Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED – The Best Laptop for Video Editors?

Content Creator laptops is a rare thing to find, most content creators will use gaming laptops, cause they are the ones with decent enough hardware to do the job, well Gigabyte’s AERO 15 OLED is a game changer in this aspect, the Aero 15 OLED is one of Gigabyte’s slimed downed studio laptops that looks all nice and sleek but definitely packs a ton of horsepower underneath the body. Now the  AERO 15 OLED has been around for a while now, but this one has the 10th gen Intel CPU’s and the super version of the 20 series GPUs.

Specifications/Price

So specs wise our review sample of the Aero 15 has a 8 core 16 thread, i7- 10875H that can turbo boost to 5.1ghz. Your GPU options range from a GTX1660Ti up to an RTX 2080 Super MaxQ studio. Then for memory you get 2x DDR4 SODIMM slots that are currently populated with 16GB of memory, but is upgradeable to 64GBs. For storage you get space for 2x m.2 NVMe SSDs. Then finally for pricing the Aero 15 OLED is about $2700 on Amazon and R56000 on Dreamware tech in South Africa.

Now even though that isn’t the cheapest, it’s very well balanced between all the other thin and light creator laptops on the market. Also all those specs in a laptop that is only 20mm thick and weighs 2kg is a content creator’s dream.

Design

So then for that thin body you get this very sleek matte black aluminum shell that definitely does not feel cheap. It still attracts fingerprints but not as bad as some others. At the back of the display you get the white Aero logo which does look very stylish. Something small but a nice touch is the AERO badge at the back of the laptop, that has 2 little LEDS shining onto it, like a car’s number plate.

IO

3‎x USB 3.2 Gen1 (Type-A)

1x Thunderbolt™ 3 (Type-C)

1x HDMI 2.0

1x mini DP 1.4

1x 3.5mm Headphone/Microphone Combo Jack

1x UHS-II SD Card Reader

1x DC-in Jack

1x RJ-45

You actually get a good amount for this thin body and if you really wanted more you can always get a thunderbolt 3 hub for even more options. On the right hand side it does get cluttered as most of your ports including your power connection sits there. I do appreciate the FULL UHS-II SD card reader built in, as most companies are starting to take that out now.

Peripherals

When lifting up the screen which you can do with a single finger you get a per key RGB backlight keyboard. The switches do have a nice soft and silent keypress that I had no issue using writing numerous reviews on already. The more medium sized track pad was honestly pretty much perfect with smooth and precise tracking. For extra security you do get a fingerprint reader built into the trackpad and you can also log in using Windows Hello.

Screen

As for the main feature that makes this laptop stand out above its competition is the, 15.6” 4K samsung AMOLED display, and it is just breathtakingly beautiful. As for colour accuracy it is calibrated by X-rite pantone, with the screen having a color accuracy of 100% for sRGB, 98% for Adobe RGB and a DeltaE of 1.39. Honestly this screen is perfect, it is very good for gaming and definitely a dream to edit on. It is currently the most accurate screen in the studio, and it honestly just took our breath away. 

Most of us here at the studio, would actually prefer this type of screen over a high refresh rate monitor any day. The only bad thing about this display is the hinges, as they wobble a lot when bumping or opening the screen. 

Speakers

Moving on to the speakers you get 2x 2W front bottom firing speakers that were decently loud and crisp and above average for a laptop, but no sub, meant that bass was lacking a tiny bit.

Webcam

As for the webcam you get a nostril viewing 720p webcam, with a privacy slider to keep all the bad guys from seeing you. Which also means your screens borders stay nice and thin.

Cooling

Then Just before we get into the performance, let’s talk about the cooling because that’s usually a problem with these thin and light high performance laptops, especially if you don’t have an aircon like I do. For the cooling solution you have air intakes on the sides and exhaust on the bottom. The Aero 15 has 2 fans 1 for the CPU and 1 for the GPU. 

On idle the CPU hovers around 42degrees and the GPU at 44degrees.

You can slightly hear the fans humm on idle, but it’s not loud at all. When on max fan settings though, they really come to life. As they get pretty loud, but we have seen that on previous Gigabyte laptops as well.

When running a CPU only blender workload, the CPU jumps up to around 70 degrees and drops clock speeds to around 3.2ghz on all cores.

Then for a GPU only Furmark stress test, the GPU reaches a max of around 68 degrees.

Benchmarks

So then jumping into performance, We have the RTX 2070 MaxQ Studio model here, again with the 8 core i7 10875H. I was able to run every game at max settings where it ranged from 80 to 150 fps. More synthetic benchmarks like Fire Strike also did quite well and more productivity benchmarks also performed good on the CPU. When rendering a video we edited on premiere, we took a 65GB project and it rendered in just over 6 minutes.

Overall the performance was definitely good for a thin and light laptop.

By looking at the benchmarks it does seem that the Aero 15 hits the power limit of the RTX 2070 Max-Q before the thermal limit. The same it seems for the CPU.

Power

Finally for the battery you get a quite large 230w power adapter and a 94 Watt hour battery. The battery lasted 1 hour and 10 minutes using a synthetic benchmark. With normal media use we got just over 5 hours from the battery. 

So in conclusion the new Aero 15 OLED is probably one of the best content creator laptops on the market right now. The screen is just amazing, making colour grading a pure delight. The i7 packed a good punch and I was glad to see that there wasn’t any thermal throttling. The 2070 Super did a decent job all around and I couldn’t complain about it at all. I must say that I was honestly impressed with this machine, especially the screen they used. I don’t think that there is a content creator laptop out there with a better screen right now. So if you are a photographer or animator or youtuber and need very good colour accuracy this is definitely the laptop you need to go for!