Well, the Aero arrived yesterday. To recap it is the Aero 15-X9, RTX 2070, 32Gig RAM, 1TB SSD, 4k.
I have to say I am loving it so far. However I think the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience may well generate a few returns if the user isn’t accustomed to putting in some time in order to optimise and tweak. Initially I was greeted with permanently (and rather loudly) running fans and the loudest coil wine I have ever heard - in fact I could hear it 10 feet away. Hmmm!
So I started working my way through the setup list which I normally do with any new laptop. I did a clean install of the operating system and drivers, followed by updates. I downloaded the Gigabyte control centre utility which has some useful features. On this I set the fans to ‘quiet’ mode. I then went into the various power management settings and made sure this was set to Balanced, from which I went into advanced power management where I took a look at the processor states. As I said, I’m not a gamer, so I like to setup my laptops for fairly quiet stable operation. I set the maximum processor state on battery to 95% and to 80% when charging. I set cooling on both modes to passive. This doesn’t result in any noticeable performance degradation for the tasks I carry out, and I find it can help to minimise fan noise. I then set the battery management to the middle of the slider when on charge and to the left (a quarter of the way in) when on battery.
I disabled any background tasks that I didn’t need such as Cortana, Win 10 communicating with other computers, Windows tips etc.
At this point the fans were marginally less loud but the coil wine was still absolutely horrible and because of that I was struggling to work on the laptop and my husband indicated he did not want to sit next to me. When assessing all this I should state that CPU usage was very low, around 3%, so that was not the cause of the constant noise.
The next thing to do was to set an undervolt at -0.140v and 0.020v on the GPU. There was a slight improvement to noise but not in any way meaningful. The fans were still constant and fairly loud and the coil wine was still manifesting as a loud squeal which fluctuated when I changed task or scrolled. Not good. I went and checked on the Gigabyte site and I saw that a BIOS update was available. I decided to go ahead and install this (FB08 23.04.19). I was then greeted with a completely black screen and the machine showed no signs of turning itself on again, as it normally would. After half an hour a hard reset got things going and I saw that the firmware update had been installed. I was delighted to be greeted by silent laptop - no fan noise and absolutely no coil wine.
I started to do some general things like opening chrome browsers and watching 4K videos on YouTube. The fans only came on once, briefly, about 30 minutes into a movie. I then did some processing in Adobe Lightroom and I noticed that the fans were kicking in every time I opened an image made some changes. I went back to look at my power management settings and I noticed that the firmware update (and the update of the Gigabyte control centre) had introduced a new power plan, geared towards performance. I set this back to balanced and set the fans back to ‘quiet’. From that point onwards the machine has been silent unless I’m pushing it a bit in light room running exports and slideshows. Fan behaviour is completely normal, it kicks in only when needed and at a pleasingly low level. I will also say that the update took out my battery management slider (on the bottom toolbar) so I can't adjust the battery state.
Idling temperature is around 40° C. General productivity such as having three or four web browsers open, doing emails, and documents in Word can take the temperature up to 52° C. I consider that perfectly satisfactory. Plugged in idle temp fluctuates a bit but is mostly 48-53 degrees.
The keyboard is also a nice surprise. Having been spoiled with my ThinkPad keyboards I thought I might not like the one on the Aero. But it’s great, no iffy keys, and a nice tactile feel. The 4K screen is also beautiful - and it’s matte. The Pantone calibration was garish out-of-the-box but is easy to tone down and tweak slightly, and it’s now very accurate. The speakers are absolutely lousy, even worse than the ones on the X1E. That doesn’t bother me because I tend to carry a good quality Bluetooth speaker with me.
Looks-wise I feel it’s better in person than in pictures, it’s really very sleek and handsome.
It is terrible for fingerprints, but this is easily dealt with by using ECO Natural Cleaner which is wonderful stuff, chemical and alcohol free. I use it to clean all my electricals (and it’s the only thing which gets all the smears of my glass shower screen).
So far, I am loving this Aero. As and when I have any additional findings I will give an update.
