NEW Aero 14 W/ 1050 ti AND Thunderbolt 3

Yes, you likely meant Furmark can kill GPU's; prime95 is a CPU only test.

prime95 is "safe" for short spins for 100% CPU testing, 5 minutes is usually enough to see if thermal throttling is a problem.

Longer 10-15 minute tests are ok too for thermal load testing a cooling system capacity. And, there are those that insist on hours of testing, but I'd be careful and not do that if you are already having thermal throttling issues at 5min / 15min tests.

furmark as a short run test, a few minutes shouldn't be a problem, but long term testing might overheat inadequately cooled VRAM or VRM's causing them to fail. furmark has been auto throttled for Nvidia GPU's for quite a while due to problems with early GPU's.

There are people that have had reported problems with furmark off and on over the years, even today, so be attentive when running it even for short time periods, avoiding it might be less stressful for the inexperienced and experienced alike, I still run it without issues.

As always, watch closely when trying out new tests and use common sense when testing, you aren't trying to "kill" the laptop, just get it winded

Note, you might want to edit your original post, no sense keeping false info in posts - it's ok to edit in corrections.

 

[Unboxing] The New AERO 14 with Thunderbolt 3 & X-Rite Pantone Certification!

 

So I was finally able to benchmark on the mantiz with the Zotac 1080 Ti Mini, used a Predator 27in 1440p GSync Display. Was running into an issue where the host to device throughput was 900MiB/s was able to fix it by adjusting the buffer in the BIOS for 128 instead of the default 32. This solved my massive frame stutter issues and made gameplay solid again. Once I get a display of my own (was using a buddies) I will do a more indepth review of the setup but otherwise I would say this is a if not THE best option for EGPU usage with the ability to game on its own. Now if only it was cheaper haha.

 

Prime95 for 15 min, -130mV, fans on "gaming" (which isn't that loud), haven't re-pasted yet.

The majority of the time it sat at mid-60c.

 

Looks great, certainly excellent enough to put off re-pasting.

Try some long gaming sessions and use hwinfo64 to log the session, you can then see the temps and other readings every 2 seconds - better than trying to go on just the single MAX temp reading.

 

I just got off a 3ish hour Overwatch session, never dropped below 130 fps, but mostly stayed at 144 fps at 1440p epic (highest) settings. No problems as far as I can tell - my random non-scientific checks on the CPU showed it also in the low-mid 60s, laptop lid closed. Overwatch isn't the most demanding CPU game, but it's a popular game at least. This is with a 1080ti in an akitio node.

I was going to do a battery test today but I forgot to turn off hibernate, and it hibernated x.x So good news, it can last at least one hour while playing a twitch video full screen at 50% brightness and 20% volume.

 

Thanks a lot for the info. Looks like the cooling system is able to handle the components. Agree with @hmscott - does not look like it needs repasting.

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So I can't figure out how to remove the bottom panel to add a SSD and upgrade the RAM. Anyone been able to do it?

 

Figured it out. It's held on with plastic clips as well as screws, so use a plastic card to gently release the clips.

Note, unlike earlier versions, there is no center screw.

Comes with 1x16gb ram stick.

It does indeed have an extra m.2 pcie slot. The m.2 drive it comes with is a lite-on 256gb sata drive. I benched it around 500mb/s read and 400 mb/s write if I recall correctly.

 

Anyone here tried just using the 1050ti in the laptop? If so, how are the temperatures?/Fan noise.

 

Random thoughts on cooling. The large center vent on the bottom isn't a fan vent, it's actually a passively cooled area that allows regular airflow (or a laptop cooling pad) to cool the RAM and the heat pipes directly over the CPU and GPU, which then can be exhausted in the same direction as the fans exhaust (up if the screen is open, down/back if the screen is closed). This probably means a laptop cooling pad will make a big difference in temperatures.

Also, my tests were all done with an external GPU plugged in, and as the CPU and GPU both share heat pipes and fans, a stress test with the built-in 1050ti and the cpu will probably produce much higher temps than cpu + egpu. I'll test that later I think.

 

Would be very interested to see these results. Would you recommend buying this laptop? Any quirks with it?

 

I just swapped the sata lite-on m.2 drive for a 960 pro and I'm in the process of reinstalling all the things. So far, no problems. Most of the drivers were automatically installed when windows was installed. IIRC, I only had to manually install the thunderbolt and touchpad drivers, plus the gigabyte utilities like the macrohub and smartmanager.

The reasons I'm keeping this:
2x m.2 2280 slots that support both PCIe (with NVMe) and SATA SSDs
2x RAM slots, comes populated with 1x16GB stick (Crucial DDR4-2400)
Full-sized SD card reader
Full-speed 4x PCIe 3.0 thunderbolt 3 port
1440p screen (excellent compromise between the ridiculousness of a 4k 14" and the low-ish res of a 1080p panel, plus my external monitor is also 1440p, which means I don't have to constantly re-arrange my desktop... it's the small things in life right?)
Quiet
Second-best laptop CPU... the 7820 HK is better
Lightweight
B+ build quality
No keyboard issues encountered so far
94 Wh battery (99.99 Wh is the legal limit for air travel in the USA, so it's basically 94% of the biggest capacity it can be)
Both the main and alternate text of keys are illuminated by the backlight
No cooling issues, nor any issues at all, running it with an eGPU
1050ti is an excellent mix of usable performance and battery life, especially knowing that I have a much better eGPU at home

Small issues so far, if I had to make some up:
Why did it come with a SATA m.2 SSD?!
SD cards aren't fully inserted, they stick about half-way out, which means you can't travel with an SD card always inserted
Would've rather had no macro keys and replace the bottom speakers with top-firing speakers like Razer/Apple
The "chin" area below the LCD panel is a bit large, and the bezels are relatively thick compared with the Aero15 and XPS 13/15
No touchscreen
It's not fully made of premium build materials like aluminum, magnesium alloys, or carbon-fiber
According to Dave3D, Windows precision drivers are much better than the Elan drivers that the Aero14 (and other laptops) use... but I don't notice a difference
The trackpad doesn't feel quite as good as a Macbook's, nor is it as large
Comes with Windows 10 Home instead of Pro
Keyboard isn't mechanical and RGB

 

Is there any backlight bleed?

Also, any coil whine or loud fans?

 

There's a tiny bit of backlight bleed, only noticeable if you have a black screen with a fairly dark environment and medium-high brightness.

It's along the bottom edge. I didn't notice it was even there until I looked for it specifically.

No coil whine I've seen so far. Fans are controllable, but basically inaudible in normal usage.

 

IMO this would be the perfect 14-incher if it inherited it's bigger brother's thin bezels. 1050ti, TB3 for eGPU, in a "13-inch footprint" sounds like a dream come true to me.

 

I agree. It'd be perfect with an all-aluminum build, thin bezels, and a touchscreen. As it stands though, I think it's very close to perfect.

 

I mean, they are just recycling the chassis from the Aero 14 they originally launched.

 

Yeah, so much so that they forgot to put the thunderbolt logo on the USB-C port!

 

Yes and that was the expected behavior. But with downgrading to the 1050ti, there is more thermal headroom on the cooling solution. Presumably they could shrink those bezels even if it impacted their cooling solution, though it would probably make more sense at that point for them to market it as a laptop for "Professionals" the way they do the Aero 15, and give it a whole new moniker rather than muddying it in the existing Aero 14 branding.

 

I think they just wanted a replacement for the original set of Aero 14s that came with either a gtx970m or 965m, hence this generation's 1060/1050Ti.

 

Do we know when the Newegg exclusive is over and the re-sellers will be able to carry the laptop?

 

@Tanner@XoticPC
Do you have infos?

 

I'm guessing it will be a while, haven't heard anything on this end yet about if/when so far.

 

Just in case anyone wanted $50 off the already steepish price Newegg Flash is running a promo that brings this down to $1499.99 here.

 

Random note, if you disable the 1050ti in Device Manager, you get significantly worse battery life.

 

All the newer video cards seem to throttle very efficiently on battery, but I didn't even think to test this.

 

Yeah it seems like if you disable it in device manager, the 1050ti runs on full power without any throttling, but the Intel 630 still does all the work. The bottom back of the laptop was really hot after 45 min of Netflix with the 1050ti disabled.

With it enabled, it seems like the drivers can put it into a low power state.


Which is kind of annoying, because you can't use EVGA precision X with both a 1050ti and external 1080ti, it crashed on start up. And having the 630 and external 1080ti enabled causes stuttering in windows. So when I plug in to the egpu, I have to disable both in device manager, but then enable both for better battery life.

 

Weird that it's set up that way. Might have something to do with how the machine handles graphics switching in the first place, might have to warn people looking for eGPU support off.

 

It's a minor annoyance at worse. Besides the evga precision X problem (haven't tried msi afterburner), just disabling the Intel 630 in device manager makes this work wonderfully well with an egpu.

But overall I've noticed some oddities with the graphics switching. Maybe the latest Nvidia update fixed it, it fixed a problem I was having with overwatch not detecting my 1050ti, so maybe it'll fix other things too.

 

What sort of temperatures are you seeing on CPU+GPU load (intensive gaming)? Thanks.

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70-72c in Hawaii without air conditioning.

 

Which game and what settings, if I might inquire?

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Overwatch on high, 2560x1440p.

 

Ah ok, thanks.

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Everyone will be happy to know that the Aero 14, plays fine with the Mantiz Venus E-GPU box and the Zotac 1080 Ti Mini. Used it with the Dell AW3418DW with Gsync for about 4 hours last night. Only minor issue I ran into was on the game side of things having a hard time recognizing the designated GPU to use. Other games that work natively included BF4, Fortknite, Nazi Zombie Army.

So if anyone is looking to use this device like I was then you should be good to go .

 

Can you please post some 3dMark numbers so that we can compare them to what that card scores on the desktop?

BTW, I'm curious why do people go for the Aero 14 instead of the 15? The 14 would make much more sense if it too had slim bezels like the 15 does (so then it would be basically the width of a classic 13" laptop).

But, with its thick bezels, it's only 2cm less wide than the 15 and it has the *same* depth and it's even slightly (1 mm) thicker than the 15. And the weight difference is only 200 grams.

IMHO, they should have made it smaller to distinguish it from the Aero 15, not make its GPU performance 50% weaker by replacing the 1060 with 1050Ti. With thin bezels and TB3, that would have been something.

 

Just ordered one, should be here next week. As soon as I get it I'm going to wipe+reinstall Windows 10, undervolt the CPU, and maybe see if I can undervolt the GPU. If there are any tests/benchmarks, games, etc that somebody wants me to try, I'd be glad to do so and report back here.

Form factor, additional battery life, higher resolution display, lighter, lower price. Also, the keyboard issue (see below.) Yes, a firmware update was released to address the keyboard issues on the Aero 15, however, while it did fix some of it, the issues are still there, and apparently it's created new issues. For some people, that may not matter, but I'm not dropping $2000 on a device with malfunctioning hardware.

 

I hear you, except regarding the form factor which is pretty much the same and the lower price is kind of expected due to a weaker GPU (1050Ti).

Regarding the keyboard issues, I agree it's unacceptable, but there's also the updated Aero 15 (X) now where I'd expect the keyboard issue to be fixed?

 

AFAIK the Aero 15x doesn't have the issue.

 

Alright, so mine arrived today. It comes with a LOT of preinstalled bloatware and popup crap, but that doesn't matter because I swiftly wiped it and installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 fall creators update, along with all the latest drivers.

I'm having some trouble getting used to the keyboard. There's no numpad, and it feels a bit awkward at first because of the row of macro keys to the left of it. I really don't think this thing needed macro keys. Also, is anybody else's left CTRL key a bit "sticky", moreso than the other keys?

The screen is beautiful but the high resolution and upscaling settings in Win10 are kinda funky and some programs seem to not support it properly, resulting in them not upscaling and showing up very tiny on the screen.

Anyway, I undervolted the CPU to -130mV with Intel XTU, and also undervolted the GPU with MSI Afterburner. After that was all said and done, I set the power mode to max performance, and ran Cinebench:



CPU temp never exceeded 69C while benchmarking.

I also ran Geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4584563

EDIT: Additionally, one of the things I'm now noticing is that due to the relatively small screen size, you can run games in low resolutions and they'll still look nearly as good as they do in native res. 1366x768 looks almost the same to my eyes as the display's native 2560x1440, minus the jaggies.

 

Had the CPU been repasted for that result, or was it just undervolted? Thanks in advance.

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It was just undervolted.

 

That is great thermal performance. Enjoy your new laptop!

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Definitely agree with this. They just seem out of place.

 

Hi All,

Just wanted to ask to confirm. Was someone able to verify that the Thunderbolt 3 port is full speed?

I do see the tests 2 users did with 1080Ti eGPUs and the FPS/quality achieved look good. But I just wanted to double check if it was confirmed that this is allowing the maximum throughput supported by the standard, for future proofing.

Thanks,
Peter

 

I just ordered one of these for my son to go along with his Presonus Quantum audio recording rig, which uses a TB2 connection. I did a more than fair amount of research on laptops with a TB3 port prior to pulling the trigger. All of the reviews for this laptop tout far more positives than negatives, and compared to other laptops in this price range it seemed like a no-brainer. This laptop appears to be future-proof to a larger degree than most, given it has two M.2 slots and the TB3 port (which by all accounts is full speed - for instance, see a review on "NovaOva"). I almost feel sorry for those who opted for 1060 models w/o TB3. Granted, they won't have to lug an external box w/card to get better graphics performance than the 1050Ti...but then again, they don't have the upgrade path, albeit external, that this laptop affords.