laptop with the potential to be great. It has a couple of component choices that take away from the experience but they’re nothing that cant be fixed with a few more bucks and a YouTube video. More on that in a bit.
The Aorus has what I consider amazing build quality. I have had a couple of gaming laptops before that were much more expensive ad did not feel as quality or as solid, had massive back light bleed, or all the above. It has no chassis flex, no creaking, and most everything feels like metal, even the non metal bits. It a nice looking matte black color with a nice gloss Aorus logo in the center of of the lid. It has an RGB strip in the bottom of the monitor that reflects off the cooler and the can match or be different that the RGB keyboard. While it looks very nice, it IS a finger print magnet, but nothing a damp cloth wont take off.
The laptop is easy to maintain and mostly easy to work on as the internal components are smartly laid out and the expansion slots are easy to find. My biggest knock is they used Torx T6 screws to put the bottom shell on instead of more common #1 or #2 Phillips screws. Unless you have a purpose built electronics kit the likelihood of you having a Torx driver lying around isn't that great. Oddly enough the internals ARE held together with #0 and #1 Phillips.
It weighs in a roughly 5.5lbs, and combined with the big CPU GPU cooler it is not the most portable laptop, but its nowhere near as bad as a lot out there. It comes with a pretty chonky 240w power brick that is able to power the i5-13500H and RTX 4050 very well, and when not plugged in allows the MUX switch to run the integrated graphics and give you a reasonable 6-7hr web-surfing time and 3-4 streaming time. Gaming on a gaming laptop while on battery is generally a terrible idea and it proved true on this one as well. FPS suffers heavily running on integrated graphics and unless you drop settings to as low as they’ll go and the battery dies pretty quick after about an hour and a half or so in my testing. It has a 99Wh battery which is as big as airlines allow so you can fly and frag if you so desire.
The laptop has a 15” 144hz panel that for some reason is labeled both 144hz and 165hz on Gigabytes product page, but I have not found any screen overclocking feature and Windows says its 144hz so that's what I’m going with. Gigabyte again doesn’t inform us if its TN or IPS instead saying its TUV Rhineland certified, but judging by the poor side viewing angle I’m willing to say its a TN panel, which seems fairly common at this price range. Its also NOT G-Sync or Free Sync compatible so something to be aware of. I noticed screen tearing the most when in smokey environments in fast paced games, or in foggy environments. Most other game play situations were crystal clear and I really REALLY had to be looking for any screen tear just so I could nit pick about it. It also has no noticeable back light bleed (at least on my model).
The RTX 4050 is the bottom of the NVIDIA GPU lineup, however it doesn’t perform as such in modern games. My other laptop has a Ryzen 5900HS and a RTX 3060 and the i5-13500H / RTX 4050 easily outpaces it. At 1080p, running the same balanced settings in MW2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider bench tests I was easily getting another 25-35 fps on this laptop with its bigger 15” display vs my other laptop with its 14” screen. Part of this is the i5-13500H being better than the 5900HS, but the 4050 is improved over the 3060 by a noticeable amount.
All games I played were playable and ran smoothly for the most part, however this is where the laptops first shortcut shows its head. If you are just doing average tasks like browsing the web, looking at e-mail, etc, 8GB or ram is fine. But the fact it is a gaming laptop with only 8GB of ram really hurts it. Its sluggish in Windows menus when trying to open Edge, type to your friends in Discord, download games, let alone trying to get a game up and going. Once in game the game play is fine, but graphically heavy games have problems loading all textures in menus. For example, looking at my guns, camos, operators, or the Battle Pass in MW2 caused many textures to fail to load, giving a lump of mud appearance on everything. Game play was normally fine as those textures are prioritized as they should be but every now and then there would be some hitching that wasn't network related as more information was being loaded into the ram. Same issues in the menu and Item Shop in Fortnite. Task Manager shows just doing basic Windows tasks eats up 40-60% of the available ram. Games immediately sent it to 100%. Luckily Windows is fantastic at ram management and gives the game priority while shutting down and shifting priority away from other tasks you don’t need at the time. It really sucks they couldn’t include at least 16GB but I understand why at this price point. It is an easy upgrade even if you don’t know much about the internals on computers and whether you want to just get one 8GB stick or go for 32GB, you have 2 REAL SO-DIM slots instead of some of the ram being soldered to the motherboard like many laptops are guilty of. I stuck another 8GB stick in and Windows and a few background tasks immediately jump ram usage to 45% (so near the old total ram amount) and MW2 jumped it to 73% and Fortnite jumped it to 85%. Other AAA games were within this range as well. So if you throw ram at this laptop it will benefit. Textures immediate load as they should, games run even better with no more hitching and stuttering, etc. Frame rates went from an average of 134 to 148 in MW2 and from 127 to 149 in Tomb Raider. VERY impressive..
Next on the list is the 512GB gen 4 m.2 SSD. 512GB is not a lot of room anymore with games easily taking 50+GB and some well over 100GB. Many people would knock it, and I’m one of them, however I understand at this price point. I applaud Gigabyte for at least including another 2280 length m.2 slot so you can easily pop in another drive unlike many other laptops that cost even more that require you to buy an external housing to flash your operating system and all the drives contents onto a new drive before replacing it , or just losing everything and starting from scratch. However before you go buy another drive ask yourself how what all will be on your PC. I currently have 15 games ranging from AAA titles eating up 100GB to a few Indy games barely over 500MB and still have 90GB free. Even if you end up needing more room, if you have fast internet you can quickly get them again. If not, unlike current gen consoles, you can use a standard external hard drive to easily expand your gaming storage instead of having to buy a special designed SSD cartridge in the case or an expensive gen 4 m.2 with a heat-sink. I ended up putting in a 1TB gen 3 SSD, bringing total capacity to 1.5TB and now have more room than I will need for a long time.
The laptop also includes a genuine Intel AX211 WiFi 6E card instead of off brand card. This card proved very fast getting 400-600MB/s on my 1gig internet. It never dropped nor did I experience really any more lag than with a wired connections. Speaking of, this laptop actually includes a real Ethernet port so if you are in a situation that allows you to plug in to get faster and more stable internet you will be able to without buying a USB to Ethernet adapter like many other laptops require.
When it comes to a clean Windows install, Gigabyte deserves some credit here. Other than standard Microsoft programs, the only things installed were Gigabyte Control Center and Network Dragon, and NVIDIA Control Center. Network Dragon can be uninstalled, as you don’t need anything monitoring your internet while you play a game, as you really shouldn’t be doing any major background tasks while gaming in the first place.
Control Center is decent. You go there to adjust the computers mode from gaming to battery saver to anything in between, adjust fan curves and RGB settings, etc. Its light and the settings are not buried in dozens of sub menus like one of my other laptops. The one of two thing that annoys me is that even though I can turn the track pad off to keep from bumping it while using a mouse, I cant disable the Windows key without installing a third party program or editing the Windows registry. I use the left Alt key to ping items in-game, and I kept hitting the Windows key instead and pulling me out of the game! Super simple thing they could fix in a future Control Center update. The other thing that bugged me was the lack of disabling the RGB turning off. If you don’t use the keyboard in 60 seconds or so, the back-lighting turns off. Again there should be an option to enable always on if you’re plugged into an outlet.
Last on the list is how the PC runs… or doesn’t? This laptop has an amazing processor and a stupid fast Gen 4 m.2 SSD. Yet for some reason this laptop takes an ETERNITY to turn on, restart, and even enter and exit the BIOS menu. I have 0 idea why this is a thing, but it reminds me of a PC with an old spinning hard drive. You can turn it on and literally go get a cup of coffee before it gets to the Windows log in screen. I believe this is squarely on Gigabytes shoulders and hopefully a future update will fix this issue.
In conclusion, for $1,000 you get a very well built laptop with an amazing processor, a surprisingly great GPU, and can easily upgrade the ram, SSD, and WiFi cards. That price tag limits you to a screen without G-Sync / Free Sync, the bare minimum ram to run, and a OK size SSD and a sluggish boot sequence. Are these problems? Yes. Will they reduce your enjoyment of the product? For most people who are new to PC gaming or buying this for their kids, I say no. Other than the screen and the boot sequence the problems can be fixed with $100 and a couple YouTube videos or you can always take it to Best Buy and have them do it for you.
