Gigabyte Aero 15 review: A spunky gaming notebook with a touch of elegance

Temperature, battery life & portability

Temperature

We measured the external temperatures of the four quadrants of the notebook after looping the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme stress test for 15 minutes. This amount of time is more than enough to get an idea of your average maximum running temperature for this workload.

The Aero 15 sort of fell into the middle of the pack here. While GPU temperatures held up well against the competition, the measured temperatures on the left and right palm rest are noticeably higher than what was observed on some of the other laptops.

However, after using the notebook for some time, we can say that these figures aren’t that much of a cause for concern. The palm rests do get noticeably warmer when the laptop is working hard, but it never got uncomfortably hot or affected usage in any way.

Battery life and power consumption

Our battery life tests involve running the battery life benchmark in PCMark 8 Home at 50% screen brightness with Wi-Fi running.

This is where the Aero 15 really shines. Gigabyte is touting so-called all-day battery life on its 94.24Wh battery, but while that’s really just marketing fluff, there’s still something to that claim as the Aero 15 has one of the longest lasting batteries we’ve seen on a gaming laptop.

It lasted over six hours with the backlight off, so it’s actually conceivable that you’d be able to take it out and get some work done.

Part of that might be due to the more efficient 7th generation processor, but it’s probable that optimizations on Gigabyte’s end played a part as well as you can tell from the top ranking power consumption figure it managed to eek out. All things considered, this is a strong point in favor of Gigabyte’s push to make the Aero 15 more than just a gaming laptop.

Portability index

Our portability index is an objective measure of how portable a notebook is, taking into account factors like size, weight, and battery life.

The Aero 15 overtook even the 14-inch Razer Blade here, a notebook that we praised as being quite outstanding in this department. Gigabyte’s win here is still more surprising – and impressive – considering that the Aero 15 is a larger and heavier 15.6-inch notebook, but its excellent battery life helped it edge ahead. Of course, it was also helped along by its relatively compact size for a 15.6-inch laptop, thanks to the slim bezels and effective utilization of space.

We’ve previously said that the MSI GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro was the undisputed king when it comes to portable 15.6-inch notebooks, but the Aero 15 may have just one-upped it here (by quite a large degree).

In a sense, it offers the best of both worlds, combining the screen real estate of a 15.6-inch laptop with the portability of a 14-inch one.