New gaming notebook unveiled - AORUS X7

From experience, what are the odds this actually gets released in Februafy in the US?

 

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While you are at it, could you check out the battery life on these things while not gaming? Just unplug it and mouse over the battery symbol for an estimate or ask the sales rep to do it for you.

 

From the sounds of it, end of February, beginning of March is likely.

 

Woot! Incoming! It will be an Australian version and I will have it for 7 days. This should be plenty of time to evaluate it. I will likely restrict the amount of benchmarking, but concentrate on the things that everyone wants to know like thermals and battery life, sound, CPU throttling, functionality of the command buttons, screen quality, ease of access to components and repasting (if I'm allowed). I'm quite happy to receive this, thanks for those of you that offered a reference, I think that helped. I'll do my best to answer as many questions as I can. This will be my deciding factor as well whether or not I buy one of these personally.

 

Awesome news HTWingNut. Congrats with getting a reviewer sample :thumbsup:


Things I`d like to see in the review:
- Power consumption. Both on stock and if there are any juice left for overclocking. If yes, how much can you squeeze out of the system.
- Temperature readings. Both on stock and when you overclock. I`d like to see CPU temps and GPU temps.
- Noise readings. Preferably using a dB meter, but atleast a subjective analysis of the noise. Both when gaming and when just surfing the internet. Also I want to hear your opinion on the 3 fan modes Aorus X7 command centre comes with. How loud are they? Can you game when just using the silent mode?
- SLI scaling. Try running a few games with SLI disabled and plot the FPS in a chart. Then do another run on those games with SLI enabled. How much percentage boost do you get with SLI.
- Display quality. Is it bad or is it good? Any grey haze you find on some matte displays? What about the colours, are they good?
- SSD performance. CrystalDiskMark readings.

 

Adding to the above:

- Boot times. The Chinese/Taiwanese review someone posted before said boot times were a bit on the long side for a machine this powerful.
- Amount of factory-installed bloatware.
- Sound quality with speakers and with headphones.

 

Thanks for suggestions, I'll try to do as much as I can. I'll probably hit the easy stuff first like battery life, boot times, audio quality, fan noise (I do have a db meter), LCD viewing angles/brightness/contrast, at load and idle temperatures (both sensors and surface measurements) at first, then get into benchmarks. And yes definitely will compare single vs dual card performance.

I will likely regurgitate information as I get it and then clean up with a well organized review. I just want to make sure I get as much data as I can while I have it. I hate to blow a vacation day but I might have to when this thing comes in!

 

WOOT and congrats. Your report will help determine if I get one or get a Haswell MBP for portability and use my i7 desktop for serious gaming.

 

Let us know how it runs... Looking for a small travel sized machine to add to my collocation

 

Depends on what you mean by small, lol. It's still a 17" screen, but the footprint dimensions aren't much larger than a standard 15" notebook, and under 1" thick, which is pretty impressive.

 

I would have loved having a light notebook with a larger panel this weekend. Did the global game jam. Ended up using my MacBook Pro 13. No way I was lugging that 9lb Sammy around. I love working on the MacBook but the GPU is just weak and the 15 is a nuclear reactor for the gpu you get. High hopes for this auros.

 

Looking at the info page looks like the CPU cooling is via both GPU's. If that's the case you may find running the GPU's hot will leave the CPU struggling with thermal throttling.

 

Well, my AW18 is GIGANTIC.... powerful, but GIGANTIC!

 

Makes sense, makes sense...

Just received tracking info, expecting next week if there are no weather delays, which is likely considering the crap snow and cold we've had thrown our way.

I am NOT allowed to remove the heatsink assy, but can remove the bottom cover.

Here is the configuration I am receiving:

17.3" FHD 1920 x 1080
i7-4700HQ
GTX765SLI 2G D5*2 VRAM
32G RAM 4x8GB
256G*2 mSATA RAID 0
1TB 7200RPM HDD
W8.1

It's the $2999 version.

 

I'm so envious of you. Don't let us down with a crappy review now, JK, LOL! :laugh:

 

Don't be so envious. There's a lot of pressure here now! Gah! Take it easy on me folks, please.

 

Just don't be afraid to speak the truth about it's shortcomings and it'll all be fine.

 

Don't worry, I always try my best to give an honest and unbiased review and report just the facts, and limit my opinion, unless it's something that needs a subjective evaluation.

 

Speaking of facts, are you able to ask Aorus what panel technology (IPS/TN/etc) they are using in this model?

 

I can ask, but I should have the exact panel model very soon.

 

Hmmm

Review: Aorus X7 - Laptop - HEXUS.net

 

Nice. That reviewer has very good prose and writing skills. Good overall review and answers a lot of questions already. Although heat, noise, and browsing battery life is still to be determined. A bit disappointing about the LCD though, but I'm sure there will be ample options out there if you're willing to upgrade on your own.

Edit: Looking further there may be an option for the Chi Mei N173HGE or LGD02C5 (120Hz 3D screen) from an end user upgrade considering the Asus G75VX uses this same AUO219D and has those other two screens as options. If I buy one of these laptops I'll be sure to check out options if it's not that great. Then again, for gaming you want best response, although I wouldn't sacrifice viewing angles or decent brightness and contrast for it. I've been gaming on a 16ms desktop LCD for ages.

 

from the notebooks I have been looking so far the video loop and browsing tests net very similar results in battery life.

One thing that people is learning from the razer blade screen upgrade project is that sometimes the lcd housing is so thick that they disassemble the housing to install on the lid. so that can be one concern.

all in all, the x7 performed much like i thought it would, albeit with your battery life figures, mine were much hopeful

 

Battery life is curious. I could get 2.5 hours with the NP9390 which was SLI 780m with 89WHr battery. A few things to consider though are the three SSD's, when did they shut down, and idle power consumption of them. Plus assuming was that balanced or power saver mode, etc. Personally, I'd prefer more, but it is what it is. Like already suggested a few times by various users is if they could ditch the hard drive in favor of a larger battery, but what would be better is manual switchable graphics, which would be the ultimate ideal situation IMHO. I'm sure they'd be hard pressed to eliminate the HDD space considering its a gaming notebook and gamers like to store a lot of games. HDD's are good cheap storage, good enough for loading games.

 

2.5 hours battery life when running a 720p movie.
Pretty short review i must say

 

you aren't in the south by chance? Atlanta was just popped by random snow the last two days. looking forward to your thoughts as this is on my radar. ill still want to see it in person as i had my sights set on the gs70 until i saw it in person. blech.

 

Congrats HT and can you try putting in some pics comparing Auros and maybe a 15.6"-17" laptop side be side, just to gain a perspective on how much thinner the X7 really is.

 

On the Hexus review it states that "The Aorus X7 is expected to become available to UK consumers in mid-February 2014 priced at £1,659." Hope the mid-Feb date also applies to US.

 

Those guys said it's 7lb.. I was expecting lighter.

Maybe that's including the power adapter?

 

gigabyte never bothers with battery life, to achieve something resembling battery life they throttle the cpu to absurd levels, so it doesn't matter what power plan you are, you are already on energy saving measures all the time.

7lb sounds about right, the divulged weight was 3kg, only very thin and compact PSUs have 100g of weight (in imperial slave numbers thats 0.2lb)

thus it can be a rounding error, or the weight with adapter or the new monkees formation

 

Ahh well.. That takes me out of the running for this, I'd like something lighter.

 

Great review by Hexus, look forward to yours as well HT! Definitely disappointed with battery life. Very interested to hear about fan noise, but glad to see temps and performance are much better than previously mentioned.

Wish this would be my GT60 replacement, but with half the battery life and as much noise I'm getting discouraged.

 

if you look at the benchmark gaming fps even the single GTX 765m is getting over 30fps on HIGH settings. do you really need dual SLI ?

 

Sure. That's like asking why you would want a 780m over a 765m...

 

30fps sucks. 60 or bust.

 

If you're getting 30 FPS with a single card, you most likely won't see 60+ with two. SLI does not double performance. There is scaling between the two and you'll see about 30% more FPS, give or take some. However, 765M SLI should be able to reach 60 FPS.

 

Yeah with SLI you will see about 30% more FPS, give or take 50-70%.

Review: Aorus X7 - Laptop - HEXUS.net - Page 5

 

Usually it's 50-70% improvement, in some instances it can double.

It is fully dependent on driver and profile support, however, so it's not straight raw horsepower like a single card could offer.

 

With everything maxed out, the most you'll see is about 50%-60% gain. That's what I was referring to. It depends mostly on the game and driver, as HTWingNut said above. Some games I see less than 50%, some more. You're definitely guaranteed a 30% gain, though, for any game.

 

Scaling typically increases as you increase graphics settings because you are making the game more GPU-bound. As the Hexus review shows, BioShock has great scaling (almost 100% or 2x performance increase) going from one 765M to two even at Medium which is surprisingly not CPU-bound on the SLI setup. DiRT on the other hand doesn't scale so well, but scaling predictably increases as you turn up the settings.

BioShock
Medium: 55.8 --> 108.4 94% increase
High: 48.3 --> 93 93%
Ultra: 28.8 --> 57.3 99%

DiRT
Medium: 92.6 --> 120.5 30%
High: 76.4 --> 117.9 54%
Ultra: 29.4 --> 47.3 61%

There's no guarantee of anything. Pre-DX9 games, OpenGL games, games without SLI profiles, games whose engines don't support multi-GPU (CoH2, Rome II), etc. are all examples of situations where SLI nets you zero gain over a single GPU. Then of course there is the kind of game that has an SLI profile but in which multi-GPU is still broken. PlanetSide 2 being a perfect example of that, where multi-GPU causes random FPS drops to almost zero for no reason and GPU usage on both cards is 50% or less in fights and effectively gives no performance gain over a single GPU, just causes more microstuttering, because the game is so bottlenecked by CPU.

The good news is that most of the popular AAA titles nowadays have at least decent multi-GPU support, especially on the Nvidia side, but there are always exceptions to the rule.

 

Well that and the fact that older games will run perfectly fine on a single 765m at 1080p So anything 2010 and earlier will likely be able to be maxed out with a single 765m (even if a slight upclock needed), and anything since then will likely have decent mutli-GPU support.

 

Aorus X7 is available for pre order now in the UK. ETA is February 21nd.
Price is $2700 for the RAID0 config with an extra HDD.

Aorus X7-CF1 17.3" LED TFT, Intel Core i7-4700HQ, 16GB DDR3, 2x128 SSD RAID, 1TB HDD, Dual NVIDIA GTX 760M SLI - Windows 8 [9WX700003-GB-A-001]

Also the weight is 2.9kg or 6.4lbs.

 

Anywhere you can buy this in Germany?

 

HT, I forget where you are located. I don't suppose it is MN? I am renting a very nice sound level meter for a project I'm working on. One of the big complaints so far is noise, it would be cool to get real noise measurements. I would also have access to an anechoic chamber, though I wouldn't be able to bring you in there.

 

he lives in robocop land, aka bail out city, aka OCP territory, aka where there was industry, aka crack cocaine land, aka detroit, MI

 

You had me at "robocop land"

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

 

It looks excellent but i live in the UK so this laptop is useless to anyone who wants one in the UK unless you want to be fine 300+ pounds duty and fees and all the other costs to.

Its a beautiful laptop though. Personally im turned off by mobile graphics solutions at the moment the 800m is a garbage 780m rebrand and mobile technology at the moment is focused on battery and CPU power consumption instead of raw mobile power.

 

According to this review, the Aorus only has a battery life of... wait for it...

152 minutes with SLI.
164 minutes without SLI.

Maybe it's just me, but I find a 2.5 hour battery life on a laptop while not playing games sort of unacceptable. If the focus is portability, which it clearly should be (otherwise there's no point in making it thin) then there needs to be a decent battery life with the ability to swap out batteries. Alas, there is not... (confirmed this with Aorus PR through Facebook and email)

 

This has already been brought up. There's no indication if backlit keyboard was on or not, if it was set to power saver (along with HDD/SSD power on/of settings), and what tasks were running, what media player was used, speaker volume or headphones, or at what % the system shut down. I'm not saying there's any good reason for a sub 3 hours battery life, but there's also no reason that the system should consume more the 20W with a single card which would result in at least 3 hours of useable battery life. There may be some improvements with drivers or more focus on the configuration while on battery. Without Optimus you definitely sacrifice battery life, but at mostly idle it shouldn't consume much power at all.

Assuming the system was getting 164 minutes with shutdown at ~ 10% battery life left, that means it was consuming about 25W, which is quite high for a more or less idling machine.