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Sudan, Juba
1 Level
719 Review
68 Karma

Review on Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED SB Thin+Light High Performance Laptop by Dominic Kimbro

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Great Specs, Terrible Keyboard, Spool Creaking, No Quality Control

I've been eyeing the Aero 15 for a long time and finally decided to buy it when it recently went on sale. Here is my rating of the Aero 15.PROS:1. This is a beautiful laptop. Thin, light, very thin bezels, metal all around, durable to the touch.2. They advertise the manufacturers of internal components, and everything is top-notch (except for killer Wi-Fi). Samsung display, Samsung memory, Grizzly thermal paste, Intel SSD, etc. I wish all manufacturers did this.3. Available with 4K OLED display. Not many "gaming" laptops offer this. While 4K gaming is arguably out of the question on the 1660 Ti, lower resolutions could be used for gaming and 4K for work and media consumption. Wide range of ports, including Thunderbolt 3 (a rarity on "gaming" laptops).5. Free internal M.2 slot for additional storage, expandable storage.6. Big battery.7. Very competitive price for specifications. CONS: 1. The laptop came with a broken display. Pixels light up randomly on the black loading screen. After loading, random flickering lines and stripes appeared on the screen. I noticed that in the first 3 seconds after turning it on. What is Gigabyte's quality control like today?2. I didn't like the keyboard at all. The first thing I noticed was that the keys were very tight. I've never typed on a stiffer keyboard, but have typed on many keyboards. But the worst thing about this keyboard is that it cramps the keys! At first I couldn't figure out why it seemed so wrong, so I measured it (from the left edge of the Q to the right edge of the P). Compared to the other two laptops and the desktop keyboard, the key sizes were the same, but the keys were slightly offset horizontally. I think they really wanted the number keys to be the same size as the rest. They then had to cramp the keys to make the keyboard fit. My other laptop with a full keyboard has narrower numeric keypad keys, and I've seen this on other laptops as well. As a blind typist, I am very disappointed with this keyboard.3. This keyboard has a very bright RGB backlight. Even on the lowest brightness setting, they seemed too bright to me.4. There are no indicator lights for power, hard drive activity, battery charge, caps lock, num lock. I can only assume that the same people who ruined the keyboard decided we didn't need it anymore.5. The RGB backlit keyboard only illuminates the functions of the main keys. Secondary functions do not light up. It didn't make much of a difference for normal typing, but you'd better have a flashlight handy for things like adjusting the brightness or volume, as these characters don't glow. I find it funny.6. Small complaint about the keyboard: since this is more of a general purpose laptop than a purely "gaming" laptop, I wish they hadn't used the ridiculous font they used on the keys. coil whistle. Annoying continuous coil whistling.8. In CPU stress tests, one core got significantly hotter than the others, by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, most likely due to poor thermal paste application. Another QC error. Gigabyte did well with the Aero line. They've found a good niche in the market for an all-around premium laptop. The laptop has very good specs and a very good price, but the product was botched for reasons of symmetry and who knows what other design principles might just interest other designers. The lack of quality control is pretty obvious too. I really wanted to like this laptop but I just couldn't, so I returned it.

Pros
  • Computers and Tablets
Cons
  • Obsolete Model