The Aorus 17G YD ($2,599 as tested) is the flagship 17.3-inch gaming laptop for Gigabyte’s premium gaming arm. It’s the textbook definition of bleeding edge, featuring everything from Intel’s Core i7 “Tiger Lake-H” power-user-class processor (see our first look at Tiger Lake-H performance) to PCI Express 4.0 storage, and even throws in Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.1 ports for good measure. (And let’s not forget its blistering 300Hz screen.) But what it gets right in tech, it lacks a little in polish. Audible fan noise and a webcam that looks up at your chin are minor downsides, but the largest one is its middle-of-the-road gaming performance. It trails the lofty bar set by the Alienware m17 R4, which remains our Editors’ Choice pick for a high-end 17-inch gamer. However, keep this Aorus on the shortlist, especially if you need practical battery life or a more sedate design.
Built to Last
The Aorus 17G feels remarkably solid no matter where or how you touch it. It’s no lightweight at 5.95 pounds, nor is it the trimmest laptop to sport a 17.3-inch screen, measuring 1 by 15.9 by 10.8 inches (HWD). But its precision aluminum build and aggressive lines make it a fearsome beast. Alienware’s m17 R4 has similar dimensions (0.87 by 15.8 by 11.6 inches), but it’s slightly heavier, at 6.55 pounds.
Unlike the RGB-themed Alienware, the Aorus 17G limits its external lighting to the passively backlit Aorus logo on its lid.
The lid is impressively stiff for being so thin. Its display hinges are strong and prevent the lid from wobbling yet allow it to be opened one-handed.
A razor-thin 3mm display bezel aids the Aorus 17G’s modern looks. However, it also demotes the webcam to the bottom of the screen where it looks up at your chin. At least it has a sliding privacy cover. Its 720p image quality is status quo for a high-end gaming laptop.
Now That’s Fast: A 300Hz Screen
These days, 240Hz screens don’t make gaming-laptop headlines. In fact, the Aorus 17G’s 300Hz screen doesn’t either, as it’s outdone by the 360Hz screen offered as an option on the Alienware m17 R4. But even Christopher Reeve’s eyes would have trouble telling the difference between those sky-high refresh rates. (See our feature Does Your Gaming Laptop Need a High-Refresh-Rate Screen?)
The 1,920-by-1,080-pixel IPS panel provides wide viewing angles and an anti-glare surface to mute reflections. Its brightness is more than adequate for indoor environments. Aorus says the panel covers an above-average 72% of the NTSC gamut.
Oddly, the Aorus 17G doesn’t have any frame-rate-syncing technology, such as Nvidia G-Sync like the m17 R4, but its 300Hz refresh rate makes this less important. I didn’t notice any tearing playing through newer games at the triple-digit frame rates that this notebook can produce. (Look for the benchmarks later.) All told, it’s a great-looking screen that is particularly well-suited for esports because of its high refresh rate.
A Real Mechanical Keyboard
The Aorus 17G’s hallmark (or shall we say, key) feature is its mechanical keyboard. The clicks and clacks from pressing its Omron-brand Blue switches parallel those of a desktop mechanical keyboard. They have an exciting tactile feel and encourage fast typing. The keystrokes are more authoritative than most laptops’ because of the long 2.5mm key travel.
The Aorus Control Center app provides basic per-key RGB lighting control, including numerous animations and game-specific presets for popular titles that illuminate oft-used keys. You can change the per-key RGB values, but there’s no way to save profiles.
Razer gaming notebooks like the Blade Pro 17 offer finer backlighting control with their Razer Synapse app. That said, the Aorus Control Center should meet the needs of most users.
Also pleasantly tactile and easy to use is the Aorus 17G’s buttonless touchpad. The square at its top left is a fingerprint reader, which is nice to see considering most gaming notebooks forsake biometrics altogether.
This notebook’s entertainment value is compromised somewhat by its lackluster speakers, which project strained, bass-shy sound from under the palm rest. But gamers will be best served by closed headphones or earbuds for another reason: fan noise. The Aorus 17G’s cooling fans came on frequently throughout my usage, even in the course of web surfing. Gaming brings them to their most audible, with a high-pitched sound that travels across a room.
Thankfully, the noise is not for naught. I recorded maximum CPU and GPU temperatures of just 70 and 72 degrees C while running a 3DMark Time Spy stress test, both far below the threshold of thermal throttling.
The Latest Connectivity
The Aorus 17G takes advantage of its Intel Tiger Lake-H platform by including a Thunderbolt 4 port on its right edge, where you’ll also find a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, a mini-DisplayPort 1.4 video output, and, surprisingly, an HDMI 2.1 video output.
HDMI 2.1 supports 4K/120Hz, against the 4K/60Hz support for the older HDMI 2.0 standard. Meanwhile, the left side offers 2.5Gbps Ethernet, a full-size SD card reader, a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and separate headphone and microphone jacks.
Wireless connectivity comes from an Intel AX200 card that supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.
‘Tiger Lake-H’ on the Attack: Testing the Aorus 17G
The $2,599 Aorus 17G YD is well-equipped with an eight-core Core i7-11800H processor (2.3GHz base, up to 4.6GHz Turbo Boost), a 16GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and 32GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory. Its one and only storage drive is a rather small 512GB SSD, but it does support the new PCI Express 4.0 protocol for fast data-transfer speeds. Windows 10 Home is included and free of unwanted apps, though the standard warranty is merely a year. (In fairness, few gaming-notebook vendors offer a longer standard warranty. It would be wise to invest in another year or two on a model this expensive.)
If its pricing holds steady (a big assumption, given the core-silicon shortages wracking the PC industry these days), the Aorus 17G YD is more than competitive with the Alienware m17 R4, which I priced out at $2,508 on Dell.com with just a GeForce RTX 3070, though that price did include its 360Hz, G-Sync-enabled screen. (No GeForce RTX 3080 units were available when I checked, a likely casualty of the shortages.)
Let’s get testing. I compared the Aorus 17G to the following gaming notebooks for our benchmark comparisons. The Lenovo Legion 7i and the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC (the latter from Aorus’ mother company) are both 15-inchers with a comparable grade of hardware. But the real heat comes from the Alienware m17 R4 and the MSI GE76 Raider.
All those notebooks sport previous-generation Intel “Comet Lake-H” chips, so this will be a good opportunity for the Aorus 17G to flex its 11th Generation Tiger Lake-H muscle.
Storage, Media, and CPU Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, a general system performance suite that simulates real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. The Aorus 17G easily surpassed our informal 4,000-point reference point for high-performance PCs with a staggering 7,157 points to lead the group. It also did well in PCMark 8’s Storage subtest, even though the test’s workload does not take explicit advantage of the Aorus 17G’s PCI Express 4.0 SSD.
Next up is a pair of CPU-crunching tests: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, while in our Handbrake test, we transcode a 12-minute 4K video down to 1080p.
Cinebench R15 highlights the superior performance of the Aorus 17G’s Tiger Lake-H chip relative to the Comet Lake chips in the others, all of which also have eight cores. It even beat the m17 R4’s Core i9 chip despite running at a lower frequency.
The final test in this section is photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the totals. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
The Aorus 17G continued its winning streak, continuing to edge out the m17 R4. No complaints about the raw CPU performance here.
Graphics Tests
Our first two benchmarks in this section measure the gaming performance potential of a PC. In UL’s 3DMark, we run the subtests Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs), both DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.’s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.
The Aorus 17G’s strong processor did little to help it in these GPU-heavy tests next to the m17 R4 and the GE76 Raider. Though all three use a GeForce RTX 3080, the Aorus uses a Max-Q version that is limited to just 105 watts. Its performance drop-off is especially apparent in the Superposition 1080p test. (For more insight, see our feature With the GeForce RTX 30 Series, Buying a Gaming Laptop Just Got More Complicated.)
The situation improved slightly for the Aorus 17G in our real-world gaming benchmarks, though it still trailed the m17 R4 by significant margins. We use the built-in 1080p benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very High presets). Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip Rise of the Tomb Raider to DirectX 12.
Objectively, the Aorus 17G’s triple-digit frame rates in these titles are excellent for a notebook. It would easily push higher numbers in less demanding esports titles, such as Fortnite, potentially putting its 300Hz screen to good use.
Battery Rundown Test
For our last benchmark, we measure a laptop’s unplugged runtime while playing a locally stored video with screen brightness at 50 percent and audio volume at 100 percent. We use the notebook’s energy-saving rather than balanced or other power profile, turn off Wi-Fi, and even disable keyboard backlighting to squeeze as much life as possible out of the system.
The Aorus 17G tied the GE76 Raider to the minute, a situation rarely seen in our testing. Both lasted more than twice as long as the m17 R4, which has brief battery life even for a power-hungry 17.3-inch gaming laptop.
Tops in Tech, Not Quite in Gaming Prowess
The Aorus 17G earns a spot among elite gaming notebooks with its top-notch design and bleeding-edge technology. Its eight-core Intel Tiger Lake H-class processor markedly outperforms the previous Comet Lake-H silicon, and it takes full advantage of the new platform by including PCI Express 4.0 storage and Thunderbolt 4.
Despite all that technology, the Aorus 17G’s gaming performance doesn’t stand out since it uses a power-limited Max-Q version of the GeForce RTX 3080, which is why the better-performing Alienware m17 R4 remains our Editors’ Choice award pick for a high-end 17.3-inch gaming notebook. Nonetheless, those that need practical battery life or a more subdued design should keep the Aorus 17G on the shortlist, and it’s entirely possible that the ongoing silicon shortages might shift the economic advantage in its favor.
