Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED i7, 2070 Max-Q Initial Impressions

I'm back at it again with another initial impression and I think this one might be the laptop for a bit. I posted in the Sager section back in June when I bought a Sager NP8485 but a few short comings resulted in the laptop heading back and led me to the Aero OLED.


Specs:
- 15.6 Inch screen
- Intel i7 9750H processor
- 16 GB ram
- Nvidia 2070 Max-q
- Samsung SSD
- Killer 1650AX wireless

Ordering process:
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I sent the Sager back to Gentech Pc where I had initially bought it. Ken was helpful as usual in the return process and provided me a full refund in terms of store credit which made life easy to order the Aero through their website. I only requested for Grizzly Kryonaut to be added to the laptop even though Gigabyte claims they paste the laptop pretty well but I dont want to take chances with a machine that I plan on keeping for as long as possible. The ordering to shipping process took about 9 days.

Unit Impression:
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From the reviews I had read about the Aero, I was given the impression that its not a good looking laptop but this one here is aesthetically good to look at. Build quality is quite decent. The RGB keyboard is a delight and the AERO written on the laptop lights up which I think is kinda cool.

The main highlight of the laptop is the OLED screen. After using the Sager I was spoiled and wanted to stay with OLED. The Areo OLED comes factory calibrated and it has a custom profile selected in the display section for color calibration and unlike the Sager, it allows for HDR content play. Sager and Gigabyte, infact all OLED vendors in the laptop market are currently using the same Samsung panel but Sager didnt offer HDR. The screen pops out, articles look awesome, pictures are vibrant on a whole new level. Its worth the investment in my opionion.

The second best thing about the laptop is the weight. Mine came at just under 4.5 lbs. Literally half the weight of my five year old AW. Again its fun having one less instrument capable of death in the house but at the same time there is a little bit of a worry. The Aero is built to be a sleek, slender machine almost competing with Macbooks and XPS laptops so I know it dont have the comfort of a spill or a drop on this laptop. Its not built to take any abuse at all, as if any laptop is but there is zero room for error on this one.

The keyboard on the laptop is RGB and offers a very crisp input. Low profile and small travel, however I have to get used to having a numpad. My old AW machine didnt have one so there will be an adjusting period with this. The trackpad is awesome and the fingerprint reader on the trackpad actually works compared to the Sager being a hit or miss. So far I have yet to have a single rejection on the Aero versus the Sager where it was a constant headache.

Now one of the main reasons I sent the Sager back was the battery life. Sager told me that the laptop was meant to be a desktop replacement and wont give me more than 2 max 3 hrs of battery life. Unfortunately that is lower then the point where I would consider it an issue so it had to go. The Aero had given me 5 hours on the first charge and that was me doing updates, setting up my apps and multitasking to get the laptop ready to be used.

I ran Fire strike on the laptop right out the bat to get an idea of where the laptop stood and I got a score for 13570. I tried to run Time Spy but for some reason it refused to load. That was the first snafu but after completing all the updates for windows and the drivers, it started to run. I installed Throttle Stop and undervolted the cup to -125mV and the gpu to -20.5 mV and my Fire Strike score jumped to 14664 and Time Spy DX 12 came to 6366. Not exactly raving scores but I wont be gaming as much as I'll be working on media related stuff on the laptop. The laptop was idling between 39-41C but jumped up to 89-91C during the test.

The Fans on the laptop do get pretty loud when the load is placed on the laptops. I'm not really bothered by sound so thats not an issue for me but people who are sensitive to fan noise may want to consider that.

Quirks so far:
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The main quirk I have is that the laptop is built to sleek and good looking but the screen is connected to the chassis with two hinges. I like to move around the house from the living room to the bed room to the media room. Its bothersome to close the lid for 2 seconds and open it back up but I've noticed that the screen tends to jiggle when I do that so that doesnt really enforce confidence in the hinges.

Another quirk is software. I had to uninstall the control center and reinstall it. It doesnt have an option where I can run it automatically at the beginning of windows. I have to manually open it to run. Maybe that is a user error but I have yet to find a solution.

So far the laptop seems like a good purchase but then again I've had it for a day and a half. Nothing against the Sager but the Aero is a seperate class of its own and HDR on the screen looks awesome. I'm available to anyone if any questions come up.

 

I had been eyeing Aero 15 when it was first introduced back in 2017 i think and I find it great looking, if you don't opt for like the shiny orange and green. The cost is on the high side for me and with all the initial waves of problems it made me hesitate even more. Even now, Gigabyte after-sale support seems to be a nightmare for many people, I am sure there are a lot of happy users too but I didn't want to buy a device that is hard to get any warranty work done in Canada.

For the software, you can try System Ninja or any other software that lets you look at system status with additional tools to help you clean up registries and what not. Alternatively, try looking for the control centre in your "System Configurations" panel, you can get there by typing "msconfig" in your search bar i think? then just go under the tab that says "Start Up" and look for your control centre.

Enjoy the laptop! The Pantone-certified screen should be pretty amazing to look at.

 

Yea, new Aero looks great and I was also considering it. It looks much better than any Sager option and I would not be buying Sager again due to issues with previous models. The only thing I do not like about Aero is the price.

Not sure if Kryonaut was the good option for it and personally I would go straight to liquid metal instead. Liquid metal is not that hard to install and should last longer after you'll give it some time to be absorbed into copper and add some extra after that.

 

Yeah for some reason that i cannot even remember, I went with Kryonaut over Conductonaut. I ran into a sanfu with XTU earlier today which was weird but so far the laptop idles between 36C-41C. I played Ghost Recon on 1080P Very High settings and got 77 FPS stable. Tried Wolfenstien Young Blood on 1080P and it ran like a Champ on Mien Leben.

So far the laptop is holding itself good. It is on the pricier side. I have to fork out a bit to add a second drive and im eyeing the Adata 8200Pro for that reason.

 

I wish I would have gone with the i7, but ingot my i9 2070 FHD for 1900, prove was too good to pass up. Thermals are tough to deal with b7t coming had keeps temps down.

My second Aero 15, classy enough for a business setting, full 10key pad, great performance keeps me coming back for more.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

 

Hi guys! I just got AERO 15 OLED with RTX 2060. The OLED display is awesome and I’m happy with this machine thermal & performance.

I found that my unit producing a high pitch fan noise even at around 2000 rpm. It’s really annoying when you’re working (typing some documents & web surfing) in very quiet room with low ambient noise. I can clearly hear the whine noise from the fans.

I watched and read several AERO 15 OLED reviews that they mentioned the fans are quiet during idle. I wonder if my unit is defective?

 

No that sounds about right. The fans on the unit do tend to make a weird pitch noise. I've been noticing it for the past two days. I ended up removing control center and letting XTU take over everything. That helped but if you want to keep the control center, play a little bit with the fan settings in the app. You can adjust the graph to custom and let the fan runs slower than what the app is set to. See if that helps.

Another thing I noticed is that XTU is telling me the laptop is on 'current limit throttling' when running on battery but goes to normal when I plug it in.

 

mine has the same noise i think it's normal

 

my problem is when i played dota the fps is very low i set res to 4k and maxed out everything but the funny thing is that if i removed anti aliasing or lower the rendering quality i got the same fps not sure why and if i compared it to my 970m laptop it's only marginally better
also i tested grid autosport and compared it to my old 970m laptop with same setting i only get extra 7 fps and my aero is 1660 Ti which is very weird i've tried updating everything
if you guys know what settings i can change please let me know thanks
also i see stuttering on youtube and twitch

 

grats ! from a video i saw they said that the laptop was already undervolted out of the box not sure how accurate that is ?
and what is your firestrike graphics score ? due to the fps problem above i consider upgrading to 2070 max q but not sure how much difference that would make

 

I'm getting 14500 in fire strike and thats with XTU undervolt. One thing i've noticed with the laptop is that it goes in full performance when plugged vs on battery. I've seen the FPS on battery. Ghost recon was barely touching 19 fps on Very high settings but as soon as I plugged in the charger it went to 90 fps.

Question why did you choose the 1660ti over the GTX versions?

I'm running a -0.150 V undervolt on XTU along with Short power max at 80 and Long power max at 62. Computer does normal functions between 36c to 41c.

 

the 14500 is the firestrike score or the graphics score ? because 1660 Ti already has 14000 graphics score but the score is 12 000
i have mine plugged in all the time and set it to max performance or high performance
because 1660 Ti is $800 cheaper and for the old games i played they don't make much of a difference but it looks like these old games can utilize the new hardware
by the way do you see stuttering on youtube and twitch? i see it time to time

 

I changed my primary ssd to a samsung evo 970. These are the scores I got when I just ran FS and TS on plugged in. As far as stuttering, I havent seen any but I also turned off hardware acceleration in google chrome. Its a known issue that causes problems like stuttering.

 

Thanks for your feedback!

 

that's a very good score if it's not too much to ask will it be possible for you to install dota and see if you have the same issue ? if yours's ok i'll return mine and get the 2070

 

Installed the free version of the game and ran it with the laptop plugged in. No issues for me so far. I would strongly suggest going to the gtx series. I was reading on in the Aero threat that someone else was having the stuttering issue on their 1660ti version as well.

 

Thanks very much for trying it out, did you max out everything under 4k res? what fps did you get ?

 

I put it at very high. Honestly at 4k most games will the machine to the test regardless of how old they are. If I wanted to game on 4k I would have gone I9/2080 route

 

I see what fps did you get ? the thing is that with my 970m laptop 4k res i already got around 42 fps dota is not demanding so when I got only around 50 fps with 1660ti i was shocked at how low it was

 

Just ran it again. I didnt measure the FPS but i set to 4k boderless resolution and it ran without a hitch. No stutter or any issues.

 

thanks for your help appreciate it, my issue is actually not stutter but the fps is very low, i found out that if i set to exclusive full screen the fps will go up borderless will give me at most 30 LOL
but even with fulscreen it's still not much better than my 970m laptop which is very weird
if there's not much going on the fps will hover around 50 once a lot things happen it will drop to around 35 with my 970m it will hover around 42 and drop to 30 when many things are happening
there's an option to display network statistics to see fps in the option window that's what i used because it updates much faster, afterburner updates every second
really appreciate your help

 

Lol i've never played this game. Had to google how to show fps. I'm getting 80-90 fps during the game with 4k borderless.

 

Thanks very much if you're in nor cal i'll buy you a beer
i guess i'm switching to your old sager 2070
although i'm a bit worried at how sager can sell the laptop so cheap the 2070 is not max q and the price is $500 cheaper than gigabyte

 

I'll take you up on that offer or if you ever end up in Houston, beer is on me.

I'll tell you this, the 2070 on the Sager is a badass piece of tech. I wish the Sager had more battery but I'm not going to lie, I'm very happy with the Aero. At the same time, the Sager is better prices than the Aero.

 

Several things you could try:
1. Update NV driver, no matter from GIGABYTE or NVIDIA
2. Update BIOS
3. Update Intel UHD graphic driver
4. Max out fan setting in control center (to gaming or auto-maximum 100%)
5. if none of above works, maybe try F9 recovery

 

Hi gigabyte representative

Thanks for the reply

and i've tried everything except bios i think the problem is with single channel memory i actually called your customer service as well he asked me to try downgrading nvidia drivers tried that too but when i get home today i'll try the bios update
I see a lot of small problems with this laptop
streaming twitch using an app will cause severe stuttering and i figured out yesterday that i needed to switch to dGPU to remove stuttering but then if i open youtube and twitch at the same time they will lag
streaming twitch from chrome will lag quite a lot especially if its 1080
opening youtube will also lag in the beginning
I noticed yesterday when comparing it to my non optimus laptop that the fps during dota will fluctuate wildly on aero laptop compared to my non optimus laptop which only has 980m and my old laptop has better fps
playing 4k youtube videos will also cause the fan to spin up a lot it seems like it struggles to play 4k youtube, playing the same video on my non optimus laptop is fine fan doesn't even spin up

it's a good laptop but it seems like it struggles a lot in small ways i'll write up a more detailed review later

 

Do you or anyone with any of the oled models happen to have a loud tick tick ticking sound at load and in games? First it only happened in 3DMark FS in physics and Aida64, now it happens in games like Jurassic world evolution. If it doesnt tick it makes a very faint popcorny-crackling sound from same general area. It happens on and off of the wall. Everyone said to jump ship from P775 but...wowser this thing. I cannot even use it in a plane or uni environment. The ticking is 5db spikes (44> 49 over and over)

 

I havent had a ticking noise but I can attest to a faint whine even with the laptop is not under any stress and it gets really loud when i'm gaming. Its hard to describe but its just this weird whine sound along with the fans themselves. I'll push my laptop to see if there is a ticking noise.

 

could you share me the version of BIOS/Intel graphic driver/NV driver?

 

could you identify where the sound is from? possibly the interference of fan and mechanical parts while fan speed up

 

my bios is up to date but i flashed in anyway and it was the same bios from the build date and no difference in performance
so all the drivers are the ones from gigabyte website i tried other versions but the one i have now are all the drivers from gigabyte website
https://www.gigabyte.com/Laptop/AERO-15-OLED--Intel-9th-Gen/support#support-dl-driver
so basically this laptop performs like my 5 year old 970m laptop with maybe 7 fps better in games if gigabyte can help in anyway i'd be grateful

not sure what tick you're having but mine has some of that but i thought it was rattling from the fan
is yours the 1660Ti model?

 

It turns out is is the fan! When the laptop spins into high rpm if it is not flat it starts to make the ticking sound, the fan marked for GPU is main culprit on my YA unit. If you move the laptop while fans rpm is high...the fans also start to tick. If the laptop is lifted more than 20 degrees in the rear the tick starts at high rpm like magic.

I was able to get good video of it.

 

That sounds like debris in the fan. Possibly a broken propeller or something small stuck inside the fan thats being tossed around as the propellers move.

 

maybe try to unfix the screw of fans and lock the screw back tighter

 

I tried that, and I also tried to kapton tape under the fan on any part of the plastic layer that lifts and could interfere with no luck . What makes this stressful is in two weeks I am going to Germany.. if XoticPC cares to reply to my support message and see what we can do...Is Gigabyte DE RMA going to give me a QWERTZ unit? Do they even have the parts to fix this yet... If I wait to RMA in the US i wont have a working laptop till Febuary-May 2020 which is not okay, could they possibly just send me a replacement heat sink assembly there?. I cannot even sell my P775 until this mess is resolved and I really don't feel like bringing two laptops to Europe because one has to be RMA'd there. My unit has no coil whine just this so...win some you lose some.

 

Hey Gigabyte rep and users, I recently got aero 15 XA 240Hz screen one, not the oled.

When the fan is off, I can here this constant metallic ticking noise. It is always there whether the fan is on or off,
but just more obvious when the fan is off.

Is this normal? do other ppl have the same thing or is this defective unit?

I linkt the video with the noise.

 

Coil whine. Common.

 

Does other aero user experience this coil whine? it gets pretty annoying, I can hear it super clearly.
I am still within return period, thinking if I should exchange for another unit if it is possible to have better noise control.

Also how much cpu undervolt can ppl do? I can do -.160, this is pretty good (better than average)?

 

I can hear the coil whine as well but im at the point where it doesnt really bother me.

I'm undervolted at -0.150. Average at 42 deg.

 

Does anyone has any issues with the edges cutting into your hands or wrists. I once tested the aero 15 with the i9 9880hk and the edges would cut my wrists. I loved the overall feel and weight of the machine but the typing was not the best.

 

mine was ok but then again i might not type like other people

 

So I haven't noticed it on the front edges but around the corners it's definitely sharp and it's gotten me a couple of times. The edges are rounded properly and they remind you about that

 

I had the same issue but after opening the case it stopped. I didn't see any debris. I haven't heard it anymore

 

mine started to rattle loudly two days ago and it's been rattling since (but not as loudly)
it happened when i picked up the laptop to move to another room

 

does anyone have a problem where the screen doesn't turn off when the lid is shut? (I don't want it to go to sleep or anything, just the screen to turn off)

 

Mine turns off screen and go to sleep if lid is closed.

Hey, not sure if anyone plays overwatch? mine aero keeps stutter in game, sometimes more sometimes less, and usually when more ppl in the scene.
I tried installing the newer killer network driver, or graphic driver, or just use the versions in Gigabyte Control Center.
Also tried turning off Killer control center, or "Enable Gamefast".

None of them help. Don't know if anyone has any suggestion?

sometimes under normal use, I do notice the mouse cursor stutter a bit when I am just web browsing and trying to move the mouse.

 

my aero oled stuttered during twitch but not during in game but it was very obvious especially in firefox and app tried too many things and finally returned the laptop

 

I reinstalled windows clean and I've been pushing the laptop on games like Control with Ray tracking and it's doing a good job of keeping 60fps or more at 1080p.

I undervolted the CPU to -0.155 and the laptop runs around 40C if I'm sitting on a desk, 37C if I'm sitting on my granite counter but the counter stays cool so it could be due to the false cooling pad notion. 47C if I'm in bed so the placement of the laptop on surfaces plays an important part.

Under stress it's going to about 85C during gaming. My only complain is that the fans get loud especially during gaming.

So far I really don't have any massive complaints with it like I did with my PB51.

 

I just learned the stuttering is actually due to my mouse was broken, the cursor stutter in game bec it was more obvious, but i notice it also happens outside of game, just not as noticeable. Just switching a mouse it fixed it!

 

new bios apparently