Gigabyte AERO 15 Laptop: i7-9750H, 15.6" 4K OLED, 512GB SSD, GTX 1660 Ti EXPIRED

I have this exact spec of laptop for gaming a whole year, some pros and cons:

Pros:
1. Absolutely great raw performance if you tweak it right. But mediocre performance when use it as stock, (read more in cons)

If you tweak well, undervolt and apply liquid metal to heatsink the Cinebench R20 multicore can reach 3100 points put is well beat most 8 core system.
3dmark time spy canreach 6200 points, [3dmark.com] put it well against RTX 2060 with (core+210, mem+400)

2. Gorgeous Samsung P3 AMOLED screen, AFAIK no image retention issue like LG panel. Not that I'm aware of from past year experience with other vendors using the same panel. There are even more vendors like HP, Asus are using this screen for laptop start this year also proves it's longevity. Also the color accuracy is top of the chart, I tested with i1 Pro, it's average delta E 0.16, full coverage of DCI-P3 even 95% coverage of aRGB.


3. I like the design aesthetics, more toward creation than gaming. Also likes the fingerprint scan and locked cam.

4. lots of ports: HDMI 2.0, TB3, even UHS-II SD card. Gigabyte cable, USB-C...

5. very easy get access to all internal components, I tear it down more than 20 times to change SSD, memory, reapply thermal paste, no issue at all.

Cons:
1. This vanilla laptop tout about using thermal grizzly thermal compound, but it's execution is actually very bad not for it's performance but a bad compatibility issue: the thermal paste is too wet and leaving part of cpu not in contact with heatsink cause serious temperature imbalance, I've seen two of these laptops under stressing test, the temp variance between cores can reach 30c. thus thermal limit kicks in and cpu frequency get downgraded.
The only solution I found is liquid metal, I first used thermal grizzly conductonaut on cpu, it will keep each and every core in touch with heatsink andhugely reduce the temprature. [imgur.com] It also proves the heatsink and fan is really great, just been compromised by bad thermal compound.

2. The laptop fan's noise profile is very unpleasant, I've had Acer, Asus ROG and Apple, never been such distracts like Aero. I can only say if you live with it long enough, you may adapt to it like me. But you really wish it's using something else.

3. The charging location is really bad: on the center of right side, it's conflict with right hand mouse and looks ugly.

4. I don't like the num pad, but someone maybe say otherwise.

5. The accompany control software is very nasty to use, it's slow and take a big toll on cpu when open. Don't upgrade the control center to newest version, the best version to use is 19.08.30.05 [gigabyte.com], you can't find it in Gigabyte support page now, but the direct link to it is still alive at the time of my writing, if you will buy this laptop, trust me use this version.
What's special about this particular version:
1. it unlocks 2 tier GPU overclock, it's magically add extra 100Mhz to GPU core on top of your 3rd party overclock like afterburner. I don't know how, it's just works, but if you manually overclock extra 100Mhz on core, it will crash.
2. It will grant you a very convenient shortcut of cycle 3 fan profiles: Full, Silent and Gaming with shortcut key press of fn + esc, so you don't need to mess around control center to change fan profile when you want silent after gaming session.

For some unknown reason, Gigabyte dropped those two important features, you lose about 3-5% performance on GPU and there is only two fan profile (max and gaming) to chose on most recent update.

Some tip of using this 4k panel in gaming:

Tip 1: Let's be frank, 1660 Ti or even RTX 2080 Ti does not guarantee you all Ultra 4k experience in 2020 and future game, but you can make your life better than some 1080p by setting game with 50-65% custom internal resolution.
For example the World war Z, 1660 Ti can play it with 1080p all Ultra with 90-120 fps. of course you gonna notice some blurry on Text and UI due to non-native resolution. So the best way is to set game resolution on 4k, and change resolution scale to 50%, thus the game is render with 4k text and UI, but internal 3D render with 1080p, since it's a 15 inch laptop screen nonetheless, your eye will mostly forgive a little blurry of 3D render especially when moving, but in the mean time you get full benefit of 4k crisp text and UI which are more useful since they're static mostly and the fps performance is on par with 1080p. It's a lot better than everything downgrade to 1080p in old fashion, you can check my screen shot down there for it. A lot of new game have this scale to tweak, use it wisely.

Tip 2: Don't get confused about refresh rate and panel latency: 60hz refresh rate cause image tear effect more visible when your fps changes rapidly in a short period of time, and latency is the delay of showing rendered image on your display, OLED have very low latency, but fresh rate is locked for 60hz like most panels, thus in gaming you definitely gonna notices some image tears due to fps change rapidly. but latency? not at all. So some people says "this is not for gaming!", I totally disagree with them. this OLED panel is perfect for gaming even competition gaming due to low latency, only thing matters is if you can accept the image tear effect when fps rapidly changes.reference link [notebookcheck.net] Beware! I'm not prompting 144, 240 hz panel useless! high refresh rate also guarantees they're not juke panel indirectly since they're more expensive to make. What I'm saying is you need to differentiate average 60hz panel to this beast.

Yes, perhaps in an Acer Nitro 5 chassis. You pay for premium builds unfortunately.

I have both the XPS 15 OLED and this Aero 15 OLED in my household. For our particular units, the Aero had significantly better calibration and calibration options.