Gigabyte Aero 15: Pretty damn good, but it has it's quirks

[HunterAP]

First let me quote the review I wrote on Amazon (Gigabyte had a promo where if you review their product they'll give you some gift, I got a $20 Steam gift card. I'm not sponsored or getting anything else from posting about it here).

I bought this laptop for college, as I needed a laptop that was powerful, light, and could play games. This filled all of my requirements.
I'm genuinely surprised how light is it: I previously had an Asus G46VW, which by comparison actually felt heavier than my Gigabyte Aero 15, despite the Asus one being smaller. Opening and closing it is extremely easy because of how light the entire laptop is, and I can't really feel a noticeable difference when it's in my backpack when I already have some books in it.

The keyboard is RGB, which is always nice, and it feels pretty good compared to other laptops' keyboard that are "mushy" or not very responsive, but these keys feel more like Cherry MX Blues mixed with membrane keys, and it feels pretty nice.

The display is really crisp, bezel-less and the levels of brightness are perfect. At the lowest brightness, I don't feel like my eyes get strained in my bedroom with all the lights off, and the maximum brightness is bright enough to see the contents of the screen both indoors and outdoors with the sun beating down on me. The only thing I dislike is that there is no Nvidia G-Sync with the monitor, even though it's not terribly necessary on a 1080p 60Hz monitor, but I definitely experienced quite a bit of screen tearing in games, where I needed to turn on vsync, which hurt gaming performance. The camera is pretty damn good, although placed on the bottom of the display's bezel is weird for me.

The ports included are nice: the three USB 3.0 ports are great for USB sticks, external mice, and even my external hard drive to connect through, and the Thunderbolt 3 port lets me connect a slew of other devices to the laptop. The SD card reader is a huge plus too, since I take a few photos & videos and can dump them onto my computer through an SD card. My only major gripe is that the USB ports are too stiff: I have to sort of shove the plug into place on the laptop for it to go in (and I'm not saying that I put the plug in wrong and had to flip it, I mean I literally had to trust the plug with a lot of effort to get it to go in). The inverse happens when I try to pull out those plugs from the USB ports: it takes a lot of effort. I guess the upside to this is that the USB devices are securely connected to the laptop.

Onto to the good stuff: the i7-7700HQ is great for browsing with lots of tabs, watching videos, listening to music, and doing coding/programming all at once. I don't think I've noticed it be any slower than my desktop's i7-6700K, which says a lot about the performance. The main issue is that it gets quite hot, which I'll explain a bit later.

The Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB is perfect for gaming at the display's resolution at 60Hz at about medium settings for most games. I even do some CUDA programming on my desktop, so it's nice that I can do that on the go with this Nvidia GPU. the GTX 1060 here also suffers the same issue with heat like the CPU does.

The heat "issue" is more of a question of how hot the components get before it doesn't seem safe (to me, at least). Both the CPU and GPU get quite hot, sometimes hitting +90 degrees Celsius under a tough gaming load for an extended period of time, even with a laptop cooling pad with two external fans. The fans inside the laptop also get pretty damn loud at +65C, but you can configure this in the software that comes on the laptop. I get a little concerned when I place my hand on the area next to the power button and feel that it's getting pretty hot. I even undervolted the CPU to get it to stay cooler, which is slightly doing the job.

Here are my biggest complaints though: the software. Despite it running fine when I first got the laptop, their Smart Manager software keeps crashing for me. Smart Manager is supposed to handle custom fan speed profiles (for both the CPU and GPU), the function key mappings, and some miscellaneous system monitoring. I've tried pretty much everything short of wiping the system and using Gigabyte's recovery tool, but the software refuses to run. This meant that I couldn't use some of the FN key commands (like controlling the screen brightness, turning off the display, or disabling the touchpad). Unfortunately, the Gigabyte Tech Support person/people I spoke with just told me to wipe my system to fix the issue, which I wasn't willing to do, and they didn't have any other solutions for me. I had to fix this manually by using a popular program called AutoHotKey, which lets you make macro key combinations, and make my own macro combinations for those missing functions. The issue with that is that the FN key isn't registered as a key in Windows, but instead is done through hardware, which meant that the AutoHotKey program couldn't use the FN key, so I resorted to using the right CTRL key instead, which is fine.

All in-all, it's a really good device, with very few issues (except the Smart Manager software issue, which was a hassle), and non of those issues are deal-breakers for me. Even after these issues, I'm still giving this laptop a 5 out of 5 because it is absolutely amazing.

 

But the TL;DR version is; it's a great laptop that runs amazingly well, it has really good battery life (especially after undervolting the i7-7700HQ and also lowering temps a bit at no performance cost), and that it's light as hell yet incredibly durable and premium feeling.

Only negatives are that my laptop was unlucky enough that the included Gigabyte software used for controlling the GPU fans and some of the FN key combinations doesn't work, despite me doing full uninstalls + registry cleaning of the Gigabyte software and reinstalling it again (including trying different versions). I got around this by using AutoHotkey, but most people don't want to mess with that, and Gigabyte's support team just told me to "do a fresh install" to fix it after 2 weeks of waiting for a response. Only other "issues" are that it gets really hot to the touch but it doesn't thermal throttle, and that the USB ports are incredibly tight to the point where a USB drive I inserted needed to be removed with pliers while another USB drive was disconnected from it's cover. I don;t know if this is just this one model or if it's every model of this laptop, but it's kind of annoying sometimes, especially when I'm afraid I'll break something.

 

Even though this is my review, I'm wondering if anyone can corroborate any of these issues that I've had. I'm curious how others are finding this laptop for their use cases.