Gigabyte Aorus 16X review: this laptop is not just for gaming

The Gigabyte Aorus 16X is a powerful, though large and heavy, gaming laptop that, with its bright 16-inch screen, Thunderbolt connection and full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, is exactly the sort of thing that will appeal to creative users too. While it may have been designed with gaming in mind - something signified by the rainbow trapped behind the keyboard and the screen’s 165Hz maximum refresh rate - the powerful components and fast SSD means it acquits itself well when asked to edit video or flip through large InDesign documents too.

Gigabyte Aorus 16X: Key specifications

Design and build

There are a couple of curious design choices that the Aorus 16X has to live with. One sticks straight out from the left-hand side of the chassis, and is used to charge the battery. Laptops with power connectors on their side tend to come with L-shaped connectors so that the cable runs neatly toward the back of the machine, but the straight plug supplied with the 16X likes to spread itself across your desk. There are also some transparent keys on the keyboard, something not uncommon in the WASD keys of gaming machines, but here it’s spread to some neighbouring letters too, and thanks to the way they’ve been constructed - with white letterforms on top - they can be hard to read if you’re relying on your eyes instead of muscle memory to find where they are.

Moving on, there's a bit of typical gaming laptop bombast in the ‘Team up, fight on’ slogan imprinted on the corner of the casing, where your wrist lands when you’re typing, and the surroundings of which extend onto the touchpad (to no obvious effect). It’s generally a restrained look, however, and won’t look out of place on a desk. The build quality is generally excellent, as befits something with this kind of heft, and while you’ll certainly be able to feel that it’s in your bag, you shouldn’t need to worry about it getting bashed.

Features

AI is the current buzzword in the computer industry, and it’s here in the Aorus. There's Microsoft’s new Copilot key on the keyboard, ready to summon the chatbot sidebar in Windows so that it can underwhelm you with its knowledge, and there's an AI monitoring application built into the Gigabyte Control Centre app that will switch between the Nvidia and integrated graphics processors depending on the laptop’s usage. It’s not really any different to the way laptops have switched GPUs for years, trying to eke out more battery life when it’s not being asked to push polygons, but it allows Gigabyte to stick an ‘AI’ label on the front of the laptop. There's also an AI Generator in the Control Centre, which functions as a frontend for Stable Diffusion. It has all the drawbacks, both moral and aesthetic, of AI image generation, but may come in useful for developing early concept art.

The Aorus 16X’s non-software features extend to some fast ports, including a full-size HDMI 2.1 connector that will delight anyone who wants to output VRR or HDR to an external monitor, and a single USB4/Thunderbolt 4 that will allow the laptop to connect to fast external storage, though it can also be used to charge the machine. You get a microSD card slot if you need to expand the storage or pop in a card from your phone, and there's an Ethernet socket, but also Wi-Fi 7 that can produce a screamingly fast and stable wireless connection when hooked up to the right kind of router.

Benchmark scoring

Performance

You’d expect some decent performance out of a laptop packing a 14th-gen Core i7 and a GeForce RTX 4070 graphics chip. These are backed by 32GB of DDR5 RAM, so paging to the 1TB SSD is less likely. Large documents, therefore, pose little problem to the 16X, and it’s hard to trip up in general use. While there are i9-equipped laptops out there, and indeed a version of the Aorus with Intel’s top chip is circulating, this i7 has 16 cores for a total of 24 simultaneous threads, and its ability to display a framerate of around 30fps in Cyberpunk 2077, with the game’s GPU-crushing ray-tracing enabled, speaks of the power of that Nvidia chip.

The CPU does very poorly in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 tests, scoring lower than the 13th-generation chip in the Lenovo LOQ 15, which makes us wonder if there's an update needed to the benchmark or whether something is happening to nerf its performance in these tests - its results in the PC Mark 10 tests, which simulate an office environment, put the Gigabyte slightly above the Lenovo, right where you’d expect it to be, which adds support to that hypothesis. The Cinebench R23 benchmarks are more like it, with the 16X coming posting roughly similar scores to the MacBook Air’s M3 chip. It gets hotter than the Mac though, and its cooling fans can be noticeable when it’s under load.

Interestingly, under our stringent testing conditions in the dank basement of Creative Bloq Towers, the 16X’s screen managed to put out 573 nits of brightness despite only being rated for 400. This, alongside its 99% sRGB coverage (plus 76% of both Adobe RGB and P3), makes it a bright and colourful performer that will have its uses in creative pursuits as well as in games. Photographers and video editors might like to use an external screen for even better colour response, but for a portable IPS it’s really not bad.

Battery life is tricky to gauge, as it wouldn’t play ball with our standard battery test. In use, however, the large 99Wh cell inside the 16X provides surprisingly good endurance for a gaming machine. Part of this can be attributed to the intelligent way it switches between GPUs, saving the power-hungry Nvidia chip for when it’s really needed, and partly to the sheer size of the battery itself. It managed nearly seven hours of use in web browsing, video, and office tasks, though this will drop once you start taxing it.

Price

At approaching £2,000/$1,700, this isn’t a budget laptop, but the performance is there even if the latest benchmark tests can’t see it. It’s large, heavy, and makes a bit of a noise when its fan is going at full blast, but gaming laptops like this have so many uses beyond first-person shooters and Baldur’s Gate 3. There are, however, a lot of machines competing for attention in this price bracket, and new ARM-based portables from all major manufacturers are just over the horizon which may blow Intel machines like this out of the water. If you’re looking to spend this much money right now, in the middle of 2024, then it might be advisable to wait and see what happens.

Who's it for?

Creatives and gamers will find a lot to like about this laptop. It has plenty of pixel-pushing power, and has the connectivity to hook up to large external displays and fast storage, even over a network. The big, bright screen (for a laptop) is extremely nice to work on, and the battery life is good for a machine in this class, so as a laptop you can take out and do actual work on, instead of having to nurse it between charging sessions, it wins out over many other gaming machines.

Buy it if

• You fancy a bit of Helldivers 2 after work
• You want a portable with a big screen
• You like a hefty laptop

Don't buy it if

• You want an ultralight laptop
• You need extreme battery life
• You can’t stand light-up keyboards

Also consider

MacBook Air M3

Hard not to like, this Mac offers a good price/performance/portability balance. View Deal

Lenovo LOQ 15

This entry-level gaming laptop undercuts the Aorus on price, but lags behind in terms of performance too. View Deal

MSI Vector 16 HX

This 16-incher from MSI is worth a look if the big, brash gaming look is for you. View Deal