Aorus X9 review

Aorus X9

The New Ultimate Gaming Laptop

 

Gigabyte’s Aorus X9 was first demonstrated as a concept product at CES in January. Now at Computex, this incredible machine looks set to make it into production and hit store shelves before the end of the year.

GIGABYTE's AORUS X9 gaming laptop is unique because it not only has an overclockable 7th generation processor, support for multiple M.2 drives, a brilliant Pantone certified 17.3" display, but it also comes with two GTX 1070 8GB cards in SLI. Yes, SLI on a gaming laptop, and on a gaming laptop that is quite thin (0.9-1.2 inches). At 30mm tall, it's one of the thinnest gaming notebooks with an overclockable CPU and two GTX 1070 8GB under the hood. Of course, the notebook also comes with a lot of other extras, such as a mechanical keyboard with RGB LEDs, custom designed trim, and flare, as well as a redesigned cooling system.

The Aorus X9 is the direct replacement of Gigabyte’s last SLI Aorus, the X7. We checked out the Aorus X7 Pro v5 almost exactly a year ago, but its SLI’d GTX 970M graphics silicon, and slimline chassis, meant it was a frustratingly noisey, powerful notebook. We were hoping then the new Pascal GPUs would offer some respite in future iterations.

That future is here with the X9, sporting a pair of Pascal-based GTX 1070 cards, and the sort of gaming performance pretty much any desktop machine would weep silicon tears to have. It’s also sporting a Core i7 7820HK CPU, but don’t confuse that with the eight-core desktop Core i7 7820X chip (why would you?), this is just a straight quad-core, eight-thread standard Kaby Lake mobile chip.

Let's take a look at this beast.

Aorus X9 Design

Unlike the demure styling of Aorus’s gaming laptops that we’ve become accustomed to, the X9 is as loud as can be with edgy design elements.

The Aorus X9 fully embraces the RGB lighting revolution with a completely customizable 16.7 million-color backlit keyboard and multiple light bars around the chassis. It’s quite the lightshow, and all the more impressive when you take a closer look at the three distinct LEDs illuminating the power button and the 11 LEDs built into the light bar just above that logo.

Unfortunately, you can’t really put the lighting to good use. The most functionality we get out of the 11 LED light bar is using it as a battery meter or a temperature gauge.


While there’s also a music mode that’s neat in that it turns the laptop’s entire lighting array into a visualizer, it requires the user to increase the laptop’s volume to at least 80%. What’s worse is this music mode only works through the speakers, which basically limits its use to when you’re home and alone – that is, unless you relish in being the most obnoxious person in the room.

We would have loved it if there were a way to tie the lighting into games, like Counter Strike Global Offensive, to let us know when to reload – or when our abilities were back in Overwatch. Razer has been ahead of the game in this regard, and you’ll find all of these keyboard lighting features on all of its laptops.


Lighting aside, the Aorus X9 features a very angular design with enough metal edges to make the Lamborghini it was modeled after jealous. It looks more garish thThere’s only one screen option on the Aorus X9. It’s a 3,840x2,160-resolution (4K) IPS panel that lacks touch, does not feature G-Sync, and sports a standard 60Hz refresh rate.

Doubtless, some gamers will miss Nvidia’s frame-smoothing G-Sync feature, but the laptop is generally powerful enough to keep frame rates smooth at 4K, though as we'll see later, you may have to dial back a setting or two to stay at or above 60 frames per second (fps).an the stealthier designs of the Aorus X5 v6 and Aorus X7 v6, but it’s balanced by the matte black paint job.

Measuring in at the same 1.18-inches (2.99cm) thickness as the Alienware 17 R4, the Aorus X9 pushes the envelope of what’s possible in an ultra-thin form-factor with its SLI-graphics card setup. Still, the Razer Blade Pro edges out as the thinnest machine measuring 0.88 inches (2.24cm).

Aorus X9 Display

There’s only one screen option on the Aorus X9. It’s a 3,840x2,160-resolution (4K) IPS panel that lacks touch, does not feature G-Sync, and sports a standard 60Hz refresh rate.

Doubtless, some gamers will miss Nvidia’s frame-smoothing G-Sync feature, but the laptop is generally powerful enough to keep frame rates smooth at 4K, though as we'll see later, you may have to dial back a setting or two to stay at or above 60 frames per second (fps).

Overall, we’d say the screen is more pretty good than great; we noticed no off-axis viewing-angle issues, and Gigabyte says the panel supports 100 percent of the Adobe RGB gamut. But the maximum brightness looks about average for a gaming PC, and for vivid images with deep contrast, it’s tough to beat the OLED-screen option in the smaller Alienware 13$1,149.00 at Amazon.

Aorus X9 Keyboard and TrackPad

The keyboard is another stand-out feature, for a couple of reasons. First, while its keys look like what you might find on many a big-screen laptop, they feature mechanical switches below. Now, to be clear, these are laptop mechanical keys, not the full-size, slightly concave keys that you’ll find on a mechanical desktop keyboard or the massive, 12-pound-plus MSI GT83VR Titan SLI (2017)$3,499.00 at Amazon. The keys here are fairly flat, but they do have a surprising amount of up/down travel (2.5mm, according to Gigabyte). And they’re designed to feel similar to Cherry’s MX Brown switches, which are generally regarded as the best compromise choice for those who prioritize both gaming and typing.

As noted earlier, the keys also feature per-key RGB backlighting, so you can choose the colors of individual keys to correspond to actions in your favorite games, or enable eye-catching lighting effects. And you can save multiple profiles for different games or programs via a tab in the RGB Fusion control software. The software also lets you program keys to launch programs or trigger macros, though there are no dedicated macro keys here. That's one area where, for a killer gaming rig, Aorus could have made some brownie points with this layout.

All that said, the actual feel of the switches and the travel wasn't as pleasing to our fingers as actual Cherry MX switches in a desktop keyboard. There's a hollow feeling as the keys bottom out here. And because there's so much travel to the keys, those used to a shallower laptop keyboard may find it frustrating, at first, that key strokes struck off center don't always activate the switch, resulting in the occasional missed stroke. Overall, we like the X9's keyboard better for gaming than typing (which is fine, given this is a gaming laptop). But we have a feeling some gamers will like the feel of these keys more than others.

Likewise, the Elantech trackpad on the Aorus X9 is nigh unusable. Simple point-to-point tracking between our finger and the cursor is aggravatingly sluggish. What’s more, no matter how much we increase the palm rejection setting, we’re still constantly activating the sensor while typing.

Some might be able to stomach the keyboard and actually find it more usable than us, but it’s almost a requirement to replace the lackluster trackpad with a gaming mouse.

Aorus X9  Performance

Thanks to the ventilation, the Aorus X9 keeps its cool and ensures all of its components are operating at their peak performance.

Above the keyboard, there are several mesh sections and eagle-shaped ventilation on the underside to help its four fans pull cool air from both the top and bottom of the laptop. Of course, with that many fans spinning up at the same time, this system gets loud. But, it’s still not nearly to the level of other ultra-thin laptops, like the MSI GS63VR Stealth Pro.

That said, we’ll take a bit of fan noise if it means we can avoid thermal throttling, which the Aorus X9 does beautifully. The 17-inch gaming laptop’s extensive network of heat pipes and aforementioned cooling system, we didn’t see a single drop in performance no matter how far or long we pushed the system.

Usually, our gaming benchmarks will turn out lower results with each successive run, and thus why we give you an average of three tests. However, the frame rates you see above were the result we got every time without any deviation whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen any laptop achieve before, and it’s a testament to the Aorus X9’s thermal design.

Thanks to its dual-Nvidia GTX 1070 GPUs, the Aorus X9 is the most graphically capable gaming laptop we’ve ever tested. This 17-inch gaming laptop flies in the face of our synthetic benchmarks, with Fire Strike scores soaring 2,000 to 5,000 points above that of the Nvidia GTX 1080-powered Alienware 17 R4 and Razer Blade Pro.

It’s no surprise that the Aorus X9 is the first gaming laptop to give us a steadily playable 4K gaming experience. We ran Shadow of War and The Evil Within 2 at Ultra HD and ultra-quality settings at an average 26 frames per seconds (fps) to 30fps, respectively. Thus far, rigs powered by a single Nvidia GTX 1080 have only been able to eke by at an average 20 to 25fps.

Although the Aorus X9 also shares the same processor as it rivals, the Alienware 17 R4 pulls ahead with slightly higher benchmark numbers. The Razer Blade Pro is the weakest in the bunch with the lowest performance numbers.

Aorus X9 Connectivity & Ports

As far as ports go, the Aorus X9 has about what you should expect from a large laptop these days. The left edge houses an Ethernet jack, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, an SD-card reader, and separate headphone and mic jacks...

On the right, you'll find a larger collection of connectivity...Here live two USB 3.0 Type A ports, two Thunderbolt 3 ports (which do double duty as USB Type-C ports), a mini-DisplayPort, and an HDMI jack.

Internet connectivity is handled by a Killer Networks hardware duo, in the form of a Wireless-AC 1535 chip on the wireless side, supplemented by a Killer Ethernet controller.

Aorus X9 Battery

At most, you should expect an hour of battery life out of the Aorus X9. As laughable as that might sound, it’s not a joke. Aorus’s flagship gaming laptop only lasted for 1 hour and 9 minutes on our video playback test, a mere minute longer than it performed on the PCMark 8 battery test.

Comparatively, the Alienware 17 R4 offers a better, but still not superb, 3 hours of battery life, and the Razer Blade Pro lasts the longest at four hours. Whether Aorus ran out of room for a larger battery or it just falters under the sheer weight of two high-end GPUs, you’ll definitely need to carry the power adapter for this 17-inch machine if you mean to take it outside.

Aorus X9 Price  

The X9 starts at $3649 for the version with a single 512GB NVMe SSD, and there is one version that is $3799, and it has two 512GB NVMe SSDs, and it's exclusively on Newegg. We have the model with two SSDs.

Verdict

The Aorus X9 is a stunning machine and embodies the Aorus brand perfectly. The company surely won’t sell many, but as a so-called ‘halo’ product that influences future, more affordable Aorus laptops, it’s brilliant. I’d go as far to say that it ties with the Asus ROG Zephyrus as the most technically impressive laptop at Computex 2017.