Gigabyte Aero 14 Review - ComputerShopper.com

Introduction, Design, & Features

Interested in a 14-inch laptop? That shows your good business sense. Though the size is more popular overseas than in the U.S., 14-inch models like the Lenovo Yoga 910 or Dell Latitude 14 5000 pack powerful productivity into packages that fit nicely between 13.3-inch compacts and 15.6-inch desktop replacements ((sound of record scratch))

Yeah, well, the Latitude and Yoga can't do this:

If you want after-hours entertainment like this—enjoying demanding games at full resolution and their best image-quality settings, well north of the 30 frames per second threshold for smooth gameplay—you need a serious gaming laptop. Fourteen-inch gaming rigs are relatively scarce compared to their 17.3- and 15.6-inch cousins, but considerably easier to carry—and in the case of the Gigabyte Aero 14, virtually free of compromises.

Available in orange and lime green as well as the basic black of our review unit, the Aero costs $1,749 at Newegg and Amazon. That gets you cutting-edge tech from both Intel—a seventh-generation "Kaby Lake" Core i7-7700HQ quad-core processor—and Nvidia—a "Pascal" GeForce GTX 1060 graphics accelerator with 6GB of display memory. Sixteen gigabytes of DDR4 system memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a 2,560x1,440-pixel IPS screen complete the picture.

With the same CPU and GPU, the Gigabyte competes with perhaps the best-known 14-inch gamer, the Razer Blade. Its ordinary backlit keyboard lacks the Razer's individually backlit multicolor keys, but it's $350 less than a Blade with a lower-resolution 1,920x1,080 display. If you want more pixels from Razer, you're looking at $2,399 for a system with a 3,840x2,160 touch screen. The Aero 14 doesn't offer touch, but its quad HD resolution is arguably better suited to the GeForce 1060's limits than the Razer's optional 4K, which is more the domain of a GTX 1070 or 1080.

Gaming chops, check. Good value, check. What else does the Gigabyte bring to the table?

Design

The orange and green versions may not fit with corporate office décor, but the black Aero 14 is handsome enough to blend in at work as well as play. Its aluminum case features a chrome Gigabyte logo front and center, above an orange chevron stripe that borders a faux carbon fiber patterned area.

The system feels substantial, heftier than we expected—at 4.19 pounds, it's a few ounces above Computer Shopper's definition of a light laptop. It's solidly built, with no flex in the keyboard tray and only a little when grasping the screen corners. It's not petite at 13.2 by 9.8 by 0.78 inches, but fits readily into a briefcase, helped by its lighter- and slimmer-than-average AC adapter, which has its own USB port for charging handheld gadgets.

Lift the lid, and you'll see another big Gigabyte label centered beneath the screen, which is surrounded by good-sized bezels and tilts back a full 180 degrees. There's a fairly bright but grainy Webcam mounted above the display, and a sizable touch pad built into the palm rest, which, like the lid, can pick up a sheen from the oils on your hands. The power button is centered above the keyboard.

The Aero has a good array of ports. On its left edge, you'll find HDMI and USB 3.0 ports, an audio jack, and an SD card slot, as well as a security lock slot.

Two more USB 3.0 ports are on the right side, accompanied by a USB 3.1 Type-C (not Thunderbolt) port, a mini DisplayPort output, and the AC adapter jack.

There's no wired Ethernet port to accompany the Intel dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, but our test unit came with a USB-to-Ethernet dongle in the box.

Features

The keyboard offers three backlight settings (low, high, and off), cycled through by pressing the Fn key and space bar. As on Gigabyte's Aorus series of gaming laptops, there's a column of five macro keys down the left side of the keyboard that work with an unintuitive software utility to let you save and switch among keyboard shortcuts.

The Fn key works with the top-row F1 through F12 keys for system functions such as controlling volume and screen brightness. A Num Lock key (Fn+Ins) triggers something we haven't seen in a while, a diagonal makeshift numeric keypad embedded in the keyboard.

Though the keyboard has both inverted-T cursor arrows and dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys, which we like, we fumbled a few times when typing colons and quotation marks because the right Shift key isn't lined up under the Enter key as we're used to. A shallow but crisp typing feel helped us get up to speed quickly.

Maybe we're still partly deaf from testing the Dell XPS 27, but we were disappointed in the Aero 14's audio. It sounds pretty good—accurate and clean, not overly fuzzy or distorted—but even at 100 percent volume is surprisingly soft, especially since it's competing with very noticeable fan noise during gaming or other strenuous operations. Headphones are recommended, as is leaving the machine on a desk instead of your lap—its underside grew steamy during our Steam gaming sessions.

By contrast, we have nothing bad to say about the Gigabyte's screen. Its 2,560x1,440 resolution is a good fit for its 14-inch size—although we thought Windows 10's default 200 percent scaling made icons too big and dialed it down to 150 percent—and it's so bright that we spent a day working at half brightness without complaining. Colors, contrast, and viewing angles are all impressive.

Gigabyte preloads the Aero with an assortment of system utilities, including one of the best and quickest emergency system restore apps we've tried; CyberLink PowerDVD (always a puzzler in a system without an optical drive); trials of XSplit's game broadcasting programs; and the usual penny-ante games like Candy Crush Soda Saga and Royal Revolt 2.

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