Gigabyte retools Aero and Aorus laptop lines with Comet Lake H and GeForce Super GPUs

Credit: Gigabyte

Gigabyte is retooling its Aero and Aorus laptop lines with the latest Intel Comet Lake H CPUs and Nvidia’s GeForce Super GPUs, and clearing up some confusion about who should buy which product line. 

The Gigabyte Aorus line of laptops is aimed mostly at professional gamers (and likely aspiring pro gamers, too). On Thursday the company announced the Aorus line would offer Intel’s latest 10th-gen Comet Lake H CPUs and Nvidia’s GeForce Super GPUs.

Gigabyte’s famous Aero series is pitched mostly toward content creation professionals. Those Aero laptops also get Intel and Nvidia’s latest, along with premium OLED and HDR displays. 

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Although both the Aero and Aorus lines offer high-performance laptops, they offer distinct differences for creators vs. gamers. The gaming-oriented Aorus 17X, Aorus 17G, and Aorus 15G use Omron mechanical keys, for one.

Mechanical keyboards aren’t new to laptops, but frankly, we’ve been mostly let down by those we’ve tried in the past. Gigabyte might be onto something with Aorus, though. We tried them at CES, and rather than our typical “is this really mechanical, because it doesn’t feel like it” reaction, we actually thought they were pretty, well, mechanical.

Some might be bummed that the Aorus screens’ refresh rates go “only” to 240Hz, but we suspect only truly insatiable gamers will care. Gigabyte doesn’t break out exact configurations and prices, but the Aorus 17X will range from $2,400 to $3,800, while the Aorus 17G will cost from $1,800 to $2,800. The smaller Aorus 15G starts at $1,700 and ranges up to $2,900.

Gigabyte

Aero laptops rock HDR and OLED for creators

If a mechanical keyboard matters to a gamer, the very names of the new Aero 15 OLED and Aero 17 HDR should tell you their priority: visuals. Gigabyte wants content creators to know these laptops rock OLED and HDR displays, respectively. 

For the Aero 15 OLED XB, it’s the latest version of a laptop we’ve long loved. Featuring a 15.6-inch, 4K, factory-calibrated OLED, the laptop also comes standard with Windows 10 Pro, a 10th-gen 6-core Core i7-10875H, 16GB of DDR4/2933 RAM, GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, and a 512GB Intel H10 Optane hybrid SSD. The keyboard features per-key RGB lighting, and the laptop also rocks a giant 94-watt-hour battery. In all the laptop weighs 4.4 pounds.

Besides the new CPU and GPU, the OLED is the main selling point. Gigabyte highlights that unlike some companies that might do batch testing—where only one panel of a batch is calibrated—every single display is calibrated to meet Xrite Pantone specs. Gigabyte adds that upgrades are a snap, as the two M.2 slots and the two RAM slots are accessible once the bottom is removed.

If 15.6 inches isn’t big enough, Gigabyte suggests the Aero 17 HDR. Like the Aero 15 OLED, it gets Intel’s 10th-gen CPUs and Nvidia’s Supers, but as the name implies it’s a 17.3-inch laptop. The larger frame lets Gigabyte jam in up to an Intel 8-core Core i7-10875H CPU.

Gigabyte

In many ways it’s a bigger-screen version of the Aero 15 OLED, but the key is the panel. Rather than an OLED, the Aero 17 HDR gets a UHD 4K IPS screen capable of hitting Vesa Display HDR 400 requirements. The screen is also factory-calibrated to X-Rite Pantone specs, which nets critical color people a panel capable of 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut. And yes, you also get a 94-watt-hour battery. As content creation laptops, both variants will come pre-loaded with Nvidia’s Creator drivers.

The Aero 17 HDR will range from $2,300 to $4,300 with the Aero 15 OLED ranging from $1,900 to $4,099. Gigabyte will also offer FHD versions of the Aero laptops at lower prices.

Gigabyte