Aorus X7 V2

I am asking if anyone has tried replacing their original screen or upgrading it to a different glossy screen. I was warned that the bezel on the Aorus might not be removable without damaging the laptop. Can anyone confirm this?

 

I got my Aorus X7 V2 three weeks ago. I would give it a 9/10, so far.

I have purchased an extra 16GB of ram but I have not installed yet as I wanted to run the X7 through the paces to ensure there are no defects (before I open it up).
I have not gamed a lot with the X7 so far (most of my time spent re-installing games from Steam), but I did play Civ V and Far Cry 3 and the SLI profiles did work perfectly and performance was excellent on high settings. I will run some benchmarks later this week. I have a 3K monitor, so I will be testing some games at 2880x1620 resolution to see if the X7 starts chocking or throttling.

Performance is excellent for such a sleek laptop. I use it for work, and my Windows 2012 server VMs just fly when running on the RAID 0 SSDs.

Many reviews and posts complain about the Aorus X7's keyboard, panel and heat management. I found the panel to be good. Screen door effect is minimal for a matte panel. Colors are crisp and brightness is excellent (though maxed out). Contrast could be better. Viewing angles from the top, left and right are more than adequate. Viewing angle is poor when looking at the screen from below, but that is not a standard viewing scenario. A colleague has a Lenovo W530 laptop, and the viewing angles are so bad that I have to almost rest my chin on her shoulder to see her screen properly. Not the case here with the X7 V2. The panel is not top of the line, but it is quite adequate. And really, how many laptops out there have top of the line 17in panels? Not many.

I like the keyboard. I quickly adapted to it and I now quite enjoy typing on it. The only issue is that the plastic housing for the keyboard is not perfectly snapped to bottom right part of the aluminium body, so the lower right side keys have some flex to them compared to the rest of the keys. This is a recurring build quality issue with the X7. I wish Aorus would just laser cut the aluminium body to fit the keys of the keyboard (like on my Dell XPS 15z). The plastic mold housing feels cheap and was probably introduced by Gigabyte to reduce cost and facilitate repairs, but this is a premium priced laptop and these type of cost cutting measures should not be allowed. But, all in all, the flex is not really that annoying and I don't notice it unless I am looking for it.

Heat management: The thing heats up big time. But that is to be expected. For me, portability trumps heat management. That's why I preferred the Aorus X7 V2 to the MSI GT72. Now heat management does become an issue if the CPU starts throttling non stop and the laptop blue-screens like it was the case with my Dell XPS 15z. So far, the Aorus X7 has not throttled once. It handles the heat, though it manages to do so just at the threshold of the CPU's 100 degree Celsius mark. It is quite impressive, yet a bit scary. I do worry that in the next couple of years, all that heat will take its toll. But it does seem like the X7 was engineered to handle all that heat. Now the fans do start blazing, especially when gaming, but then I am wearing headphones, so I don't care. I did couple the X7 with a Cooler Master SF-19 cooling pad and it does make a difference. At work, the fans will start blazing when loading a big VM and running heavy SQL Server queries, but it does so for short spurts. So the noise level at work is quite acceptable. When the fans do quick in, the sound is a consistent white noise, with no loud pitches or hissing sounds.

Overall, I don't regret my purchase. The Aorus X7 V2 is the right laptop for my needs.