Slim Gigabyte AERO 16 OLED laptop review: Efficient RTX 4070 for gamers and creatives

Gigabyte’s Aero 16 OLED is an interesting mix of gaming laptop and workstation for creatives. In addition to the switch from Alder to Raptor Lake CPU and from Nvidia RTX 30x to RTX 40x, other changes have also been made, such as to the case and the ports. We’ve previously reviewed the predecessor with the RTX 3080 Ti and our current configuration has an RTX 4070 .

So far we’ve only reviewed the new Razer Blade 18 with the same GPU, so the 18-incher will have to serve as comparison in the 3D benchmarks. Otherwise we compare previous generation 16-inch competitors, including the Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED , the Asus TUF Gaming A16 and the MSI CreatorPro Z16P with its Nvidia A300 . At first glance, the design appears to be unchanged, but if you take a closer look, you can see that the narrow, silver metal chassis has changed quite a bit.

For example, it has become even thinner and Gigabyte has finally shifted some of the ports to the back. Overall, the manufacturer’s design is more in the direction of a business and office laptop than a gaming laptop, which will certainly please the target group. So the hidden gamer looks quite inconspicuous in an office setting, even alongside a MacBook.

The smooth metal unibody is still stable, especially at the base, which can hardly be twisted. The keyboard has been lowered slightly. The display lid, on which the illuminated “Aero” logo is emblazoned, is somewhat less rigid.

Only the display frame is made of plastic. Ventilation grilles are practically everywhere, namely at the back, on the sides, below and above. The build quality seems to be on a good level and no gaps were found.

At just 18 mm, the Aero 16 is slightly thinner than the ZenBook Pro 16X or the MSI CreatorPro Z16P . It is also lighter, with the predecessor having weighed 200 g more. A lot has changed in the ports, fortunately, because the meager three USB-C ports of the predecessor had to be expanded with an Aero Hub to include HDMI, USB-A, etc.

This year, the new Aero houses almost all the necessary ports. To do this, it utilizes the space at the back where the mains connection is, for example. We would have preferred a USB-A instead of one of the three USB-C ports on the side, and a LAN port is still missing, but at least there is now an HDMI port and a (microSD) reader.

The port distribution is good, except for USB-A at the back instead of on the side. MicroSD cards click into place and protrude only minimally (1 – 2 mm). The transfer rates are good; we copied 1 GB of image material from our AV PRO microSD 128 GB V60 to the desktop in about 7 seconds.

If competitors have a reader at all, it is slower. The Intel AX210 chip was also installed in last year’s model and again ensures good transfer rates, though the MSI CreatorPro is even faster. The module supports Wifi 6E and thus the 6 GHz range.

Gigabyte has finally installed a Full HD camera into the creative laptop, with the resulting image being quite usable, even in suboptimal lighting conditions. A look at the ColorChecker, however, unfortunately shows that the colors deviate greatly. The predecessor had a 720p camera.

The Aero is not really for security fanatics. TPM is on board, but there is no fingerprint sensor or Kensington connection. No accessories are included together with the laptop upon purchase.

In Germany, the manufacturer provides a 24-month warranty. This may differ in other regions, so interested buyers should double-check before purchase. First, 10 torx screws need to be removed.

Afterwards, finding a gap in the tight chassis for inserting level tools is not so easy. The best way to do this is towards the back. Once the first step has been made, it becomes much easier and the baseplate can be detached quite effortlessly.

Inside, you have access to the fans, the battery, the replaceable WLAN module, the two RAM slots and the two M. 2 SSD slots, one of which is occupied. There are cooling pads on the base plate for the two SSD slots.

The keyboard now has white instead of black keys. This looks more elegant, but you should refrain from activating the white keyboard backlight in bright lighting, otherwise you’ll no longer be able to discern the lettering – but who does? The layout looks very tidy. None of the keys appear out of place, and even the arrow keys are of normal size – very good.

Keys are of medium size and are all well spaced apart. Key travel is around 1. 7 mm and the feedback just barely perceptible.

Typing is quick and the noise moderate, but the space bar is a little louder. Although the on/off switch is integrated into the top right of the keyboard, it has a much firmer pressure point and is a little smaller so that it is not so easy to press accidentally. In Gigabyte laptops, the special keys for brightness (further left here) and volume (further right here) are usually swapped, which takes some getting used to.

The touchpad remains the same size as its predecessor (approx. 12. 1 x 7.

6 cm), but is now silver instead of black and offers good gliding properties, even with very slow movements. The integrated keys provide clear feedback and are thus slightly louder than the keyboard keys, but still moderate. Gigabyte again installs a 16-inch OLED panel from Samsung with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 4K resolution of 3,840 x 2,400.

The panel has a new version number, but still only offers 60 Hz – a downside for gamers. Otherwise the OLED panel boasts a rich contrast, a great black level and very good illumination. The IPS competition can no longer keep up here.

We measured a brightness of just under 400 nits in SDR display mode. But the panel also meets the HDR600 standard. So we measured in HDR mode and arrived at a peak brightness of 620 nits.

This is only possible with a small measuring field, since OLEDs quickly darken on large, bright areas. Screen bleeding is not an issue with OLEDs. Response times are also excellent.

Gigabyte advertises the Aero 16 as providing 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage and our measurements confirm this claim. Even AdobeRGB is covered at 96. 4 percent.

The OLED display is thus very suitable for editing photos and videos. The display is already well calibrated ex works; our calibration via Portrait Displays Calman Color Calibration pushes the DeltaE values down slightly even more. So the display has only very slight color and grayscale deviations.

Our ICC profile can be downloaded above. As is typical for OLEDs, the display flickers at 60 Hz at full brightness. At around 50 percent brightness and below, the frequency changes, and 238 Hz may prove annoying for sensitive people.

Outdoors, of course, the reflective surface is distracting. The rather average SDR brightness and the good contrasts can only balance out this disadvantage to a limited extent. A shady spot and a direct viewing angle are recommended.

A loss in brightness only becomes noticeable when looking at the display from extreme angles. The Aero houses brand-new hardware. The combination of i9-13900H , RTX 4070 and 32 GB DDR5-4800 should not pose any problems for users, whether gaming or using creative applications.

However, all this hardware is packed into a slim case, so it does not run at full power, as will be shown below. After all, a creative laptop is not supposed to be a super-hot roaring laptop, so hardcore gamers will have to suffer a little here. Our test device didn’t have a Control Center preinstalled, so there were no performance modes to begin with.

The power modes preinstalled in Windows by Gigabyte had virtually no influence on CPU performance in Cinebench R15. Therefore, and because the fans never stood still at first, we installed the Gigabyte Control Center afterwards. Here we were faced with the difficult choice of the performance mode: there are a total of five here, and we had a hard time choosing between Content Creator and Gaming.

So we had to decide between good performance but louder fans, or quieter operation with weaker performance. In the end, we performed the CPU benchmarks without the Control Center, i. e.

in the delivery state. The GPU benchmarks then run in gaming mode. The software isn’t always entirely free of errors.

For example, it just displayed a black window during some starts. Also confusing is that, in addition to the modes, there is another selection window “Power Mode” with further options for power control. These likely represent the energy modes, because if you set this to Custom, the Windows power modes can be selected.

There is also an “AI” switch on the left of the main modes. The “AI” independently selects the best mode depending on the situation, for example, the energy-saving mode when we disconnect the power plug. At the heart of the Aero is an Intel Core i9-13900H , one of the flagships of Intel’s brand new Raptor Lake series.

This provides 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores, with the former clocking at up to 5. 4 GHz in turbo! Alternatively, the device is also available with an i7-13700H . In our Cinebench R15 loop, the Aero comes out on top, but the advantage over the i9-12900H from the Alder Lake series is marginal and the predecessor is hardly slower across all CPU tests.

A look at the power consumption shows that you should definitely install the Control Center. Because in delivery state, the CPU only treats itself to 70 W for a short time before falling to 45 W. On the other hand, if you switch to Gaming Mode in the Control Center, the short-term TDP increases to 115 W, and then hangs at around 60 W for the rest of a Cinebench run.

So it very much depends on the power settings. Without Gaming mode, the new Aero 16 is no faster than its predecessor across all CPU benchmarks. The CPU can only draw on around 20 W in battery mode and the Cinebench score is correspondingly lower.

In PCMark 10, our Aero exchanges blows with last year’s MSI CreatorPro Z16P . Unfortunately, the Aero has a weak productivity score, but it does very well in the other sub-tests. Shortly after starting LatencyMon, the software detects the first DPC latencies.

These increase further when launching the browser and opening multiple tabs. Our 4K/60 fps YouTube video, on the other hand, is rendered smoothly and without skipped frames. The Razer Blade 18 has even worse latency values than our Aero.

The manufacturer uses a very fast PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD from its own company. It is currently ranked second in our best list . The model here doesn’t quite reach its best performance, especially since the Phison memory in the predecessor (rank 1) is a tad faster.

At least performance is relatively constant, and it’s good that a cooling pad is attached to the base plate. When it comes to the GPU, you have the choice between the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 ; the more powerful variant is installed in our test unit. In the thin Aero, it normally consumes around 105 W.

The maximum is 115 plus 25 W Dynamic Boost, but our colleague Andreas recently pointed out in his review of the card that hardly any performance increases occur above 100 W for the RTX 4070 . In the synthetic 3DMarks, the card is on the expected level, although we don’t have too many other measurements in our database. After all, it is occasionally ahead of competing devices with an RTX 3080 Ti , while the predecessor with its RTX 3080 Ti is also beaten by almost 20 percent, the CreatorPro by 30 percent.

Even the Blade 18 with the same GPU and nominally faster CPU is slightly behind. The Alienware x15 R2 with its RTX 3080 Ti, on the other hand, is slightly ahead. A lot of 3D performance is lost in Battery Mode, with the score in Fire Strike dropping by almost 70 percent! In gaming, the Aero 16 is just overtaken by the Blade 18 overall, and only because of the weak results in DOTA 2 Reborn and X-Plane 11.

11. The Aero even has the edge in GPU-heavy games. This is interesting because the RTX 4070 is allowed 140 W in the Blade, but only 105 W in the Aero, which confirms that it makes little sense to run the card above 100 W at the moment .

Overall, it can handle all games up to 2K and sometimes even above, although the card sometimes runs out of steam in very demanding games at 4K. Ray tracing performance, on the other hand, is very good. In Cyberpunkt, it only drops from around 85 to 65 fps with activated ray tracing at 1080p.

The Aero 16 does not offer Advanced Optimus, and the same applies to Nvidia’s Whisper Mode. However, a MUX switch is available so that you can manually switch between iGPU and dGPU. In gaming mode, the frame rate in Witcher 3 is quite constant for over an hour and is above that of a Razer Blade 18 .

The GPU’s power consumption is almost constant at around 105 W, which means that both the core clock (2,350 MHz) and memory clock (2,000 MHz) are also very constant. The card heats up to about 80 °C. The slim Aero 16 gets quite loud in Gaming Mode under heavy stress.

Gaming or our stress test causes the fans to spin up to 55 dB, which is louder than the competition, but not surprising given the thin form factor. In Creator Mode, the volume drops from the 55 dB of Gaming Mode to around 50 dB in stress testing. This brings the Aero closer to the competition, which has a similar noise level.

Only Meeting Mode tries to keep the device really quiet. Despite its slim case, the Aero performs well in this field. The comparatively loud fans and the metal case dissipate the heat well, so that the hot spots on the back remain well below 50 °C.

The predecessor and several competitors fare worse here. The palm rests are always within a comfortable range. In stress testing, the CPU is able to consume 105 W in short bursts before falling to a constant 62 W after a few seconds.

At the same time, the clock starts briefly at 4. 1 GHz before dropping to around 2. 9 GHz.

However, this does not remain constant but fluctuates with temperature. When the core temperatures reach 90 °C, the clock is throttled slightly, after which the temperatures drop again. At just over 80 °C, the clock rate then rises slightly again, etc.

The GPU clock also fluctuates continuously between 1. 7 and 2. 4 GHz.

In contrast, the memory clock rises and falls from 2 GHz to 1. 75 GHz. The same waveform is evident in the GPU temperature, which fluctuates roughly between 70 and 80 °C.

The power consumption never reaches its maximum in the stress test, but hovers only around 67 W. Gigabyte has installed two stereo speakers with 2 W each, which is generally standard. Unfortunately, the speakers aren’t really convincing in any discipline: they’re reasonably loud, but are unable to deliver well-balanced mids or highs.

In addition to the digital outputs, the 3. 5 mm headset slot can be used for external devices. Energy consumption is very good, especially compared to the previous generation.

In the predecessor, the power-hungry RTX 3080 Ti was also throttled at 105 W. In the gaming benchmarks, you can see that the old card performs noticeably worse while consuming significantly more. The new RTX 40x generation is clearly much more efficient.

More information on the efficiency of the new RTX 40x generation can be found here . When gaming with Witcher 3, the average consumption is around 158 W. The medium-sized standard power supply from Chicony is rated at 240 W and copes well with load peaks of up to 192 W in stress testing.

Battery runtimes depend heavily on the selected mode, and the bright OLED screen also drains quite a bit of juice. The laptop still has an 88 Wh battery. Due to the overall lower consumption, longer runtimes can be achieved with a well-chosen energy saving mode.

When watching a film or surfing the web at reduced brightness, we get just under 7. 5 hours each, a good value. Gigabyte has automatically activated the energy-saving mode here.

At maximum brightness, the runtime falls to 5. 5 hours. Until now, high-performance laptops have often been big, loud and hot, making them suitable for either gamers or creatives, depending on the design.

In the future, we would ideally like silent, cool and, if need be, small, mobile laptops. The Aero is a good step in this direction, even if the current technology is far from ideal. The Aero performs better than its thicker predecessor with the RTX 3080 Ti (also only 105 W), but its efficient RTX 4070 consumes noticeably less and stays cooler, though not quieter.

If you’re looking for discreet, you’ll benefit from the many power modes and manual setting options in the Control Center. This allows you to adapt the performance and emissions of the Aero to the respective situation or environment. Because the present Aero scores better in the “Gaming” rating category (88%) than in the “Multimedia” category (86%), we are rating it as a gaming notebook.

Gamers might be bothered by the fact that the otherwise great OLED display can only operate at 60 Hz. Otherwise all other points of criticism, such as the unbalanced speakers, are relatively mild. The Aero 16 OLED not only has a great screen, but is also particularly thin and, thanks to the efficient RTX 4070, also powerful and yet comparatively economical and cool.

The competition never sleeps and is also exploring the possibilities of the new RTX 40x generation. We have only reviewed a few so far, so alternatives are still rare. Interested buyers can check directly via Gigabyte’s official product page here , where you click on Buy and select your corresponding region and country from the drop down list.

You will then be forward to a list of online stores that may list the laptop in your country. In the US, for example, Amazon lists the two configurations of the Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED, namely one with an i9-13900H and 32 GB RAM and the other with an i7-13700H and 16 GB RAM. Both are US$2.

299,00 and US$2. 099,00 , respectively. Of course, this is not representative of global availability, which is likely to fluctuate depending on regional and shipping factors.

Prices are as of 12. 03. 2023 and subject to change.

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