Partner manufacturers Gigabyte and Aorus both make laptops, but they approach things differently. This year at Computex, though, both are going for broke with super-thin gaming machines designed to catch the eye but still perform at maximum power.
Gigabyte’s Aero 14 is, as the name might suggest, a 14-inch laptop made for gaming and high-performance computing — but it fits some pretty powerful hardware into a surprisingly skinny 19.9mm chassis. Intel’s Core i7 Skylake mobile CPU takes pride of place — almost a foregone conclusion these days — is joined by a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M mobile graphics chipset, DDR4 RAM, M.2 PCI-Express x4 solid state drives and I/O support for both HDMI 2.0 and USB Type-C.
Despite its skinny aspect, though, the Aero 14 somehow manages to fit in a 94.24Wh battery, which Gigabyte says will last for an “entire day” — although more detailed info is not yet forthcoming. The top lid of the Aero 14 can be specced out with a orange, green or black lid — like Dell, Gigabyte wants you to personalise your laptop when you buy it. That 14-inch display inside is a 2560x1440pixel one, which should look great for desktop work even if it does stretch those internal graphics during gaming.
Aorus, maker of ridiculously thin metal-bodied gaming laptops, has a new desktop-grade notebook in its most powerful model yet: the X7 DT. A desktop-grade GTX 980 and overclockable K-series Intel Core i7 chip mean that — as long as you’re plugged into a gutsy power point — the X7 DT can handle most modern games without breaking a sweat — especially since its 17-inch display is only a 1920x1080pixel one.
Like all Aorus laptops, the X7 DT is only 25.4mm thick and weighs 2.3kg, so while it’s weighty it’s definitely not the heaviest gaming laptop we’ve seen — not by a long shot. Aorus also has a mechanical keyboard called the RGB Fusion on show at Computex, with dedicated macro keys and the same per-key lighting setup found on the company’s X5 and X7 gaming laptops. [Gigabyte / Aorus]