Upgrade Aorus X3 Plus to Aero 14?

Snikerdoodlz · June 1, 2016

I currently have an Aorus X3 plus v1 (i7-4860HQ, GTX 870M, 16GB DDR3) that I found on Craigslist. Gigabyte has recently announced its Aero 14 laptop. It looks very appealing, but I don't know if it offers much more to make me switch. I am going into high school this year and am going to bring my Aorus with me to use. The battery is pretty solid--it offers 4 to 6 hours of life on light use. The GPU works just fine for me too. The most graphically intensive game that I play right now is Elite: Dangerous and I plan on playing No Man's Sky once it comes out. I run all of my games just fine with it.

I'm not sure if the Aero 14 offers enough new features to make it enticing enough. Sure, it has 3.1 type-C and a larger battery, but I'll only use type-C for a graphics dock once it becomes too un-powerful to run something that I need it to. They both have the same number of type-A ports and weigh about the same (~4lbs), but my Aorus has a LAN port while the Aero doesn't. The Aero has HDMI 2.0 (for 4k), but I have never had the opporitunity to use a 4K monitor. I think that the miniDP port on the Aorus can do 4K, though.

I did manage to crack the large plastic back piece and break one of the vent grilles when it banged against something in my computer bag, so it will probably also lower the resale value, leading to less money to put toward it.

Actually, most people usually don't upgrade laptops too often. I've only had mine for about 6 months and it's still going fine without any problems. The GPU is still amazing (most of my friends don't even have a GPU and are stuck watching slideshows when playing games) and it is still blisteringly fast with the dual SSDs. Maybe I'm just being wishful and not considering what I already have too much. What do you think?

Yiz · June 4, 2016

It will be hard to resell something with damage, and we still don't know a lot about the aero 14 in terms of build quality or real world battery performance, (I could be wrong there). But also I don't think you'll be able to resell for a price your happy with. You might be better off keeping it until a whole new breed of laptops are realised. You can wait a year can't ya? The Auros will be plenty fine until then!