Review on Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED SB Thin+Light High Performance Laptop by Philip Davenport

I bought this laptop when it was on sale. I was hesitant at first as I saw a lot of negative reviews about Gigabyte laptops, but after using this laptop for a while I can safely say that this might be the best laptop I've had in a long time. Build Quality: The build quality of this laptop is fantastic, it's all aluminum so it really feels premium. And also, in my opinion, a very nice design. Really muted which I like. The only thing that worries me is the loop. Does the loop not feel tight enough? This causes the display to shake sometimes, but never when I'm typing, so that's a good thing. It can also be opened with one hand. The laptop is also fairly light, but the 230W AC adapter is quite large. Display: Wow, the display here is really great. The 4K OLED panel is really bright and vibrant. 500 cd/m² is not exceeded, but it was a sacrifice that one gigabyte had to make to get good deltaE values. The contrast is amazing, the color scheme here is really good. The only downside is the 60Hz. Hopefully we'll see high refresh rate OLED screens on laptops soon. Sometimes I see banding, but rarely notice it. Performance: The 1660ti paired with the i7-9750h is a pretty good fit for me. Aside from gaming, I typically get around 120 fps in Apex Legends, 100 fps in Resident Evil 2, 150 fps in Overwatch, and 90 fps in Soul Calibur. All games were on high settings except Overwatch on epic settings and all games ran at 1080p. I can't run many games in 4k. In terms of video editing and rendering in Unity and Blender, the 1660ti also has studio drivers for AERO and render times were pretty good and video editing was pretty smooth, although I don't edit videos often. The thermals on my unit weren't very good. but they weren't that bad. I've never experienced temperature throttling. Under load, the GPU temperature is typically around 75-84°C, while the CPU temperature is higher at around 90-92°C. You can drop the temperature by about 3-5 degrees by cranking the fans to maximum, but at this point they get REALLY loud. Keyboard and Trackpad: I like the AERO's keyboard. The backlight is highly customizable and bright. The keys have fairly good travel, making them quite comfortable to type on. The trackpad is glass, so really smooth, and it has Windows precision drivers so gestures and the like work like a breeze. It also has a fingerprint scanner which is pretty fast and works great for me. Software: The laptop is virus free except for GIGABYTE Fusion and AI software which I don't think are viruses as they are very useful for fan control. , keyboard lights etc. Almost all my drivers are out of date but hey the control center makes it very easy to update drivers and after about 30 minutes all my drivers were up to date. I personally like and have no problems with the control center, but the AI software still seems useless. Fan noise: The fans get very loud under load, but otherwise I hardly hear them. As mentioned above, maximum fans sound like a jet engine. With Gigabyte Fusion, you also have complete fan customization. Battery life: Battery life for me when writing documents, surfing the web, 40% brightness and keyboard backlight on was around 4-5 hours for me. Didn't check it while playing the game though. Camera. For me, the camera is the worst thing about this laptop. Bad quality, bad position. Although I rarely use it, I don't care. However, they do have privacy protection, so there's no need for a ribbon for the privacy-conscious. I will continue to update this review as I use AERO but so far this is a really happy customer. Some other things: - The laptop has a second m2 slot for SATA and NVME SSDs, Gigabyte also includes extra thermal pads for any additional SSD you might add. The standard SSD is also very fast. On November 17, 2020 I filled my second m2 slot with a Sabrent Rocket 1TB nvme SSD and had no problems with it on my laptop. The speed is also very fast, around 2000MB/sr/3000MB/s. I've seen many complaints about the AERO's Wi-Fi card, but the Wi-Fi on my model was excellent. No problems with download and upload speeds over Wi-Fi on my model and no dropouts. ***Update*** It's been a month since Aero 15 with no issues so far. I still love this laptop. **Updated 11/17/2020* My GPU fan started making loud grinding noises after owning the laptop for about 3 months. I'm not sure what caused this, but I suspect the bearing is defective. A few months later, the fan failed completely and stopped spinning completely. I decided to buy a replacement fan myself on AliExpress and replace the fan. Replacing the fan was pretty easy, and while I was at it I also re-glued my CPU and GPU with Artic MX-4 thermal compound. After swapping out and re-gluing, my fans are now much quieter and my thermals are much better than before. I can sustain 3.8GHz on all cores under full CPU load. I'm still deducting 2 stars from my rating as I'm disappointed that the fan failed in such a short time. If you search Reddit for other people's experiences with this laptop, it seems like a pretty big issue with this model. Not sure if this applies to the 2020 model but I can only hope it gets fixed. Other than that, I haven't had any more problems with this laptop and everything was still good, especially the performance after putting it back in place. Fan model for anyone curious: PLB0701S12HH. My opinion stands, I still think this is a great laptop but I hope Gigabyte fixes the fan issue. If you look at Reddit, people have guides on how to fix fans without buying replacements.