Last year we reviewed probably the sexiest-looking gaming laptop outside of Dell’s Alienware range, Gigabyte’s Aorus X7. It was one of the first-ever gaming notebooks we’d seen equipped with not one, but two graphics chips (NVIDIA’s GTX860M in SLI), and it flew through every benchmark we threw at it with considerable ease.
But now, Gigabyte has updated the X7 with an even more powerful pair of graphics chips: the revised model sports two of NVIDIA’s formidable GTX970M chips that should give anyone who knows about them quite a bit to salivate over. The new model is called, appropriately enough, the Aorus X7 Pro.
What makes the X7 Pro so incredible is that the 970M is one chip below the absolutely fastest single chip at the moment, NVIDIA’s GTX980M, and the fact there are two working together means gaming performance that surpasses even the blazingly-fast frame rates the 980M puts out. Which is incredible in itself, considering just how fast that chip is.
For comparison’s sake, we have seen a single GTX980M push 3DMark’s graphics-intensive Fire Strike benchmark to just over the 8 800 mark, while the dual 970Ms of the Aorus Pro managed to surpass the 14 800 mark, hitting 14 824 in the fastest run we saw at standard settings. That’s beyond the performance of all but the most tricked-out of gaming desktops.
In practical terms that obvious power translated into anywhere from a 40% to a 90% increase in everyday gaming performance, depending on the title. That means higher frame rates and smoother overall action even with performance-chewing features like anti-aliasing set to their most GPU-melting extremes. It also keeps things smooth when gaming across three monitors, or on a single 4K display, making the X7 Pro a viable desktop replacement in the truest sense of the word.
Everything else about the Aorus Pro is the same as the previous model (the Aorus X7 v2), so it has a 17.3-inch screen, a backlit keyboard and the same sexy chassis and Intel Core i7-4710HQ processor. The price is understandably higher, but not massively so: the Pro has an RRP of R35 999 versus the X7 v2’s RRP of R32 999.
Gigabyte appears to be pulling out all the stops to make gamers think twice about their gaming laptop choices, and with such good looks and honest-to-goodness desktop-shaming performance, the X7 Pro is at the front of the pack right now.
Here are its updated specs:
- RRP: R35 999
- Processor: Intel Core i7-4710HQ @ 2.5Ghz
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX970M 3GB x 2 (SLI), total 6GB VRAM
- Display: 17.3-inch Full HD 1920 x 1080 LED backlit display
- Memory: 2 x 8GB (16GB) DDR3L 1866, 4 slots (Max 32GB)
- Storage: 2 x 128GB mSATA SSD, 1 x 2.5-inch 1TB drive
- Networking: 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Killer LAN chip
