Gigabyte Aero 15X with intel 8th generation

Design
The Aero 15X is plain, yet also sophisticated. While Gigabyte has, unfortunately, gotten rid of the fun colors it offered for the Aero last year (at least for the time being), this year's all-black version is still incredibly sleek. The carbon-fiber lid is mostly spartan, other than a reflective, silver Gigabyte logo and a small, arrow-shaped design that looks like metal.

The magic is still on the inside, though. When you open the laptop, you're greeted by a 15.6-inch, 1080p display with a very minimal bezel. Below the screen is a new Aero logo, which is much more visually exciting than the Gigabyte moniker on the outside. There's still a webcam on the hinge. The island-style keyboard is RGB-backlit, but the rest of the chassis is all black.

This laptop has a nice variety of ports, including an Ethernet jack, USB 3.0, an HDMI output, a Mini DisplayPort and a headphone jack on the right side.

On the left side are the power jack, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, Thunderbolt 3 and an SD card slot.

While the Aero 15X is nice and compact, at 4.5 pounds and 14 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches, it's not any svelter than competing laptops. The Dell XPS 15 is 4.6 pounds and 15.1 x 9.3 x 0.7 inches; the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin is 4.1 pounds and 14.1 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches, and the Asus ROG Zephyrus M GM501 is heftier, at 5.5 pounds and 15.1 x 10.3 x 0.8 inches.

Display
While the color on the Aero's 15.6-inch, 1080p display pops, the screen doesn't get as bright as we'd like. When I watched a trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp, a purple hot rod with flame decals popped against the gray of the road, but it was difficult to see a scene in which Scott Lang and Hank Pym watch the Wasp on monitors, because it was just too dark.

Keyboard and Touchpad
With 1.4 millimeters of travel and 74 grams of force required to press down the keys, the keyboard feels snappy, but a bit on the shallow side. I never felt like I was bottoming out, but I would have preferred another millimeter or so of travel. Still, it was comfortable, and I hit 107 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is standard for me. But I got a 3 percent error rate, rather than my usual 2 percent. You can customize the RGB keyboard backlighting use the Gigabyte Fusion app.

The 4.1 x 2.7-inch Aero 15X touchpad and its ELAN drivers (it does not list a Windows Precision touchpad) don't support every gesture. While I could do the most common gestures, like two-finger swipe and pinch-to-zoom, I couldn't swipe with three fingers to place open apps in the task bar or tap with four fingers to open the Action Center.

Audio
The speakers on the Aero 15X are on the quiet side. They barely filled the room with sound when I listened to Brandi Carlile's "The Joke." Her vocals, the guitars and the drums were all clear, and the string quartet was nice and crisp. But there was very little bass to speak of, and Gigabyte doesn't include any software to adjust the sound.

Gaming, Graphics and VR
The Aero 15X's Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU is no slouch. I played Middle-earth: Shadow of War at 1080p on Ultra settings, and it ran between 60 and 71 frames per second as I engaged in a battle with Snafu the Seer and flaming arrows from enemy archers scorched my surroundings.

The Aero played Hitman at 75 frames per second, just slower than the Stealth Thin's showing (79 fps), as well as the average (85 fps) and the Zephyrus' result (88 fps).

On the SteamVR performance test, the Aero earned a score of 10 (very high), so this machine should run Oculus Rift and HTC Vive games smoothly. The premium gaming average is 10.5, while the Stealth Thin got a 9.5 and the Zephyrus reached 10.9. The XPS 15's GTX 1050 isn't ready for VR.

Performance
With its Intel Core i7-8750H Coffee Lake CPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD, the Aero 15X won't sweat under an average workload. I had 20 tabs open in Google Chrome while also watching a 1080p stream of Fortnite on Twitch, and I experienced no performance hiccups.

On the Geekbench 4 overall performance test, the Aero earned a score of 16,305, beating the premium gaming average (15,965) and the XPS 15's mark (13,911; Core i7-7700HQ). But the Aero's result falls below those of the Zephyrus (20,590) and Stealth Thin (17,184), which have the same CPU and GPU as the Aero.

The Aero took 9 seconds to transfer 4.97GB of mixed-media files. That translates to a blazing 565.5 MBps. The average is 509 MBps, the same as the Zephyrus' result. The Stealth Thin (193.3MBps) and XPS 15 (339.3MBps) were both slower.

Battery Life
For a gaming laptop, the Aero 15X has solid battery life. It endured for 6 hours and 13 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test 2.0, which has a computer continuously browse the web and run a series of videos and graphics benchmarks over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. The premium gaming average on the test is just 4 hours, while the Stealth Thin ran for 5:40 and the Zephyrus lasted a paltry 2 hours.

Heat
The Aero 15X stayed nice and cool during our usual heat tests. After streaming 15 minutes of HD video, it measured 83 degrees Fahrenheit on the touchpad, 91 degrees between the G and H keys, and 95 degrees on the underside. None of those temperatures exceed our 95-degree comfort threshold.