Latest Gigabyte Aero X16

Although it touts an epic design language and a beautiful color-accurate display, its underwhelming GPU and middling storage performance leave a lot to be desired.

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I don't understand Gigabyte's Aero X16, I really don't. Actually, scratch that, I don't currently understand the wider gaming notebook market. Not right now anyway. I've combed over the test results here repeatedly over the last week, and well, to say this isn't the best gaming laptop, is an understatement. Quite the damning opening paragraph that, especially as a hardware journalist with a reputation to uphold and all, but here me out. I've got beef, and it's with TGP, or total graphics power.

This here is the Gigabyte Aero X16 Copilot. A quick glance down the specs list, and you'll see it's brimming with some seriously impressive hardware, or so it would seem anyway. There's one of AMD's latest Ryzen AI 7 350 CPUs based on the Krackan Point architecture, a healthy dose of 32 GB DDR5 clocking in at 5,600 MT/s, a nice 1 TB helping of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, and perhaps more importantly for this whimsical argument, an RTX 5070 8 GB mobile GPU. But there's a catch: it's limited to just 85 W.

That's the same 85 W power limit Gigabyte placed on its Gaming A16 I tested earlier this year as well, with its RTX 5060. The same 85 W limit, which I berated as being the primary culprit as to why that specific breed of 16-inch gaming notebook failed to keep up with the likes of Lenovo's much more potent LOQ 15 Gen 10. And here it is, rearing its ugly head up once more, but this time strapped to one of Blackwell's finest RTX 5070 cards instead, a GPU whose desktop equivalent is designed to top out at 250 W of power, with the mobile one theoretically limited to 100 W (at least if the manufacturer doesn't have other plans). Oh, it can't be that bad, can it? I hear you ask. Well, dear reader. Yes, it really is.

Side-by-side comparison first, let's compare it to that Gigabyte Gaming A16. Both feature 32 GB of DDR5, both have a 1 TB SSD, both have a 16-inch display (albeit at slightly different resolutions), and they both have similarly impressive CPU setups (The A16 with the older Core i7 13620H, and the Aero with the aforementioned AMD unit). The difference, of course, is that RTX 5070 GPU and a $100 price bump f

Source: PC Gamer