NEW Aero 14 w/ GTX1060

No problem!
Maybe you can listen to audio through the headphone jack with and without the core and see if there is any "noise" without it vs with it.

 

Good idea! I've been playing Rocket League with headphones and haven't noticed anything; I'll try some music as well.

 

Damn these fans squealing sound is pretty irritating, even the wife is complaining about how loud and specifically high pitched and annoying it is.. during gaming specifically.

 

It does get super loud while playing an intensive game but I like that you can play less intensive ones on quiet mode for little or no sound at all. Which means it can behave like a laptop with a 960m effectively when needed, or a beast otherwise. All the other laptops with this card don't seem to be able to do that as convincingly so I'm overall happy with it. I haven't tried the razer but I am sure your wife would complain about that too even if the fans are slightly less high pitched!

 

From a quick search online.

The ferrite core close to the laptop end of the cord is there to prevent electrical noise within the laptop from being radiated by the cord (which works as an excellent antenna). This noise is generated by both the switching battery charge regulator/internal power supply and all of the other high frequency digital components in the laptop. While such radiation might not interfere with nearby data cables (though it might), it does tend to get regulatory bodies concerned (FCC, etc.) From my experience, ferrite cores are generally used more to meet regulatory requirements than to maintain actual device functionality.

 

to add why they are always at the end (from a search also) ;

They broadcast the signals quite efficiently. The signals they broadcast can interfere with radios and TVs. The cables can also receive signals and transmit them into the case, where they cause problems. A ferrite bead has the property of eliminating the broadcast signals. Essentially, it "chokes" the RFI transmission at that point on the cable -- this is why you find the beads at the ends of the cables. Instead of traveling down the cable and transmitting, the RFI signals turn into heat in the bead.

be interesting to know if you notice anything at all by removing it?

 

Hadn't noticed anything from removing it yet.

 

Well it's really just the high pitched noise that we don't like, the typical 'whoosh' sound of air moving is fine.. even the volume of that is not a big concern. I don't really expect quiet fans on any thin gaming laptop, at least not during gaming, but yeah the squeal in particular is annoying and audible even at lower fan RPM's. Fortunately unless I'm gaming I can enable 'quiet mode' for the fan settings and they typically don't run. I tried gaming mode with quiet mode and at least Rocket League started dropping frames pretty heavily as there must have been throttling going on right away. I imagine maybe other games like LoL I might be able to play on quiet mode..

 

ah i see. i can play dota 2 without issues in quiet mode, agreed it does throttle but its ok for less demanding games or lower graphic settings. not sure what other fans sound like so cant compare all i know is razer seems to be loud and never stop

 

Yeah.. at least for example right now on 'quiet mode' I can have other steam games installing and don't have to listen to the fans, lol. I have quite a few laptops, and have tested quite a few others, so we're pretty familiar with loud fans. Ah well other than that it's a pretty solid little machine so I guess we'll try to learn to live with that unfortunate aspect.

 

I did a video showing the fan noise on a P35XV6. Take a look if you want: At what temp does it start to throttle? My P35XV6 maxed out at 90C on both CPU and GPU and I have not notice any throttling.

 

Throttling wont start on the cpu until about 95c

 

OK, I read further back and they're talking about playing games while forcing the fan to run in quiet mode.

 

So I got my New Aero 14 yesterday, and so far I love it. Only 1 gripe is I have been unable to get the SmartManager to load post wiping the system. Does anyone have any experience with this? I always like to do a fresh windows install and do the minimum packages on top of it. But for some reason when I did this it wont open, it looks like it tries to open for a min or so and kinda freaks out the system while it is doing so.

I will be writing up a more detailed review tomorrow, but so far this thing is awesome.

 

I am the same very pleased with mine also, dont know if i got super lucky or just my ears are shot but my fans are acceptable on my model.

obviously when gaming they ramp up but no worse than my AW15 to be honest my msi gs63vr was worse, so in that respect i am more than pleased.

not sure regards the smart manager i have also done a full re install on my aero and i have the smart manager working andi think its great btw.

did you install all the main stuff first like the chipset and all the intel management stuff?

i have an issue where smart update wont update it will see if a driver is out of date but when i click on it, it just say no network and closes, not a biggie as i just get from http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=6135#dl

another issue with mine is the elan driver install pops up every re start, i just close it and carry on.

 

Is anyone else still able to get 10h showing on the battery life estimate? I swear when I first fired up the machine, BatteryInfoView would show that the machine was only using around 8-9w, which meant 10 hrs, but now even at idle I can't seem to go below 15w, maybe 13w if I turn the brightness all the way to the bottom and disable the keyboard backlight which means just above 6 hrs. Mostly all I've installed are steam and battle.net, and a few other applications like sublime text, and even when none of those are running (and even with Chrome closed), and bluetooth disabled (wifi still on) I still can't seem to get back to my original battery life. Anyone else notice this? I might do a clean reinstall..

Hmm, it almost feels like the graphics card isn't turning off (or rather switching to intel) anymore. I think because of this emptyproject11.exe that is running all the time. Maybe I can just disable that..

Edit: Ok yeah that did it. Hm I wonder what changed to make this emptyproject always use the GPU; I swear it wasn't like that when I first started using the machine.. weird.

 

Interesting this , I also wondered what exactly emptyproject11 was doing, maybe trying to disable the 1060 in device manager when max battery life is needed would make a difference? have you tried that yet?

 

Empty project 11 definitely keeps the OS using the nvidia graphics. If you kill it (mine ends up hogging 30+ % cpu from time to time) you will notice weird hangs in Windows 10 when you click on things like the battery icon, and occasionally the start menu. Even when plugged in.

 

It looks like it's just keeping the Nvidia GPU on for some reason. I wonder if this is to counteract some claims I had seen when researching stuttering which said it was related to Optimus switching unnecessarily during Windows desktop (non gaming) use. Just keeping the GPU on at all times doesn't feel like a great solution. Literally just opening task manager and going "end task" on the emptyproject.exe made it go away and instantly dropped the battery usage back down to 7-8w (with backlight turned down still etc)

 

so when you guy's are ending the e....11.exe does it stay off ? or have you noticed it start up again?

 

It seems no stay off until reboot, or manual relaunch

 

I do remember mine was throwing an error dialog on boot up saying it couldn't load a dll for sound or something so I had to go into the registry and remove the entry than was trying to do it.

 

Hm I just rebooted after trying to update SmartManager to see if it would make a difference, and shut off emptyprocess11.exe and yet I'm still back to 15w usage, even with the GPU Activity Icon showing that there are no other processes using the GPU. Annoying. What's your guys' battery life looking like?

 

It's probably only 10 hours on silent with screen dim and keyboard backlight off

 

Yeah I don't really know what's going on but I had rebooted, w/ no apps running other than BatteryInfoView, and screen dim and keyboard backlight off, BT/wifi off, and I was still getting 12-13w usage. Then I disabled the GTX 1060 in Device Manager, and it actually shot up to 17-18w. Then I re-enabled it and was able to turn my brightness back to 40%, keyboard backlight on, and wifi back on and Chrome open to this site and I'm hovering between 8.5-9.5w. It's almost as if the GPU needs to be turned on first to allow it to turn off properly? At this point even cranking the brightness up to 100% only has me around 10.5-11.5w usage. So.. I don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I ended up renaming the emptyproject11.exe so that it won't auto start on bootup.

Edit: At least the Aero charges nice and quick, 47.9w means probably almost full from dead in 2 hrs while using it. Of course the charge will slow down once it's filling up but still, pretty quick.

 

10 hours is really fantastic for a laptop that's this small with a 1060 in it. Have you guys done any test on multimedia viewing? How long do you think you could watch 1080p content for (say, binge watching a TV show on an international flight)?

I'm really torn between this laptop and the Blade. Since the Aero is not available in my country, factoring in international shipping and warranty, it actually comes out to the same price as the Blade. I *can* actually get the Blade in my country which should, in theory, make the warranty process easier.

But, you know... Razer. Definition of don't count your eggs.

Edit: My original choice was the Aorus X3 V6 but HID stopped carrying them so... I hate the idea of buying into a company like Razer, but also am not really enthusiastic about spending closer to 2k on the Aero.

 

I'd go with this machine over the razer at the same price. The battery is about 30% larger, has way less fan noise at idle, and performs like it should without needing to use throttlestop.

But then again I've never seen a blade in person, maybe the build quality makes the aero look budget or something.

 

It's not so much the build quality, it's the idea of paying heaps for shipping, and having to ship international should a problem occur within warranty. Those costs ad up quick.

But it's not like Razer's warranty is any better, if anything came up I'd bet money they'd "fix" my issue and when I got the laptop back 2 months later the issue still persists!

 

It's a tough call, I'm not sure what my warranty situation would be in Canada. But I'm a short distance from the US border if I needed to ship anything back.

 

I paid almost the same for my aero as a 256gb Fhd blade admitted the aero still has 512 ssd but even if they were the same I'd still take aero all day long. No question, I started watching a movie off the drive with battery saving settings and was 8hours left with 78% battery, not sure if that was accurate but it was pulling about 10w at the time.

I Will do a proper test on and off wifi watching video and see how long it lasts

 

Thanks battery life will definitely be a big consideration for me and I love the huge battery on the Aero. It just makes my work day much much simpler as I move around a lot.

 

Lots of great discussion going on here. I've had my Aero 14 for a few days and I'm going to have some things to contribute but first I have to ask if anyone else has had random hard lock ups. Mine has done it about 7 times now. The screen goes black but the backlight and keyboard backlight stay on. It doesn't respond to any input and can only be reset by holding down the power button long enough to force it to shut off. The box it came it had a moderate dent in the corner the Aero was packed in so I'm beginning to think something got jacked up inside during shipping. It locked twice during initial Windows setup and every other time has just been during random light use. I've been able to confirm it's not heat or CPU/GPU load related and a memtest86 scan uncovered no problems. Not looking forward to testing the RMA process.

 

Re: hard lock ups, I did have a few, but I'm going to blame it on a few weird instances re: driver installation as well as undervolting testing. It seems like once I am not doing either of those things then it works fairly well; I haven't had any other crashes under normal usage.

 

So I ended up picking up a laptop cooling pad: http://www.targus.com/ca/targus-hd3-gaming-chill-mat and I gotta say I'm pretty happy! It means I get to run games with the laptop right on my lap and instead of feeling warm on my lap it feels cool! Plus it means I get to basically substitute the 'whine' of the high pitched Aero fans with the 'whoosh' of the white-noise cooler pad fans; the laptop fans don't have to work as hard and the temps end up around the 78-80 mark instead of the fans working so hard just to keep it at 85 degrees. Feels like a pretty big win! Highly recommended if anyone else is looking to game w/ the laptop actually on their lap.

 

Yes mine has done this also only once with a black screen After I left it on all night installing games.

 

I haven't had any lockups thankfully. First thing I did was apply all driver updates it smart update, as well as the bios update. I also made sure that GeForce experience and the drivers there were completely up to date.

You might want to open it and reseat the ram if you keep getting lockups before going the route of an RMA.

 

That's a good idea. Looking at the bottom though and I don't have anything thing other than Phillips and flat head drivers. I assume these are just standard torx screws? Anyone know which size so I make sure to buy the right driver?

It locked up again shortly after I made my last post. Computer wasn't even doing anything. I was just sitting there looking at an article and the screen went black. I'm kind of glad it's been doing it since during initial setup though so I know it's not a result of some change I made.

 

T6 mate

 

Can anyone help me solve this weird problem I am having with my aero 14 1060. Whenever I play games on the laptop itself, I get lower fps than compared to secondary display using display port. I can confirm this because of rise of tomb raider benchmark tool. When I play on the laptop itself, I get 67fps in ultra preset at 1920x1080 60hz and 72fps on monitor using same settings but its at 120hz instead of 60hz. So in other words, am I getting better fps bc it's set at 120hz instead of laptop's 60hz. I also set projection mode to "second screen only" using dp.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Can you force the monitor to 60hz and see? The only thing I can come up with would be around vsync and maybe it's capable of squeezing a few extra frames in at a faster refresh.

 

As I suspected. There's nothing wrong with your scores. That's a strange thing. But hey. At least you know you can get more fps externally on a bigger screen...which is what you want right?
I've no experience using a 120hz screen so no idea if this is common or not.



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Ok I will try this and let you know. v sync is off btw, it's just the refresh rate

 

Those scores don't mean anything for my test because notebookcheck uses a different way to benchmark instead of benchmark test. They use a sequence from the game to determine the average fps. Here's the link for it . I don't want to game on an external monitor bc I already have a desktop pc back in lubbock where I reside since I go to school there. Purpose of this laptop was to game when I go home for breaks.

 

Ok I tried what bruor suggested and I still get better fps in external display. I tried this with watch dogs 2 and can also confirm that I get better fps with external display. For my watch dogs 2 test, I set v sync on set 60hz on laptop and got dips around 53fps in a particular scene in the 1st mission but when I tried it on external display with exact same settings (v sync on 60hz) in the same particular scene, my lowest dip was around 57 fps.

 

It might be a way they do things but it's in line. If you don't want to accept that then you need to find other users using the 1060 and find out what they get. I can't begin to explain why you get better results because your monitor is faster.
I hope you find out why. It be good to gain extra fps.


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Now I'm wondering if scaling on the built in panel is causing it. How about if you disable the Intel graphics device? Maybe there's some something happening between them and external can only be accessed by a single card which removes the issue.

 

I fixed my issue with Smart Manager, and it was all due to "Destroy Windows 10 Spying " that I like to use. Once i wiped and didnt do that step it has been solid. The only last funky issue I am seeing with the hardware side maybe software is the audio will just stop. A redo of the driver / device manager wipe and or restart usually fixes it. So hopefully i can figure out why and get that fixed in software.

 

I have had like 2 random lockup type scenarios. I think it is when it is switching between Intel and Nvida and maybe windows PowerSave Mode. It has been running much better when I changed the primary graphics card to Intel, and then I am white listing applications in the control panel for which to use the 1060. I am also going to experiment with killing the EmptyProject11 exe to see if that give me a little more.

 

Did he reply how he is under volting? I am curious myself.

 

that was me yes i replied

" Just with XTU moving the core offset slider to -0.155 haven't tried any lower yet as temps are perfectly acceptable

People have noted though the lower you can get can actually increase gpu benchmark, because there is less heat dissipation across the heat sink which is directly joined to the gpu so it allows the GPU to boost more"

I seem to have hit my max stable at -0.155mv core offset, so thats me done.

I've copied the shortcut to XTU into the start programs folder so it runs every time i start as well

helps the battery even more