Gigabyte Aero 15x v8 review

So I'm not that knowledgeable about hardware, but here are my general feelings about my Aero 15x 7 months or so after purchase.

The good: This laptop is extremely powerful given its size and weight. When I purchased it came with a backpack and I barely feel it in there when walking around. I opted for this laptop because I had a large budget and I wanted the latest generation of GEForce graphics card, an SSD, a lot of physical memory already installed because I've had issues in the past with upgrading it after the fact, etc. I don't tax it much with games but I do run programs like Unity and Blender with some frequency, keep tons of tabs open in chrome all the time, and have several containers running via a docker engine for work and hobby stuff, and I haven't noticed any issues with the amount of stress I'm putting on the system. The image resolution is more than good enough for me and the speakers can generate enough sound to stream video sitting across the room and still hear fine. I'm a sucker for gimmicks like programmable back lighting on the keyboard and Gigabyte doesn't disappoint in this area, right now I have it set to light each key that i press and slowly fade out and I'm like a kid with a lite-brite watching them go.

The bad: This was far from an out of the box kind of experience like you might expect with laptops from a certain Cupertino based company. I had a number of configurations that didn't make sense with the Windows 10 operating system as it had been installed at the Manufacturer. Some examples: for some reason, when I first started using this laptop there were settings that prevented it from taking advantage of the dedicated nvidia card and instead it was using the integrated graphics card even in Unity when I was attempting to render a scene with lots of polygons. This resulted in slow and choppy rendering in the editor making the program run as though I had a far less performant machine. Additionally, there have been common problems with the trackpad responsiveness just because the drivers for it are not very good so many reviewers online recommend installing Microsoft precision touchpad drivers and that made things work much better. I also had several BSODs very soon after buying this machine, mostly power state failure messages. This didn't seem like it would brick the computer or anything, but it required a lot of fiddling with the OS and drivers until I was able to get it to run in its current state. I still get the occasional BSOD, but as it is not frequent enough I'm just hoping these are anomolies or driver conflicts that I haven't figured out yet.

The ugly: Don't get me wrong, the laptop is gorgeous. I did, however, dent the lid pretty soon after getting it. I use this for work and this was probably just wear and tear because I have to take it back and forth so much, but it was still a bummer and I can't help but feel if this were a lenovo or a macbook or something that I wouldn't start seeing that kind of ding show up for a while because the material of their cases just doesn't ding as easily.

Overall, I'm still really happy with my purchase and I haven't had trouble despite putting the laptop through a lot in terms of running software and traveling with it frequently. I would recommend this laptop to someone else if they need high performance or are a gamer, or even a casual user who wants a laptop that won't be obsolete for a while.

 

Oh, and I give this laptop 4/5 stars

 

Thank you for taking the time out to review this model, Winged Cloth and great details one your experience and resolutions! I do have a few questions if you have the time:

1. When you mentioned that some configurations were interfering with OS, namely the Nvidia Dedicated Card issue, what helped you to resolve it?
2. What BSODs are you still receiving on this Gigabyte or have they pretty much been resolved?

I am always curious of these kinds of things. Thanks!