Gigabyte And Aorus Go All In On Laptops At Computex

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]


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