Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA review: One of the best displays on a gaming laptop today

Note: This article was first published on 17 July 2019.

Retina-searing brightness

Slim and light gaming laptops are aplenty today, and there's no lack of choice when it comes to picking a Max-Q gaming notebook. However, most of these notebooks are targeted expressly at gamers. Few are looking to woo content creators, even though they could also benefit from the same powerful hardware that powers gaming notebooks today. 

As a result, that's a niche Gigabyte has been looking to fill with its Aero 15 laptops. The Aero 15 series has long boasted some of the best displays you can find on a gaming laptop, with bright Pantone-calibrated screens and razor-thin bezels. They're also one of the few notebooks that come with a UHS-II card reader, an important feature for photographers and video editors. 

This past Computex, the company overhauled the Aero 15 series once again, updating its design and adding a couple of new high-end display options. The Aero 15 OLED XA now comes with a gorgeous 4K AMOLED display from Samsung, and it's seriously stunning. Gamers will be happy to learn there's a FHD 240Hz option as well (first tested in the previous Aero 15 Classic XA), but my review unit comes with the AMOLED screen. 

Here's an overview of its specifications:

• 15.6-inch 3,840 x 2,160-pixel AMOLED display
• Intel Core i7-9750H processor (2.6GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
• 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q
• Intel 760p 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD
• 94.24Wh battery
• 356 x 250 x 20mm
• 2kg

Like before, Gigabyte is also calling attention to the source of its components, which includes an Intel SSD and Samsung DRAM modules. The networking solution also comprises a Killer Ethernet E2600 controller and Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650, the latter of which supports the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard and speeds up to 2.4Gbps. 

The above configuration will cost you S$3,799, but you're really paying for the premium display and the laptop's slim and light chassis. Read on to find out if it's really worth your money.

A brand new display

One of the biggest changes to come to the latest Aero 15 line-up is the option of an OLED display. To be sure, Gigabyte isn't the first brand to offer an OLED screen on a gaming laptop, and we've seen similar announcements from Razer, Dell, and Alienware. However, the Aero 15 OLED XA is part of a longstanding push on the part of Gigabyte to position the Aero 15 as a laptop for both gamers and content creators.

Having said that, the addition of the OLED display fits in nicely with this approach. The Samsung 4K AMOLED panel that the Aero 15 OLED XA uses boasts 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space and DisplayHDR 400 certification. This means 25 percent more colors than the sRGB color gamut and a peak brightness of 400 nits, which means more vivid images, more accurate color representation, and improved detail in the brightest and darkest areas of a scene. 

Gamers might also appreciate the speedy response time of an OLED panel, which clocks in at just under a millisecond, according to Gigabyte. This should translate into less motion blur, but I don't think the difference is that great when compared to a 144Hz or 240Hz screen. In fact, the higher refresh rates give a much bigger benefit in games since everything just feels silky-smooth and more responsive. In comparison, the 4K OLED display on the Aero 15 OLED XA is capped at 60Hz. It's great if you enjoy reveling in open-world environments with lush graphics, but not so much if you mainly play fast-paced shooters.

Nevertheless, the edge-to-edge OLED display on the Aero 15 OLED XA is simply gorgeous. You'll probably notice the biggest difference when watching Netflix videos, and the carnival lights in the background in Stranger Things 3 just stood out that much more. Colors and details really popped, and I'd really like to rewatch the Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones on the laptop, where the perpetual darkness of the entire episode made it exceedingly difficult to see what was going on.

Finally, you'll definitely appreciate the Aero 15's color accuracy if you work with photos or video. Each Aero 15 panel is Pantone color-calibrated at the factory, and they ship with their own ICC profile. The laptop should be good to go right out of the box for most folks, with no further tweaks necessary.

The Aero 15 OLED XA is also part of NVIDIA's just-announced RTX Studio program. RTX Studio laptops are built specifically for content creation, so Gigabyte hopes that creators will treat this as an added vote of confidence. Some RTX Studio laptops come with a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, but the Aero 15 features an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q, which is the same as most other gaming laptops today, so I can't really say that it has been tuned for performance in creative apps. I'm guessing Gigabyte is banking on the built-in Microsoft Azure AI feature, which is supposed to automatically optimize performance for different workloads. 

An updated design

The Aero 15 OLED XA is also getting a design update. It's not a major overhaul, but there's now a new hinge that lets the display float above the laptop's base. The new hinge is super smooth, but it could maybe use a little more resistance since I found that carrying the notebook around sometimes resulted in the hinge moving as well. 

The design on the lid has also changed slightly. The carbon fiber pattern on the lid has been replaced with what looks like a brushed metal finish, although this has been created using the same nanoimprint lithography process. A notch has also been carved into the pattern, and it sort of looks like an inverse of the previous triangular shape. 

In addition, the Gigabyte logo on the lid has been replaced with a stylized Aero branding that looks more modern. Aside from that however, the new Aero 15 looks pretty similar to its predecessor. The black aluminum body is as solid as ever, and build quality is simply excellent. 

The webcam still sits in the bottom bezel, so there's been no change from the previous generation in terms of awkward camera angles. However, Gigabyte has now added a manual privacy filter in the form of a physical cover, so you don't have to stick tape over your webcam if you're concerned about that sort of thing. 

Somewhere along the way, Gigabyte also made the RGB backlight on its keyboards brighter, and that's something that carries over from the previous generation. The backlighting looks good even under bright overhead lighting, and the Control Center utility offers per-key customizations and a range of presets.

The keyboard doesn't feel markedly different from before. They're surprisingly tactile, and the keyboard spans the entire width of the keyboard. I like how Gigabyte is making the best use of the available space to squeeze in a full-sized keyboard, but this does mean that the layout can feel a little cramped if you have larger hands.

The Windows Precision Touchpad is responsive and accurate, although it'd have been nice if it were a little wider. A fingerprint reader has been squeezed into the upper-left corner as well, so you can log-in using Windows Hello.

The ports and connectors haven't changed much either, although their layout has been rejigged somewhat. You get one Thunderbolt 3, three USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A, one HDMI 2.0, and one USB 3.1 Type-C with DisplayPort 1.4 out. On top of that, there's also an Ethernet jack and a single UHS-II SD card reader. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-A port on the Aero 15 Classic XA has been dropped in favor of a third Gen 1 port, but that's not too big a deal. 

The UHS-II card reader remains a really nice inclusion, so Gigabyte is making sure to check the right boxes when it comes to making a laptop for creatives. The Thunderbolt 3 port will also let you add up to two 4K displays at 60Hz, which is great if you want to make the laptop the center of a multi-monitor workstation. The power connector is located right in the middle though, an awkward position where the right-angled cord will either block the vents or the ports. 

Beefed-up cooling

However, the most important change may be the upgraded cooling solution. It has a direct impact on performance, and it's long been one of my main complaints about the Aero 15 series.

Gigabyte is calling the new thermal solution Supra Cool 2, and it features dual 71-blade fans and a total of five heat pipes. In order to improve airflow and heat dissipation, the number of vents has also been bumped up to 11, comprising large intake vents at the top and bottom and exhaust vents at the back and sides. In comparison, the previous model featured just two heat pipes with no independent cooling for either the CPU or GPU. Furthermore, the only exhaust vents it had were hidden in the niche between the laptop base and its lid, which seemed somewhat lacking. 

In addition, the Aero 15 OLED XA uses Thermal Grizzly's TG-H-001-RS, or Hydronaut, thermal grease. It'd have been nice to see the liquid metal Conductonaut used here, but I appreciate that the company is calling attention to the thermal paste in use. 

But in order to cram all that in, Gigabyte has had to make the laptop slightly thicker. It now measures 20mm thick, up from 18.9mm. The weight is mostly unchanged though, coming in at roughly 2kg. It's not really a perceptible difference, and the laptop still has a really compact footprint, thanks to its thin bezels.

Test setup and performance

Here's a full list of notebooks we're looking at:

• Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA
• Acer Predator Triton 500
• Gigabyte Aero 15 Classic XA
• Aftershock Forge 15 Pro

I've chosen to compare the Aero 15 OLED XA with the Acer Predator Triton 500, another similarly configured notebook with the same CPU and GPU. Last generation's Aero 15 Classic XA was included as well to provide an idea of the improvements offered by the upgraded cooling solution. Finally, the Aftershock Forge 15 Pro was thrown in to show how the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q stacks up against the GeForce RTX 2060. 

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I ran the notebooks through the following benchmarks:

• PCMark 10
• PCMark8
• 3DMark
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Far Cry 5
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

How good is it for work?

PCMark 10 Extended evaluates systems based on workloads that can be categorized into four distinct groups, comprising Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, and Gaming. This includes tests such as app start-up times, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, photo and video editing, and rendering and visualization tasks. Finally, gaming performance is evaluated using the Fire Strike benchmark. 

There are no significant differences between the systems in terms of overall scores. The Aftershock Forge 15 Pro had the lowest score because of its GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, which resulted in a lower Gaming score, but it wasn't even that far behind the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q notebooks. Suffice to say, most modern gaming notebooks are pretty capable of handling daily productivity tasks and even some video work on the side. 

In terms of storage performance, the Intel 760p SSD in the Aero 15 OLED XA had the lowest storage bandwidth of the lot in the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark. That said, the performance gap isn't too large, and I don't think that's something you'll notice in day-to-day use or even while gaming. 

How fast is it in games?

The GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q in the Aero 15 OLED XA has a base clock of 885MHz and boost clock of 1,185MHz, the same as on the Acer Predator Triton 500. However, the Aero 15 OLED XA was always slightly behind the Acer laptop. For example, it trailed by 4 percent in Fire Strike and 6 percent in Time Spy. That said, I'm nitpicking here and performance was pretty close overall in games.  

Gigabyte's Control Center utility lets you configure the CPU clock speed and GPU TGP (total graphics power, which is the total power consumed by the GPU chip and its board/module). As I noted in my review of the Aero 15 Classic XA, the interface isn't very intuitive, as there are no quantifiable metrics for you to refer to. Instead, you have to play around with orange-colored blocks, where higher performance is signified by having everything highlighted. 

That's actually what the built-in Microsoft Azure AI plays around with. The idea is that the AI can learn your preferred settings, so it'll automatically apply them the next time you fire up a certain app or game. However, it can also dynamically switch between different power modes for the CPU and GPU, depending on the workload at hand. The idea behind this is to reduce power consumption and noise, but I mostly preferred to manually set everything at maximum to run our benchmarks. 

Performance has improved a bit from the 'older' Aero 15 Classic XA, and the new Aero 15 OLED XA is just under 7 percent quicker in Far Cry 5 at Ultra settings. I'm just happy to see it actually pull ahead of the Aftershock Forge 15 Pro now. The performance on the Aero 15 Classic XA was truly puzzling, as it trailed the GeForce RTX 2060 in the Aftershock notebook. Considering that the hardware remains the same, the performance boost can probably be attributed to the improved cooling solution. 

Either way, the new Gigabyte laptop seems quite capable of handling any modern game at 1080p. 

How good is the battery life?

Battery life continues to be a strong suit of the Aero 15 OLED XA. The battery capacity is unchanged from the previous generation at 94.24Wh, but the brighter OLED display is also more power hungry, so battery life is also slightly reduced. The hit isn't too big though, and it still managed to outlast the Acer Predator Triton 500 and Aftershock Forge 15 Pro. 

Our portability index is intended as a measure of how mobile a notebook is, after taking into account factors like dimensions, weight, and battery life. The Aero 15 OLED XA did well again, although it wasn't as good as the slimmer Aero 15 Classic XA and its even longer battery life. 

Still, I think Gigabyte continues to offer class-leading performance in terms of battery life on a gaming laptop, and the OLED display hasn't set it back by too much. Granted, our battery life tests were conducted with the PCMark 8 Home battery life benchmark and at 50 percent brightness. With the brightness ramped all the way up, you'll probably see a very different picture.

Does it run hot?

I want to point out that the Aero 15 OLED XA represents a decent effort to improve on one of the key weaknesses of its predecessor, which was poor cooling performance. However, you'll have to make some tweaks to get the most out of the laptop. For one, I found that the Gaming fan mode wasn't sufficiently aggressive to squeeze the most performance out of the laptop. If you look at the fan curve below, it doesn't even ramp the fans up to full speed at 90°C, which is pretty toasty in my books.

Fortunately, you can fix this by creating your own custom fan curve using the Deep Control option, or simply setting the fans to run at maximum speed. This means the notebook gets really, really loud, but it's the price you pay for better performance. 

I generally run the fans at top speed when looping 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme stress test to get an idea of how much heat the system can dissipate when it's running at maximum. The Aero 15 OLED XA managed to stay pretty cool, but this is also a laptop whose CPU and GPU temperatures go past 90°C when using the preset Gaming fan mode. Nevertheless, it's a marked improvement compared to the numbers I got on the older Aero 15 Classic XA. 

Made for photo and video editors

The Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA is a gaming laptop with a stunning display. Aside from having a high refresh rate, I don't think people expect much from the screens on their gaming notebooks. That said, the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA happily defies that expectation with a gorgeous 4K edge-to-edge AMOLED panel. It's not the first gaming laptop to offer an OLED panel, but in comparison to its competitors, the new display feels like a more logical and natural addition for a laptop that has long wanted to woo creators.

Of course, gamers aren't being left out either, and the new Aero 15 will also have the option of a FHD 240Hz panel. However, it doesn't look like that particular model is available to buy locally, so Gigabyte is gunning squarely for those who do graphics design work or video editing here.

Performance-wise, the Aero 15 OLED XA and its beefed-up cooling solution represent a much welcome improvement compared to the previous generation. It's still not perfect though, as you still need to tweak the fans to run more aggressively to avoid throttling. And when that happens, the Aero 15 OLED XA is one of the loudest laptops around, which may explain why Gigabyte didn't want to tune its fans to scale all the way up.

That said, there's still a lot to like about the laptop. Aside from the absolutely stellar display, you get a tasteful aluminum chassis in black that feels like quality stuff. There's also a wide selection of connectors, including a Thunderbolt 3 port and UHS-II SD card reader, both items that creative professionals will want. 

If you're only looking to game, the Aero 15 OLED XA may not be the best choice. But if you also edit a lot of photos and videos, the Gigabyte laptop is a serious contender. The OLED screen might not be ideal for twitch reaction shooters, but it'll do well enough for something like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey or Monster Hunter: World, where exploration and taking in the sprawling landscapes matter as much as the gameplay itself. 

At S$3,799, the Aero 15 OLED XA is priced more or less in the ballpark of its competitors. Brands like Alienware, HP, and Razer also have RTX Studio notebooks, but the Aero 15's more tasteful design may help it appeal to the professional crowd. 

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