It’s CES, and every laptop manufacturer is taking the opportunity to refresh its product lines with Intel’s latest seventh-gen Kaby Lake CPUs and Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs — both of them much more efficient than their predecessors. That combo means gaming laptops that can actually game away from a power point, and Gigabyte’s new machines are no different.
Of the entire range of Gigabyte laptops being refreshed, here are what we thought were a few bright points. The Aero 14 we loved at Computex has been updated with a GTX 1060, a pretty gutsy internal graphics card considering its slim sub-20mm thickness. Despite its 2560x1440pixel 14-inch display, Gigabyte says the new machine will last for up to 10 hours’ use on a full battery charge.
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Gigabyte’s P-series laptops range from 13- to 17-inch screen sizes, and machines like the P56 have impressive specifications given their relatively straightforward external designs. The updated P56 has a new Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor which can hit top speeds of 3.8GHz and Nvidia’s desktop-equalling GTX 1070 laptop graphics chip, and its 15-inch display can be specced either with a 1080p or 4K panel.
The company is also targeting esports gamers and enthusiasts with new entry level gaming laptops, like the Sabre 15 above — a machine using that same high-end Intel Core i7, but installing one of Nvidia’s newer budget GTX 1050 or GTX 1050 Ti chips, which will suit less visually demanding titles like League of Legends or DoTA 2 at the 15-inch machine’s 1080p native resolution. Interestingly, it’s also one of the first laptops we’ve seen with an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive.