Gaming laptops aren't a new phenomenon, but manufacturers keep finding new ways to make them somewhat annoying. It's remarkable how much time and energy is spent making the situation worse. In the case of the Gigabyte Aorus 16X, this rule is applied to the keyboard: specifically the QWERASD keys. In the version sent to us for review, they are clear with white lettering on them, while the rest of the keyboard is black with a backlit keycap. This means that the backlight (the usual pulsating RGB rainbow) makes the letterforms at the top much harder to see.
This may not be a big deal, since typists and those who play games with the keys rely on muscle memory to find the key. But if you ever look down to see what key you're about to press, the letter can be hard to see. Conversely, if you turn off the backlight, it will become clearer. Backlit WASD keys aren't a new idea, but their implementation here is clearly questionable.
Elsewhere you'll find the kind of laptop that's great for gaming. With a 14th generation i7 CPU and an RTX 4070 GPU, it's well equipped for high detail levels and frame rates at the native 2560 x 1600 resolution of the 165 Hz screen. It's bright too, with my colorimeter showing the supposedly 400-nit screen displaying 573 of the itchy brightness units at its peak.
There's a quintessential gaming laptop design in the 'Team up, fight on' slogan printed right under where your hand rests while typing, the abundance of vents and the way it illuminates the Aorus wordmark on your desktop from the back of your desktop. the chassis in the same way that some cars project their manufacturer's logo onto the ground. It's kind of fun, but at the same time something that immediately turns you off.
Aorus 16X Specifications
CPU: Intel Core i7-14650HX
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 (140W)
RAM: 32GB
Storage: 1TB SSD
Screen: 16 inches 2560 x 1600 IPS, 165 Hz
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, 1x USB4/Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x micro SD, 1x Ethernet, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x headphones, 1x DC in
Dimensions: 35.6 x 25.4 x 2.7 cm
Weight: 2.3kg
Price: $1,649 | £2,097
Further keyboard issues stem from Gigabyte's decision to place the Home row keys (End, PgDn, etc.) to the right of Enter, meaning you'll be clipping them frequently when trying to confirm things until you get used to the layout. The Enter key itself is half-height to make room for a huge slash, which can be useful if you use the terminal a lot. It's a ten-keyless design, and the keys are otherwise a nice size and have good movability (including the arrow keys) and include Microsoft's fancy new Copilot key for chatbot fans. However, they are quite resistant to press and must have a low point to be registered. The trackpad, which covers a wide area of the chassis front and centre, is much better, more responsive, smoother and unencumbered by the line pattern painted over it.
The laptop also comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which is really nice to have in these days of 150GB games as 500GB drives are starting to feel plain. narrow. Both can also be upgraded by the user. The IPS screen is surrounded by a thin bezel with a thicker top bezel that houses the Windows Hello-compatible webcam. It's a pretty standard setup, as are the ports spread around the sides - you get a full-size HDMI 2.1 for all those clever VRR tricks on an external display, and USB3.2 Gen2 in both Type-A and Type -C guises. There's a single USB4/Thunderbolt port that you can also use for charging, although there's no symbol next to it indicating this, plus Ethernet, a headset jack and a microSD card slot. It's well equipped and comes with Wi-Fi 7 on board, so you can get the best speeds from the latest routers.
The included power adapter shows another curious design: it plugs into the side of the laptop but doesn't have an L-shaped connector, so it sticks out straight to the left rather than running neatly to the back of your desk. However, the 99Wh battery will give you about six hours of use, which is good for a gaming laptop, but will drop significantly if you hard-drive the GPU all the time.
Our tests show that the laptop achieves decent frame rates for games like Cyberpunk 2077 with Ultra ray tracing at 1440p. Gigabyte's RTX 4070 runs at a slightly higher wattage than the one in the recently reviewed Lenovo Legion 7 16 PC Gamer, and in some benchmarks it beats that machine despite it having an Intel Core i9 processor. However, that CPU's influence shows up in other tests, where the Gigabyte model lags behind, but never far.
Does that i7 make a big difference compared to the i9 equipped machines? Not so much, where it counts. If you look at the Cinebench R23 results, which render the same scene using a single CPU core and then use them all again, the i7-14650HX in the Aorus 16X manages 117 points less than the i9-14900HX in the £3,600 costing Razer Blade 16 in single-core mode. Like a 5.2GHz i7 versus a 5.8GHz i9 you would expect a difference, but it's not huge.
The huge difference comes when you open all the cores, and it becomes 16 on the i7 versus 24 on the i9 - the gap between them is greater than 6,000 points. But you have to remember that you pay a lot less for the i7 Gigabyte machine than you do for the i9 Razer, although there is also an i9 version of this Aorus.
There's AI in the 16X too, more than just pressing the Copilot key to generate an image of a sexy motherboard. Gigabyte is so excited about it that there's an AI logo on a sticker on the front of the machine, next to the screen stats and the Wi-Fi 7 logo. In practice, the effect of this is twofold. There's an AI Nexus in the Gigabyte Control Center app, and you can have it monitor your usage in AI Auto Gear mode, switching between the Nvidia and integrated GPUs as needed in exactly the same way laptops have been doing for years , only now with AI. There's also an AI Generator tab, which opens a frontend to the Stable Diffusion image generator, and Wahey! It's sexy motherboard time again.
Laptops like this have had their thunder stolen en masse by Microsoft with the Copilot+ announcement, and the accompanying laptops all run on Snapdragon chips. Being a Raptor Lake Refresh chip, the CPU doesn't have the NPU woes of a Meteor Lake Core Ultra, and it remains unclear which of the Copilot+ features will run on it once they're released.