Gigabyte Aero 14 review & benchmarks: laptop versus servers
Introduction
I recently purchased a Gigabyte Aero 14K v7 (shortened as 14 in this post) after 6 months of tracking Internet for THE laptop I wanted. I am very picky on laptop specifications and usage, which makes it very difficult to match my needs and what I can get (read more about my needs later in this post).
The previous laptop which met all my needs was the HP Elitebook 840 G1: IPS 14" Full HD screen, i7, 16GB RAM, two SSDs (SATA + M.2 2242), nearly fully silent… Fully spec-ed out, it did cost 5 years ago over €4,000 with an international next day 3-year warranty (a 3/3/3 warranty) on-site (I got it under €700 due to the wrong keyboard in France).
Battle of Computers
Getting a laptop without comparing how good it is against its competition is futile. Actually, we will compare it against insanity which you can find below:
- A simple ultraportable laptop under the name Acer Aspire 13 S5–371 (i7–7500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) with one of the most annoying fans in the world of laptops
- A workstation equipped with a i7–7700, 64GB RAM, 2x 500GB SSD, and a NVIDIA 1080
- A server with a Dual Quanta Freedom (Ivy Bridge 2x 10 cores, 2.7 GHz), 128GB RAM, and 2x 500GB SSD
- A server with a Dual Xeon E5–2697v3 (2x 14 cores, 3.1 GHz), 128GB RAM, and LSI MegaRAID with 4x 500GB SSD in RAID 10
The latter did broke into the top 20 world ranking of Cinebench R11.5 on October 12th, 2017:
Specifications
You may wonder what are the specs of my Gigabyte Aero 14 laptop? Note that it includes my upgrades on my Aero 14 (model name: Aero 14K v7):
- Screen: 14", 2560x1440, matte, non touch
- CPU: i7–7700HQ, undervolted (undervolt -130mV)
- GPU: Intel HD Graphics, NVIDIA 1050 Ti 4GB RAM (undervolt -150mV)
- Thermal Paste for CPU/GPU: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
- RAM: 2x 16GB RAM 2400 MHz (Crucial CT16G4SFD824A)
- SSD: Transcend 256GB MTS800 (default), Samsung 960 Evo 1TB
- OS: Windows 8.1 Pro Update 3
- Factory extras: USB to Ethernet cable, CPU and GPU -50mV undervolt
- Weight: 1.9kg, about 500g for the charger
- Thickness: 19mm
Cost & Upgrades
The cost was spread approximately the following way:
- Laptop: €2,000
- RAM upgrade (1x 16GB RAM): €190 (critical UPS shipping method is a bunch…)
- SSD upgrade (Samsug 960 Evo 1TB): €450
- Thermal Paste upgrade (Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut): €5
- Operating System downgrade: €0 (got tons of MSDN licenses)
- Grand total: €2,645
End of Introduction
This post will be divided into multiple sections:
- What are my laptop usages?
- Why did I choose this laptop? Because magic?
- Purchasing online is weird?
- Some “synthetic” benchmarks?
- Real world usage?
Some images were taken from the notebookcheck review of the Gigabyte Aero 14 (NVIDIA GTX 1060, NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti). For pictures of the laptop, go check them as it is way better =)
How do I use my laptop?
This section was added after a question was asked about the usage of my laptop:
What is this laptop used for? Machine learning? Gaming? General usage? Or all of the above?
All of the above, I will describe here more in details the main usages of my laptop. It may provide more details about how I am using my laptop and why it was very difficult to find such laptop.
Machine Learning & Data Analysis
An important point for me was to be able to use the machine for machine learning, for the following tasks:
- Parallel xgboost (not xgboost multithreaded): requires a bunch of CPU threads with high frequency, lot of RAM
- Deep learning / neural networks: GPU is mandatory
- Lot of vertically scaling data analysis: more threads and more RAM helps a bunch
- OpenCL / CUDA optimized code in R: need dedicated GPU…
- 32-bit data analysis: we are still in the JMP 10 / SPSS 21 era
- Business Intelligence: Tableau and Qlik are CPU bound
Example: for data analyzing Porto Seguro dataset, if I do not refrain myself from using too much resources, I require on my server (56 CPU threads…) 20 minutes and 110GB RAM to produce meaningful automated reports for human analysis. On my new laptop, the same meaningful analysis takes 4 hours and 30GB RAM (this means you can go to shopping and come back after food with a report ready).
Typing Everyday Anywhere / Programming
I use my laptop to type stuff everyday and anywhere when not at work. This includes emails, chats (Slack, etc.), blogging (Medium), websites, programming…
When I need to write stuff, I use the following tools:
- RStudio for R
- Spyder for Python
- Visual Studio / RStudio for C++
- Git Bash for Git and Bash
- Notepad++ and Visual Studio Code for other languages
- Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Visio for documents
- KiTTY, MobaXterm, Bitvise SSH Client… for SSH-ing
- Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) for remoting into another machine
- Photoshop / Illustrator / InDesign for anything graphic related, visually critical on screen
- Axure RP / Mockplus / JustInMind for anything UI/UX design related, visually critical on screen
Believe me or not, having keyboard macro keys help tremendously in getting very high typing speed. And a very light laptop (under 2kg) is a gigantic plus when you can not stay at the same place.
Rendering Scenes
I use Daz Studio Pro 4.9 and KeyShot 7, and require beefy CPU and GPU depending on my needs.
CPU helps a lot when processing single elements sequentially (think: load app, load textures, etc.), while GPU is the bazooka for final rendering of scenes. When GPU cannot be used for any reason, LuxRender allows blazing fast renderings using CPU only.
Virtual Machines
I often need virtual machines, literally everyday. I use Hyper-V and VirtualBox for virtualization. This allows me to:
- Have multiple operating systems booted at the same time
- Test distributed programs / machine learning properly
- Test web services in an isolated and fully controlled environment
- Test malware behavior
- Run Windows 10 when applications are not running without it (eyes rolling at Adobe new software)
How did I choose my laptop?
For those who know myself personally, they all know I am very picky when it comes to purchasing (actually, investing) into a new laptop. Typically, here are my specs required:
- Screen size: 15" maximum, matte mandatory, touch screen optional
- Screen resolution: 1920x1080 minimum
- Webcam: at the top mandatory (Dell is blacklisted due to this)
- Operating System: must be able to install Windows 8.1
- CPU: 7th gen (Kaby Lake), hyperthreading available, ultra low voltage (Intel U) or quad core (Intel Q)
- GPU: dedicated NVIDIA Pascal GPU optional, with power savings (Optimus), Intel Iris Plus/Pro preferred
- RAM: 16GB RAM minimum, 32GB or 64GB RAM preferred
- Drives: SSD, preferred NVMe with 4x PCIe lanes (~4GBps), preferred two SSDs
- Network: Wi-Fi, non Killer versions (Intel-only network cards)
- Mobile internet: a big plus but not mandatory (Huawei / Qualcomm preferred)
- Ports: 3x USB any version is mandatory, VGA or HDMI is mandatory, mini Display Port is mandatory, Thunderbolt 3 is a big plus, charger with charging USB port is a big plus
- Keyboard: backlight mandatory (on all keys + all elements), macro keys is a big plus, mechanical feel preferred, centered touchpad preferred, Macbook keyboard style forbidden (no butterfly keys)
- Case: must be able to be opened
- BIOS: must be able to edit more than what we get in a Surface Pro
- Battery life: at least 8.5 hours of battery life doing web browsing / work in Google Chrome
- Weight: less than 2kg, less than 2.5kg with charger
- Fan noise: next to none in any available silent mode after undervolting, manual throttling, CPU/GPU repasting, etc.
If you read the notebookcheck review of my laptop, you will find my laptop ticks everything I need as mandatory.
Shopping Online and Refunds
Before choosing definitely my laptop, I went through many of poor laptop choices which fits nearly all my needs.
What did I try?
The laptops I tried (non exclusive list) includes:
- Razer Blade Stealth 4K 12.5", i7–7500U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, which I refunded because the coil noise (on both the charger and the laptop) was driving me nuts even after the “BIOS update” which was supposed to fix it (hint: it just does some software tweaks but will not fix the coil noise)
- Apple Macbook Pro 13, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, which was delivered with the wrong keyboard (good luck doing development tasks using a French Apple keyboard!!!), with a small scratch on the back of the screen (small enough that at an Apple Store they could not even find it without looking carefully)
- Dell XPS 13, non Iris Plus version: screw this laptop as I returned it before Dell started to refuse returns due to coil noise (they preferred trying keeping my money and sending me a technician under their Premium Support — yes, not the ProSupport, it would have ended up like this)
- Dell XPS 13, Iris Plus version, 8GB RAM: except the RAM issue (need more…), it could fit my needs if I could even order it…
- HP Spectre x2, Iris Plus, 16GB RAM: this laptop heats up very quickly and has poor battery life (4h or even less?), not recommended
- HP Spectre x360, 16GB RAM, 15" version: you just installed a private jet at home
Dealing with Amazon, Apple, HP, Dell, etc.
I am putting only my results when dealing with Amazon, HP, and Dell support. Note that it may apply to France only.
Amazon France (top tier support/behavior):
- Delivery: same-day delivery (19h–22h delivery), which is perfect when you work during the day
- Support hours: I could contact support from 6h to midnight, which is again perfect when you work during the day
- Support behavior: so far I did not see any customer support which beats Amazon
- Behavior towards laptops: laptops must be wiped before sending, they also allow to fully wipe the drives before sending back the laptops (perfect for privacy-minded users)
- Returns: print a prepaid paper, paste it on the original Amazon package, and send it for free (approximately 2 weeks to get refunded, which is fast)
Apple:
- Delivery: custom to order (CTO) laptops takes 2 weeks, but when you will get delivered you get warned of the day and the hour by email/text
- Support hours: anytime an Apple Store is open is better
- Support behavior: they listen first then they ask (appropriate) questions
- Behavior towards laptops: as I did not use my laptop, no idea whether we should wipe the drives or not
- Returns: in Apple Stores, takes 2 days ONLY to get the money back, otherwise same as Amazon
HP France:
- Delivery: 2 days to 1 week, no control over when you get delivered (have fun if you work, because you will struggle very hard to get your package)
- Support hours: did not have to deal with them for a refund
- Support behavior: unknown
- Behavior towards laptops: unknown, but I wiped the drives before sending them back (no issue for refund)
- Returns: same as Amazon
(HP got no physical shops in France?!)
Dell France: holy moly when trying to pay using PayPal (if you read French, read the Le Hollandais Volant):
- You need an ID
- You need a proof of home of where you will be delivered
- They attempt to charge you 20% more than what you were initially charged (you can view this is double VAT for payment authorization)
- They say they tried to call you, when they NEVER attempted it
The whole block of text:
Dell — Internal Use — Confidential
Cher client,
Chez Dell nous nous efforçons d’assurer l’intégrité des transactions par cartes bancaires dans le souci de protéger nos clients. Nous vérifions les commandes afin de valider les détails du paiement.
Votre commande a été vérifiée, mais malheureusement il nous a été impossible de vous contacter aux numéros de téléphone que vous nous avez fournis lors de votre commande. Par conséquent, nous sommes dans l’obligation d’annuler votre commande . La pièce manquante est un justificatif de domicile à l’adresse de livraison datant de moins de trois mois (dernière facture EDF ou France Télécom ou de Téléphone mobile) + une copie de pièce d’identité du détenteur de la carte de crédit ou kbis . Dès réception des documents demandés, votre commande sera validée et partira en production. Merci de nous envoyer ces documents au plus vite par email à l’adresse suivante :SER_CC_Validation@dell.com .Veuillez nous excuser pour le désagrément que nous vous causons, mais soyez rassuré quant à notre attention particulière suite à votre réponse.
I would just put Dell in a blacklist and try to get their laptops through Amazon FR or Amazon DE.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Here, we will take our machines and make them fight against each other in benchmarks. We are taking useful (comparable) fighting cases for our machines.
What are we testing?
We are going to use three benchmarks:
- Cinebench R11.5 and R15, on CPU: get the magnitude of difference between a laptop and a powerful server
- Cinebench R11.5 and R15, on GPU: how powerful is our NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti against Intel HD Graphics?
- AS SSD: how crazy can be the Samsung 960 Evo 1TB?
What are we playing against?
My Gigabyte Aero 14 is going to be tested against several machines, in the following increasing order of performance:
- Acer Aspire 13 S5–371: i7–7500U (2c/4t, 3.5/3.5GHz), Intel HD Graphics 620
- Gigabyte Aero 14, near-silent wattage (33dB): i7–7700HQ (4c/8t, 2.3/3.6GHz), NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
- Gigabyte Aero 14, “Gaming” fans mode (37dB): i7–7700HQ (4c/8t, 3.5/3.9GHz), NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
- Workstation: i7–7700 (4c/8t, 4.0/4.2GHz)
- Server 1: Dual Quanta Freedom Ivy Bridge (2x 10c/20t, 2.7/3.3GHz)
- Server 2: Dual Xeon E5–2697v3 (2x 14c/28t, 3.1(2.9)/3.5GHz)
The server 2 cannot sustain 3.1GHz as it exceeds its power limits (145W), it throttles down to 2.9GHz (which is still higher than its base clock).
Extra additions
The following was applied on our Gigabyte Aero 14 past our benchmarks, and it did not change any results (other than making the laptop less loud):
- Thermal Paste: Thermal Kryonaut Grizzly
- CPU undervolt: -130mV
- GPU undervolt: -150mV
We also did the following on our Acer Aspire 13 S5–371:
- CPU undervolt: -90mV
- GPU undervolt: -90mV
- Turbo Boost Power Max: 25W
Cinebench R15
As expected, our Aero 14 is getting crushed by our workstation and servers, but it beats very easily old Intel CPUs (in singlethread) and our ultra low voltage laptop (being twice as slow for multithreaded tasks).
If CPU performance matters, don’t buy a laptop: purchase or rent a server. A desktop with a simple i7–7700K will not be up for your task, as you can get Intel i7–7820HK overclockable CPU in a mobile laptop under 3kg (check for Clevo chassis laptops).
Screenshot of results:
Cinebench R11.5
The Gigabyte Aero 14 is doing fairly well as on Cinebench R15 despite being only a quad core mobile CPU. When it comes to GPU, the NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti just crushes our Intel HD Graphics 620.
Screenshot of results:
AS SSD Scores
The Samsung 960 Evo makes every non NVMe SSD look idiot. Cheap prices, high capacity, what are you expecting for €450? (a Samsung 960 Evo 1TB, supposing we ignore the Samsung 960 Pro 1TB at €600)
However, when the price of the laptop is €2,000, finding such Transcend MTS800 SSD (which is also only 256GB) is unacceptable. I’ll contact Gigabyte to know what is their point of view towards this, as we all know we wants those Samsung PM961 inside and not that poor Transcend SSD which cannot even go faster than SATA SSD speeds.
AS SSD General Results (MBps)
Just so you can check how the Samsung 960 Evo crushes the competition, and how bad the factory Transcend MT800 is.
Screenshot of results:
AS SSD General Results (IOPS)
Just so you can check how the Samsung 960 Evo crushes the competition, and how bad the factory Transcend MT800 is.
Screenshot of results:
AS SSD Copy Results
The Transcend MTS800 is getting crushed by a Crucial MX300.
Screenshot of results:
AS SSD Compression Results
How fast is the Samsung 960 Evo compressing data? Too fast!
Screenshot of results:
Real world usage of the laptop
I got my Gigabyte Aero 14 since last week, and so far I am very happy when it comes to the performance, noise, keyboard, screen, and battery. I got a major issue with drivers and random crashes due to (old) NVIDIA drivers.
When opening the laptop, two DVD are provided in addition to the laptop and the USB / Ethernet cable:
- 7GB DVD for drivers
- Cyberlink PowerDVD 12
The major issue: drivers
- First of all, this major driver issue could be even worse if Gigabyte did not provide a 7GB DVD with all drivers and the 17GB backup “GIGAWIN10RC” USB (you need to make the USB yourself, but you get prompted right at the beginning to do it).
- Second, I am using the laptop in an unsupported scenario: Windows 8.1 Update 3 (however, they do have drivers for Windows 7 even when using “unsupported” Kaby Lake CPUs which is very rare!!!).
- Third, all installable software is very easy to install.
When it comes install GPU drivers, this is another story:
- Intel HD Graphics drivers cannot be installed on Windows 8.1 without some small hacks
- NVIDIA drivers cannot be installed without installing Intel HD Graphics drivers before
Solution: do some Intel HD Graphics driver hacking (there are guides online), install the drivers, and install NVIDIA drivers afterwards. This solution alone would put off anyone who does not want to get into driver hacking.
Performance and Noise
There is nothing wrong with the performance of this laptop, except some weird and buggy behavior of the laptop graphic cards:
When it comes to the noise, the only issue is when putting the fans into Gaming Mode. I tend to use Quiet Mode instead, although it throttles the CPU quite a lot for a near silent operation (33dB at full load after undervolting):
The Gigabyte Smart Manager allows to control everything on the laptop, except the Bluetooth button which is broken in Windows 8.1.
The controls are the following:
- Change volume (nothing exceptional)
- Mute sounds (nothing exceptional)
- Change brightness / Automatic brightness (the latter can only be done here)
- Power Mode (same as Control Panel > Hardware & Sound > Power Options)
- Wi-Fi on/off (nothing exceptional)
- Bluetooth (is broken)
- Camera (nothing exceptional)
- Keyboard Backlight (can also do Fn+Space)
- Monitor Switch (opens the charms)
- Mouse Speed (faster than going into Control Panel)
- Windows Key Lock (holy moly the amount of time you might accidentally press the Windows button)
- Font Setting (DPI change…)
- X-Rite Pantone (calibrated display, I measured less than 2 of difference)
- White Color / Blue-light Killer (nice to have)
- Fan Tweaks (this one is vital as it allows you to control the fans directly, and their modes: Quiet (silent or near fully silent), Normal (not silent but not loud), Gaming (not silent to loud), Custom Auto (not silent, maximum noise allowed), Custom Fixed (permanent noise))
- Smart Dashboard
As for the fans, here are the settings:
- Quiet fan: 0 RPM (until you go over 60°C CPU/GPU, CPU throttles, no GPU throttle — maximum fan seems 30% on CPU, 40% on GPU)
- Normal / Gaming fan base: 2167 RPM (same as 30% auto fan noise)
- 30% auto fan (ex-25%): 2204 RPM (32dB, you will not even notice it from far)
- 30% fixed fan: 2551 RPM (33dB, a bit sleepy)
- 40% fixed fan: 3208 RPM (35dB, maximum you will encounter in quiet mode?)
- 50% fixed fan: 3660 RPM (37dB, your occasional peak)
- 70% fixed fan: 4647 RPM (you can feel the wind from your seat, 42dB)
- 100% fixed fan: 5615 RPM (oh my god you have a private jet at home, 50dB)
The laptop is full aluminium with a bit of plastic (a lot of plastic for the screen and the ports cough cough), and gets warm quickly if you stress the CPU and GPU a lot. In addition, the fans blows up on the monitor, which might be unusual if you are not used to it.
When opening the case, due to how tight is everything, you may think you are exploding the laptop with the cracking noises.
Laptop Life
This laptop is a gem as it combines the following:
- Not so bad GPU (NVIDIA 1050 Ti)
- Small weight / high portability: 14", less than 2kg (1.9kg)
- High performance mobile CPU: i7–7700HQ
- Long battery life: I usually hit 10h to 11h battery life
- High quality calibrated screen
- Two drives with 4x PCIe
- Mechanical keyboard and Macro keys
As for the keyboard, it feels close to a mechanical keyboard and will hurt anyone who uses only membrane keyboards.
I do not recommend this laptop who are not used to typing on mechanical keyboards, because they will get tired very quickly. However, if they keep trying on this laptop, they will get rewarded with the Macro keys which allows you to perform an action / series of actions automatically on a single key press.
We can also switch the macro used by pressing the “G” button, effectively changing the column of the macros used (there are 5 columns with their respective colors, visible on the keyboard).
Note that when holding the laptop, it feels common to cut the skin of the hands due to how sharp the edges of the case can be. The solution is to stop trying to be MacGyver and to learn to pick and hold the laptop properly.
For the fans, as long as you use the Quiet mode, you will very rarely encounter the fan noise. Even watching YouTube videos does not trigger the fans.
Conclusion
This laptop is very expensive and the luxury of the users who need to make the most out of their laptop.
Do not use purchase this laptop if you are lurking to do a single thing, because this laptop fits the following type of user:
tl;dr: one size fits all, jack of all trades
Checklist:
- Portable laptop (light, small screen, noiseless)
- High quality matte screen (QHD IPS, 2560x1440, well placed webcam)
- High battery life (8h+)
- Many ports (USB 3, HDMI, mini Display Port, Thunderbolt 3, SD card)
- Acceptable performance both on CPU (4 cores) and GPU (not Intel)
- Self-serviceable / upgradable (2x DDR4–2400 RAM, 2x NVMe M.2 2280 storage)
If you do not need one of those, you can get an equivalent of that “Gigabyte Aero 14” for half the price (don’t say Dell XPS 15 is the answer, its noise is insanity).
What else would you need?
Oh wait. If you click the touchpad while the laptop is off, you can get an idea about how much battery left you have. Perfect for travelers.
