Gigabyte Aorus 16X Review: flagship yet value for money
The Aorus 16X is an excellent gaming laptop that manages to check almost all the right boxes
Review Summary
Expert Rating
Okay, so here’s the thing. When you have the money to splurge, you can buy all kinds of premium things, including high-end gaming laptops. But that doesn’t mean pricey gaming laptops shouldn’t offer value for money. Take the Gigabyte Aorus 16X for example. Most laptops that pair the Intel Core i9-14900HX with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 are priced above the 2 lakh rupees price tag. The Aorus 16X, on the other hand, comes with a handful of savings, while offering a 16-inch display, a 2TB Gen 4 SSD, and excellent performance. But given Gigabyte’s market presence in terms of laptops, or lack thereof, is it a viable option? And more importantly, where has the company cut corners to offer an affordable option like this? Let’s find out in our in-depth Gigabyte Aorus 16X review.
Table of Contents
Design and Display
Starting with the design, the Aorus 16X boasts a sleek and aggressive design that should appeal to gamers. While the chassis is predominately built out of plastic, the lid is made from aluminium, which ensures excellent rigidity and sturdiness. Speaking of which, there’s little to no flex in the lid or keyboard deck, making it feel like a well-constructed machine.
Under the keyboard, there’s plenty of RGB lighting (more on that later), but that’s not all. The Aorus 16X also has a light projector on the rear side and dual light strips on either side. In case you’re wondering what function it does, well, it does add some ambient lighting to your setup when gaming in a dark room.
The 16-inch QHD (2,560 x 1,600) display is one of the standout features of the Aorus 16X. It offers a fast 165Hz refresh rate, making it ideal for competitive gaming where every frame counts. Apart from gaming, the panel’s 16:10 aspect ratio also comes in handy for productivity tasks. As for colour accuracy, there’s a 100 percent sRGB colour gamut, and the display is Pantone Validated with excellent colour calibration, so you can use it for content creation too.
As for media consumption, the panel is also Dolby Vision certified, and the slim 3mm bezels add to the immersive experience. The panel also gets quite bright, and the matte coating is handy. As such, there aren’t any issues in using the laptop outdoors either.
Ports, Audio and I/O
The Aorus 16X is well-equipped with ports, ensuring compatibility with various peripherals. On the left side, there’s the DC input, a full-sized RJ45 LAN port, an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a Thunderbolt 4 port.
Over to the right, there’s another USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s quite interesting to see GIGABYTE include a microSD card reader as opposed to a full-sized card reader, considering the latter would have made more sense for content creators. Nonetheless, the port selection is quite good, and both USB-C ports also support DisplayPort 1.4. Additionally, the Thunderbolt 4 port comes with support for USB Power Delivery 3.0.
The laptop also has dual 2W speakers, that are surprisingly very well-tuned. Is there noticeable creaking at the top volume? Yes. But up to 80 percent volume, the speakers are quite solid, and there’s a good level of bass too. I’d still suggest pairing it with a speaker for your movie night or a pair of headphones for gaming, but on the off-chance that you don’t have either, the speakers should do a decent job.
There’s a 1080p webcam at the top as well, which has decent quality for the most part, and should aid you well for video meetings, as well as general streaming. What adds more value to it is the fact that it’s an IR camera, meaning there’s support for Windows Hello face unlock. And I’m happy to report that the face unlock manages to function well, even in challenging lighting conditions.
Keyboard and Trackpad
This is possibly the one area that baffles me the most about this laptop – the keyboard. Let’s get the positives out of the way first. It’s an excellent keyboard in terms of the typing experience. The keys are well spaced out, the feedback is nice, and there are full-sized arrow keys which is always a nice touch. The RGB lighting underneath is quite bright, and while I do miss having some dedicated hotkeys at the top, I won’t make a big fuss about it.
But there are certain things that Gigabyte has done that make the keyboard harder to use. For instance, the handful of keys around WASD are transparent, but then they have white lettering on top. In a dark environment, the legend is quite hard to read. If they wanted to make the keys stand out, they could have just added some texture on top, and that would have been great.
Secondly, for a laptop that’s priced this high, the Aorus 16X comes with 3-zone RGB lighting, as opposed to per-key RGB lighting. I’ll be honest, I am not someone who cares much about per-key RGB, but considering the price, I’d definitely like to have the option for it. Interestingly, Gigabyte preferred adding the rear ambient and projector lights as opposed to per-key RGB lighting for the keyboard. Then again, it is what it is, and should by no means be a deal breaker for anyone.
Thankfully, the touchpad below it features a smooth surface that’s nice to use. It’s not as big as most gaming laptops with a 16-inch chassis, but enough to easily accommodate my large hands without any issues. The gestures work fluidly, and the palm rejection is solid too with no complaints.
Software
Much like most gaming laptops, the 16X uses Gigabyte Control Center for its configuration duties. While the interface could use some work, especially some textual information to explain the modes better, it does come with all the functionality one would expect. You can change the performance modes and fan profiles, tweak the RGB lighting, and much more. There’s also the AI Nexus app, which features a dedicated Performance mode, allowing you to get the maximum FPS while gaming.
It’s also worth noting that the cost GIGABYTE saved in not providing a per-key RGB keyboard was used to provide its users with a Windows 11 Pro license. For context, most premium gaming laptops also come with a Windows 11 Home license. While the Pro license is better for IT professionals, I prefer having complete control over my Windows installation. Then again, your perspective might vary, and I’d love to hear about that in the comments below.
Performance and Battery Life
Under the hood, our unit has an Intel Core i9-14900HX processor coupled with 32GB of DDR5-5600 MT/s RAM. There’s the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU with a max TGP of 140W and dual 1TB GIGABYTE AORUS Gen4 5000E SSDs, for a total capacity of 2TB. It’s not the fastest SSD by any means, with its read speeds reaching just 5000Mbps (≈625MB/s), but that’s not bad either.
Thankfully, the other hardware inside redeems itself, as the i9-14900HX processor absolutely blazes past the benchmarks. The Aorus 16X managed to reach scores of 26,910 and 1,654 in Cinebench R23 Multi and R24 Multi respectively. The RTX 4070 GPU doesn’t disappoint either, with the 140W TGP card scoring 7,177 in Fire Strike Ultra, and 13,437 in the 3D Mark Time Spy benchmark.
For context, the ASUS Strix Scar 17 with the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX manages to outperform the GIGABYTE Aorus 16X, but that laptop costs more than an extra 1 lakh rupees. There’s also the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024), powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, but that falls behind the Gigabyte Aorus’ excellent performance, despite the Aorus using an older generation processor, and also being significantly cheaper.
The excellent results carry forward in gaming benchmarks as well, with the RTX 4070 GPU easily handling AAA games at Ultra settings without breaking a sweat. Titles Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Forza Horizon 5 run smoothly at high settings, easily pushing frame rates well above 60 FPS in most scenarios, at 1600p resolution. If you prefer to drop the resolution down to 1080p, then you can easily push these titles to well beyond 100FPS, with the quality and ray tracing turned high.
In case you’re wondering how the Auros 16X manages to perform so well, it’s primarily due to its excellent cooling solution. The laptop gets seriously loud, with the fan profile set to Turbo, and AI Nexus mode set to Performance. However, the good news is that the laptop manages to stay well under 60 degrees, while the surface temps don’t even cross the 45-degree Celsius mark. That’s super impressive, and it also means you can game at the highest settings without any worries about thermal throttling.
As for the battery life, the laptop comes with a 99.2Wh battery, which is really nice for a laptop of this size. In our video loop test, with the screen brightness set to 80%, the laptop managed a runtime of 5 hours and 53 mins. That’s pretty good, though consumers have reported slightly better battery backups, in the range of 6.5-7 hours as well. Of course, your mileage may vary, but you won’t be disappointed with the overall battery backup.
Finally, to juice the laptop up, there’s a beefy 240W adapter provided in the box. That’s quite heavy though, so you can leave it on a desk, and opt for USB PD charging up to 100W to juice the laptop on the go. Just note that while the 100W of USB-PD is quite fast, it’s not enough power to enable gaming, which is to be expected.
Verdict
So, at the end of the day, the Aorus 16X is an excellent gaming laptop that manages to check almost all the right boxes. For most users, the priority is going to be performance, cooling, and display, and the 16X delivers on all fronts. The keyboard and GCC software do leave room for improvement, but neither of those is a major flaw. More importantly, considering the price tag and GIGABYTE’s excellent customer service, the Aorus 16X is a solid recommendation.Editor’s Rating: 8 / 10
Pros:
- High-refresh-rate Quad HD display
- Excellent performance
- Cool peak temperatures
- Good price to performance
Cons:
- Keyboard could have been better
- Software needs some work
- Fans get very loud
