Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XD Gaming Laptop: i7 11800H, 4K, 1TB NVMe SSD, RTX 3070 Expired

So I just returned the 1399 RTX 3060 model yesterday. The screen is beautiful, and GPU compute performance was pretty close to my desktop GTX 1080 OC'd under water (the 3060 mobile even beat it in some things, very impressive considering the 3060 was running about 90 watts, the desktop 1080 about 220 watts).

Reasons why I returned it:
1. The Gigabyte control software for hardware functions is horrible, occasionally crashes, settings often randomly revert, the AI keeps turning itself back on.

1b. Did I say the Gigabyte software quality is horrible? So much so that it broke the built in Windows reset, and the Gigabyte specific reset in the Windows recovery menu would say it completed but didn't actually get rid of the data. I had to make a usb recovery drive with Gigabyte's USB Smart Backup Tool (which as far as I could tell isn't a backup tool but just a wipe the drive and reset to factory recovery tool) before I could finally return it to Best Buy. I reset the TPM chip to get rid of the bitlocker key on the windows partition before rewritting it with the tool.

The rest are much more minor complaints about the hardware:

1. The Intel CPU is decent but still not Ryzen-level, it ended up being power constrained pretty heavily. Cyberpunk 2077 would max all cores (perfectly playable but worrying for the future when my, all-be-it, desktop 3700x sits around 30-50% at 60 watts ish, Intel 11800 throttling to 45 watts ish in the upper 2Ghz or low 3Ghz range).

2. The 6GB of VRAM, size/bandwidth, was definitely a limiting factor in some scenarios against the 8GB GTX 1080. The 3060 mobile is still a great GPU, but it's sad to see it limited by that (and of course the 100 watt power limit).

3. No hardware MUX switch for the GPU output, meaning the internal screen will always be run physically from the i-gpu (10-20% performance hit in many games).

4. No USB C trickle charging and somewhat disappointing battery life, despite the 99WH battery and trying to minimize power usage (possibly due to the crappy Gigabyte software seemingly pulsing the dedicated GPU for no reason).

5. The hinge is a little wobbly and the fans are a bit high pitched.


Overall, I still liked the laptop but decided I could wait a while for other performance laptops with OLED screens at reasonable prices. If you need something now, the compromises on this aren't terrible.

PS: The 60Hz limitation wasn't nearly as bad as the consequential lacking of VRR/G-Sync. Still, turning VSync on if you can keep 60+ FPS mostly solves that.
I also did some comparisons between 1080p DLSS upscaling, Intel's integer upscaling, and native 4k on Cyberpunk. The quality difference isn't huge and I ended up settling on the integer upscaling for 20-30% more performance than DLSS (25fps ish DLSS to 35 fps ish integer)

Aero 15 is mainly targeted towards productivity related workloads like Content creation, Video and Photo editing while keeping it's gaming DNA. The concept is similar to XPS 15 lineup but rather than being a full fledged productivity machine, Aero series strikes a balance between Gaming and Productivity. and RTX 3070 can play a lot of games in 4K with middle or lower-middle setting and a lot of Multiplayers games like PUB-G, Overwatch, COD online, FIFA and a lot of others in high settings at 4K.

They don't. Don't spread misinformation. Those are IPS. you always forget to share a link of your examples, don't you?