Aorus X5 V7 specs for 3 SKUs detailed and up for preorder at overclockers.co.uk

See here.

No firm words on a release date, but at least this provides a look at what to expect. Personally, I'm disappointed there are no 1080p or touchscreen options. Otherwise, it looks like a very solid offering. I'm eager to see the clocks it can achieve on stock cooling and with repasting, and also how well its power can be controlled when unplugged to stretch out light work away from an outlet.

 

What are they doing? The 1620p panel is fairly crap for an IPS... The 120Hz was a way better option, that and 4K would make way more sense.

 

At least people will stop complaining about lack of Thunderbolt 3.

 

Do you think XoticPC would carry it too for us in the US?

 

Certainly, if we can get them we will sell them.

 

Looking into the description a bit more for the 4k one it says optional after the G-sync bit? I'm really hoping that this will mean that either we can turn it off or that maybe possibly they will sell one with out it. Just crossing my fingers for optimus support. lol

 

That is weird because if it didn't have Gsync, you would figure it would have Optimus, which they would then advertise.

 

I think the trend now is towards just throttling the GTX card on battery instead of switching to integrated.

 

I'd be fine with that so long as idling the gtx could still give me over 4 hours on battery.

Edit: Just got email back from Aorus and their rep seemed to think that it would be discrete graphics only with the integrated ones disabled. But to be honest he didn't sound all that certain.

 

I'll wait and see some reviews. If a GTX 1070 laptop is getting some good wifi browsing battery hours, that's a good argument for Optimus no longer being necessary, but I can't help but be a little skeptical.

 

I think that's basically where I'm at too just got to wait and see what we can get.

 

It'd also be great if Intel could take a page from Nvidia's book and just unify its mobile and desktop line somewhat. Just give us the full-fat desktop processors already, the only reason more people aren't doing that already is because to make it work you need to delid, which then voids the warranty. What notebook can handle a good OC on a 6820HK/7820HK that can't also handle a delidded 6700K/7700K? Just delid the desktop versions and ship them off to OEMs.

Edit: wrong thread...and wrong website! But yeah! Do that Intel!

 

Well I might be mistaken but I think the IPC is almost the same between them and they only really turn the frequency down and make sure they're fairly power efficient because the difference between a 45w and 65w let alone a 90w chip is insane to try to cool in smaller form factor. At least that is what I assume. But I believe that if you took a 7820hk and ran a 7700k at the same clocks that they would be pretty similar performance. I could be wrong though.

 

The 7820HK is a physically smaller die at 28mm x 42mm (1176 mm²), versus the 7700k which is 37.5mm x 37.5mm (1406.25mm²), so unless they're using more advanced manufacturing techniques to fit the same number of transistors in a smaller area, the 7820HK just can't carry the same punch. Otherwise, you'd see laptop manufacturers rushing to sell preconfigured 7820HK 5GHz machines, as 7700Ks can commonly hit 5GHz on air. I suspect a 5GHz 7820HK is close to impossible.

 

I knew it was a definitely a lot different when i realized how many "pins" it had. And I definitely know that oc headroom is way off considering the fastest 6820hk I saw was 4.5ghz at 1.45v. But (though I can't remember where) I thought i saw a comparison of a 6700k clocked down to almost the same point as a 6600hq and saw similar performance.

(if I can find it again I will post it here.)

 

As much as Aorus charges for X series laptops, I would expect vapor chambers and above average TIM (priority more on long lasting TIM than high performance). That should be enough to hold a good CPU and GPU overclock at reasonable thermals, which then justifies using overclockable parts in the first place. It's a good setup for consumers who don't know better (IE, people who don't even know what TIM is), while still leaving room for the diehards to throw in liquid metal or whatever. With Acer throwing down the performance gauntlet in the 15" sector (their forthcoming Triton 700 has a 1080), this is something Aorus can easily do to keep up. Plus vapor chambers us less space than heat pipes, so you get more internal room to work with.

 

I don't know for sure but I don't know any laptops that use vapor chambers and if I had to guess I would say its because of the very slight risk of a laptop that gets carried around every day and bumped into things possibly rupturing one of the chambers (very unlikely to happen I know). The TIM is the same story too especially when you offer a 2 year warranty you want to make sure that the thermal solution will last seemingly forever rather than just something that might shed a couple of degrees but need to be changed out often (leaving the power users to replace it themselves if they want that extra performance). And when talking about the Triton 700 the 1080 was just in the engineering sample but it sounded like that will not make it to production but only time will tell on that one.

 

There are other reasons not to have Optimus, like Optimus does not like VR headsets so if they're pushing VR compatibility it would at least be disabled out of the box.

 

Actually I didn't even think about VR. That does make sense in my opinion nvidia needs to figure out a way to build in a way of running in discrete mode or hybrid mode so that we aren't reliant on everyone having to do what Clevo did to add an MUX switch (which I imagine is just an extra display signal that comes from the cpu instead so that it can run non G-Sync. Just my 2 cents though. And honestly if Aorus can figure out how to get the 1070 to throttle down enough to get 4.5-5 hours of battery out of it it would be perfect in my opinion.

 

I wouldn't figure a vapor chamber would be any more delicate than a heatpipe? I don't hear about heatpipe ruptures being a problem, so I don't figure vapor chambers would be any more problematic. There are plenty of quality TIMs that will outlast the laptop, the big key is just to not use crap. When people repaste, temperature drops shouldn't be this dramatic. I think it would be possible, albeit expensive, to get a single 1080 in a 15" form factor using such quality components, though Acer might be waiting for Volta to do it due to Pascal being such a hot architecture. The X5 V5 was cooling 120W worth of Maxwell parts without high-end cooling, and the V7 has 110W Pascal part. Get a little fancier and you should be able a 150W 1080 in there. A real feat of engineering would be getting all 250W of a 1080 ti or Titan XP in there, or their Volta equivalents. I know TDP isn't actually that simple, but the point is that there's headroom with existing designs.

 

Seems like Optimus is becoming less common, so likely better throttling will be the way forward.

 

Better throttling is probably the better technology to invest in anyway. Even if you have Optimus, during those times when you are using the discrete GPU, you don't want its clock to be running higher than it needs while you're on battery.

 

Totally agreed. I'd rather do away with Intel graphics entirely on machines with a discrete GPU.

 

I'm surprised Intel didn't already do that with their unlocked CPUs. Who's going to design a laptop with an unlocked CPU and use the IGP? Even on desktop CPUs there's barely a point, though for system builders it's handy if they bought a defective GPU or something I guess.

 

Even then, they've still got some display, just super low res.

 

If there is a way to throttle the GPU to be as low power as the igpu on an intel chip that would be awesome (even if the performance hit is as sever) but it seems that somehow even just idling any of the gtx cards still draws a decent amount of power. But I could see if they can get the GPU to throttle enough in 2d work to draw very little power like an igpu that would be the best possible solution. Looking forward to a future like that.

 

If they're dropping Optimus, hopefully, that means they're close to such power efficiency already, or at least making that a serious goal. Otherwise, they'd probably work towards getting Optimus and Gsync together, but you haven't heard a peep about that.

 

My biggest worry about that is that it seems that all the gaming laptops are obsessed with the best gaming experience possible and leave out the practical stuff which is fine for some of the huge gaming notebooks out there where portability is going from one desk to another and being able to plug in all the time. But something like the aorus is compact enough where using it as a regular laptop anywhere any time not being tied to an outlet is something that should be thought about. I mean in the v6 you basically cant get a bigger battery as it is its almost at the legal limit yet it still seems to get only 3.25 hours on wifi. So there is some serious work that needs to be done to keep that 1070 from drawing so much power.

 

Right now there are trade-offs to get performance, portability or battery life out of a system. I suspect it will be a while before there's something out there that's got long battery life and XX70/XX80 performance that isn't massive.

 

Actually right now even the big laptops don't have good battery life. And since the legal limit for a battery in a laptop is 99wh (aorus is 94wh) the size of the machine seems to be irrelevant in this case it all seems to come down to the fact that they cant get the 1070 to idle low enough to not draw a decent amount of power and the other option being optimus doesn't work with G-Sync which it seems all of the major manufactures seem to be obsessed with putting on to anything with more than 1060. Which I must say I know that I am in the 1% as someone who would want to buy such an over the top gaming laptop and then want to use it in a professional setting too but I just hope to get the best of both worlds.

 

One thing that should help is the continuing reduction in components. The Z370 chipset, for instance, will be baking in Intel wifi, so that's one less component to power. Plus then you don't need to worry about getting some POS Qualcomm or Killer card.

 

If you can stand gaming at home but need professional capabilities on the go, a powerful desktop for gaming at home coupled with a light efficient laptop/tablet might be the way to go. Even if the professional tasks require a lot of processing power, they likely aren't terribly affected by network latency, so running them remotely might be an option.

 

My dream until I saw eGPUs aren't where I want yet was something like that. Find the lightest quad-core notebook with no GPU, then turn it into a desktop at home with an eGPU. But for the cost of those eGPU docks, you may as well build a desktop. I've got enough old games which run fine on an IGP to keep me entertained on the road, but I'll be in hotel rooms five weekends out of the next six, the temptation to have a 1060/1070 with me is strong. I don't think I'll jump on an eGPU until they're able to function as a complete dock and laptop PSU. IE, you sit at your desk and plug your laptop into the eGPU, and that charges it, provides the GPU, keyboard, monitor, etc. all from one connection. A couple iterations of Thunderbolt from now, maybe that can become a reality. I would even accept a proprietary connector, ala Alienware, if it could do all that.

While I'm continuing to idly wish for things in this thread, give me a 16:10 screen, too.

 

I do already have a desktop with great performance but I do travel as well and also having something that can go to lan parties is nice. Figured I would try to kill all the birds with one stone. But definitely not going to be my primary gaming rig. Just wanted to go as far as I could to get the most life out of it. (current macbook pro on at least 5 years now.)

 

Right now there's not really a stone for all those birds. I have been hearing rumors of a massive increase in small battery energy density for years and nothing has actually come of it yet. Until then if you're gaming you pretty much have to pick how much you want your outlet-hopper to weigh.

 

Don't worry, as soon as battery tech finally ends its long stagnation, we'll quickly move on to ramping up device power consumption to completely negate the potential battery life gains.

 

I like that your pessimism exactly matches mine.

 

If this ever makes it to market and turns out to be decent, it'd be a great way to sacrifice battery life occasionally.

 

I'm gonna give "makes it to market" 30% probability and "turns out to be decent" much less. Those hinges scare me.