Aorus X7 v6

Aorus, while not quite a well-known as Alienware or MSI, has been making excellent gaming laptops since 2014. They’re a subsidiary of fellow Taiwanese hardware giant Gigabyte. 

The company prides itself on making not the biggest and beefiest gaming gear, but rather slimline models that offer more portability and sleek looks. 

Price, availability and value

The X7 v6 is part of the sixth generation of Aorus' laptop fleet, and it’s the largest of the group at 17.3-inches. 

It’s accompanied by two smaller machines, the very good X5 v6 (with a 15.6-inch screen) and the rather wonderful X3 v6 (13.9-inch).

This isn’t the most powerful machine they make, that mantel goes to its sibling the X7 DT V6. That has an Nvidia 1080 GTX tucked inside along with an optional 4K screen, whereas here it’s a GTX 1070 and two choices of non-4K screen (more on that later). The lack of 4K makes sense here as the 1070 probably wouldn’t do it justice. 

It should be noted that the DT costs considerably more at around £3,000 ($3740, AU$4800), whereas this is looking at around £2,200 ($2,760, AU$3,580) depending on which configuration you go for. For the money you’d spend on a DT, you might want to actually look at an SLI system.

As well as the screen options to pick from there’s an optional enhanced streaming chip. The Live Stream Engine chip is installed in one of the three M.2 slots. Apparently it’ll reduce the CPU load by up to 30% when live streaming. We didn’t have one installed so we couldn’t test it unfortunately. Also it’s not available in all countries, so do check with your supplier. 

Design

Aoruses are always pleasing-looking rigs, their designs avoid some of gaming laptops’ more garish tropes. Of course, it’s got those traditional huge air vents at the back, it’s in gaming matt black, but it does away with alien-green colour flashes and bright red racing lines as they’d detract from its stealth bomber style.

Its little sister, the X3 has had a design update with an understated power button on the side. The X7 is pretty much the same as the previous generation which places the button, adorned with the Aorus logo, in the centre-back of the keyboard area. It glows bright white which can be a little distracting. We actually prefer the updated X3, so it’s a pity the update wasn’t made here too. 

At the base of the keyboard, either side of the trackpad, are two large speakers that considering the thinness of the machine, belt out a fair amount of sound. The bass is particularly impressive due to the dual 2 watt woofers. It’ll never rival a Bowers & Wilkins system but it will drown out a lot of other laptops of a similar size.

The keyboard is fully backlist with 16.8 million color options. While they’re not that visible during daylight even on full brightness, they come into their own in a darkened room. There is also a range of novelty settings such as disco and flashing patterns.

They’re set up using Aorus’ Fusion program, and most of which are incredibly distracting, but are fun for showing off to friends. What does come in handy are the presets for games such as Starcraft and League of Legends. For instance, if you’re learning where the shortcuts are for a specific game, there’s usually a preset available. The programmable colors could also come in handy for creatives who are learning a new program as you can create your own pretty easily.

Travel on the keyboard is low and it’s not too clicky. Some gamers might find it a little lacking in response time as it’s not a mechanical keyboard. But that would add unwanted bulk, something that goes against Aorus’ ethos. As this is a 17.3-inch laptop, there’s a handy numpad on the right hand side. Generally, the key positioning takes a little getting used to, the enter key doesn’t not quite seem in the right place but we quickly got used to it.

The touchpad looks fantastic, and the blue Aorus hawk logo shimmers like a peacock feather as it darts diagonally across the pad. It’s a good size, but can sometimes skip, jump and be a little bit too sensitive. We highly recommend using a mouse where possible as it would also accidentally zoom and sometimes drag windows across when we didn’t want it to.

Screen options

Screen-wise, there are a couple of options to ponder: Full HD (1920x1080) or QHD (2560x1440) - we were sent the latter. Aorus claims the QHD version is the world’s first gaming laptop to feature a 120Hz & 5ms screen. Although now MSI’s Dominator Pro has a 120Hz option. It’s worth noting that both options here are G-sync compatible.

However, the screen was a bone of contention, it’s not that clear and has small horizontal lines across it. According to Aorus, this is an issue with the screen manufacturers that will get fixed for future models, not our test model however.

It’s the worst aspect of the machine, when you’re paying over £2,000/$2000/AU$3,500 for a laptop, you expect a certain standard in the screen. The anti-glare wasn’t that effective either. And at low brightness the colours were dull and a little muddy. It was difficult to appreciate the claimed 120Hz visuals because of this.
 

The good news is that this is an incredibly fast beast with an i7-6820HK Skylake inside. It’s a CPU which runs at a faster clock speed (by 0.1GHz) than a 6700HQ which is in the Gigabyte P37X and HP Omen 17. 

It also has an unlocked multiplier, which means it can be overclocked within Windows using Aorus’ Command & Control software up to a whopping 4.0GHz. 

It is, however, looking a little long in the tooth. It was released back in 2015 and with the newest Kaby Lakes just have been released this may not be as future proof as other upcoming setups.

Our test machine came with a gamer friendly amount of RAM, 16GB of DDR4 2400, and its upgradable to a maximum of 64GB. Unfortunately, the base is attached using speciality Torx screws so you’ll need to buy a special screwdriver if you’re thinking of upgrading to that magical 64GB.

Permanent storage is courtesy of an M.2 PCIe 512GB SSD for the OS and a 1TB for everything else. More than generous we thought, but if that’s not enough it’s possible to  upgrade using three 512GB M.2 PCIe SSDs and one 2TB HDD, providing you a massive 3.5TB. 

Performance

For the benchmarks, we set the Command & Control software to overclock the CPU to 4.0 GHz and turned the fans to the gaming setting. This did mean it got quite loud during the tests, and belted out heat from the rear vents. It’s a laptop in name only, so we’d recommend setting this up on a large well-ventilated desk for best results. Also due to the fan noise, consider noise-cancelling headphones when playing demanding titles.

That being said, it breezed through The Division at just over 80fps on Ultra, and nearly hit 200fps on Low. Its scores bested both the Gigabyte P37X v6, HP Omen 17 and Acer Predator 17x. 

It also stormed through out other benchmark tests too, beating its aforementioned rivals on almost everything except the Geekbench Multi Core test where the Predator just edged in front. Most impressive were its 3D Mark tests which easily outshone the others by a few thousand or more in each test. Sky Diver clocked in a particularly impressive 30,837.

It’s obvious that a 1070 coupled with the overclocked processor is a winning combination. The GPU also means that it’s VR Ready, and the SteamVR Performance Test reflects this in a score of 9.9 (Very Good).

The only place where it fell down, and it fell down pretty far, was with its the battery life or rather, lack of it. In the PC Mark 8 Battery Test, it couldn’t even hit 1 hour 30, limping to 1 hour 17. Altering the settings didn’t help much either, on lowest brightness and a throttled CPU it only managed 1 hour 24 which is pretty dismal.

On paper it should be better than the Gigabyte P37X as it’s got a 94.24Wh battery compared to the P37X’s 75.81Wh. However the Gigabyte racked up over double the battery time than the Aorus at 3 hours 23 mins. 

Admittedly, this is foremost a gaming laptop, so it’s not intended to be used while travelling or to be away from a power supply for long, but we would have liked to have seen a little more oomph in the battery department.

We liked

Aorus has created a very high performing 17.3-inch gaming laptop that’s portable and is encompassed in an attractive package. It achieved exemplary scores in our benchmarks, no doubt due to the overclockable CPU under the hood. Aorus’ coupled software makes the tricksy dark magic of overclocking a doddle. 

We disliked

The X7 v6 is a little pricey, not necessarily over-priced as it does come with excellent components, however if you’re looking for better value with only slightly lower performance we’ve recommend something like HP’s Omen 17 or Acer’s Predator 17 X. 

The battery life is very below par, and the screen wasn’t up to scratch either. It’s a pity as if both of these things had been up scratch then this would have been an excellent machine, despite the slightly higher price.

Final verdict

Aorus just missed the goal with the updated X7. On paper it’s incredible (if a bit expensive), but in reality the screen and battery life woes means this upgrade just hit the post. However if you have a bit of money to spend, are looking for an overclockable and VR-ready unit, and don’t care much for battery life then this might be for you.