The Aorus range of gaming laptops from Gigabyte have undergone a strong evolution in the past few years. Starting first as sleek-looking power-houses packed with the latest in PC technology that made it possible to game anywhere, they have slowly changed as gamers’ needs, and the underlying technologies on which they are built, have moved with the times.

Today’s Aorus laptops benefit from the years of research Gigabyte’s R&D departments have poured into their development. Development which has recently begun to actively involve the gaming community, taking suggestions from the very people who made the laptops popular, and who have spent hundreds – if not thousands – of hours gaming on them.

Heat & Noise

And results have been promising. Reducing heat and noise, for instance, has become a strong focus of Gigabyte’s engineers thanks to the community’s feedback. Nobody likes to rest their palms on a hot laptop, and even fewer people love it when their laptop’s fans make a racket when they kick in to cool the internal components. So Gigabyte set about fixing that.

Take the Aorus X7 Pro V5, for instance. Gigabyte made it slightly bigger, a teeny bit heavier, and used the extra space created for an innovative new cooling system that used an extra 300g of copper and the additional 3mm added to the laptop’s profile at the rear to improve cooling performance by 25%.

With such a large improvement to its cooling design came a commensurate drop in noise levels, and the new X7 Pro no longer sounds like a jet engine as its predecessors did to a degree, to producing barely a hum even under full load. It is now an incredibly quiet machine that maintains comfortable temperatures, even when it’s throwing everything it has at ensuring games run smoothly and look amazing.

How fast?

Naturally, performance is of paramount importance as well, and Gigabyte’s engineers have done their utmost to make the top-of-the-range Aorus laptops almost inconceivably faster than anything that came before them.

Just how fast, you ask? Well, would you believe someone who told you they’ve packed up to three SSDs into a single laptop chassis, and that the combined throughput they are capable of is in excess of four thousand megabytes per second? Well, that’s exactly what Gigabyte has done with their top-of-the-line Aorus notebooks: they’ve used the latest PCIE Gen3 x4 NVME interface, which transcends SATA’s throughput limitations and really allows individual SSDs to fly, featuring single-drive speeds of around 2000MB/s. Pair them up in a RAID 0 configuration and they really let loose, reaching speeds of around 4000MB/s and beyond.

And that’s not all: Gigabyte’s latest Aorus gaming laptops also sport the latest Intel processors – that’s the Skylake range – which of course means they use DDR4 memory as well. What all of this translates to is no storage-based performance bottleneck, and a laptop that boots in record times and loads applications and games at high speed. Those load screens gamers hate so much? Expect to see them a lot less.

Gaming Performance

As for actual gaming performance – you know, the entire reason to own an Aorus in the first place – Gigabyte has gone all out and kitted the notebooks with NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line graphics chips, delivering the kind of performance in a mobile form factor that even just a few years ago was inconceivable from non-desktop systems.

Gamers can choose between a single GTX970M or a GTX980M, but if they want the ultimate in laptop performance, they can opt for two GTX970Ms in SLI, which knocks even single-card desktop systems off the top spot in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark 11.

The (not so) little things

The other, lesser-referenced parts of gaming notebooks are exceptional on each Aorus. From backlit keyboards that can register 30 simultaneous key-presses without ghosting occurring to a glass trackpad that’s simply marvellous to touch to exceptional screens sporting NVIDIA’s latest G-Sync implementation and a refresh rate of 75Hz, the Aoruses have them all.

And should lugging around a 17-inch laptop not be to your taste, you can always opt for the Aorus X3, the most powerful 14-inch notebook in the world, which boasts a stunning 3200 x 1800 screen in addition to some class-leading internals. While the display is not quite 4K, it’s incredibly sharp and clear, to the point where you’ll wonder how you ever got by looking at jaggy, pixelated 1080p screens before.

Backed by pride

All of this is backed by Gigabyte’s standard two-year fetch-and-collect warranty, so gamers can purchase Aoruses confident in Gigabyte’s quality, as well as in the notion that they won’t have to be inconvenienced to get their warranty honoured.

The latest Aoruses will be available for sale locally in late March. To find a list of accredited resellers, click here.