Aorus has always built the Lamborghini Aventador of laptops. Its X-Series notebooks are packed to the brim with bleeding edge hardware, but are somehow ridiculously thin at the same time. At Computex 2015, the company has shown off a new X5 and X7 Pro for you to lust over, and both have dual-linked graphics cards that make them probably the most powerful laptops you can buy today.
The 15-inch Aorus X5 is the more accessible of the two, purely because it’s the more mainstream screen size of the two. It uses Intel’s latest and greatest Core i7-5700HQ 5th-generation mobile processor clocked to a maximum of 3.5GHz, has dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M graphics in SLI, can be specced with up to 32GB of RAM and up to three 512GB M.2 solid states drives in RAID 0 as well as a 2TB 2.5-inch mass storage drive, all running on the high-end Intel HM97 chipset.
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The X7 Pro is the same basic idea, writ large — a 17.3-inch 1920x1080p display, dual GTX 970M graphics, triple SSDs and 32GB of RAM, but with larger and more powerful speakers. That combination of comparatively low-res screen and high-powered graphics should make the X7 Pro one of the most gutsy gaming laptops ever created. Interestingly, both laptops use the same large 73Wh battery. Both, too, have a set of macro keys off to the left of their super-thin-travel chiclet keyboards.
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Having SLI graphics means both Aorus laptops can use midrange graphics chips, but two of them, supercharging their performance over even the best single-chip notebook graphics from Nvidia. The dual GTX 965Ms run about 15 to 20 per cent faster than a single GTX 980M, while dual GTX 970Ms are a full 40 per cent faster — as long as Nvidia’s drivers and your favourite game’s software play happily together.
Crucially, both the X7 Pro and X5 are Aorus’ first (and some of the world’s first) laptops to have built-in support for Nvidia’s G-SYNC screen smoothing tech, letting games display frames perfectly over a wide range without stuttering or tearing being apparent. This is the big thing to look for if you’re intending on getting a new gaming laptop any time soon, [AORUS]