Gigabyte Aero 16 Review | PCMag

The Gigabyte Aero 16 (starts at $2,199.99, $4,399.99 as tested) is yet another entry in the fairly new category of content-creation laptops. Armed with a 4K OLED screen, high-powered Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics, and the latest Intel Core i9 processor, you might initially think this is a gaming machine. But this desktop replacement isn’t made for the latest game release. Instead, it’s aimed at artists and media editors, musicians and videographers. The fact that it can handle AAA titles is just a bonus. It’s not a perfect answer for every creator—the battery life isn't very impressive—but if you want one of the best laptops for video editing or other media work, it’s a powerful (if pricey) option.

The Gigabyte Aero 16 looks great and feels even better, thanks to a sturdy aluminum alloy chassis. Measuring 0.88 by 14.02 by 9.78 inches (HWD), it’s close to the size of the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, but a bit thicker and heavier, at 5.05 pounds compared to the MacBook Pro’s 4.85-pound weight. That aluminum construction gives it some heft, but more important, it simply feels super-deluxe. It lends the Aero 16 a sense of luxury and quality that plastics and composites just don’t have.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

The next thing you might notice after you open the Aero 16 is that there’s a bit of a hump above the thin-bezelled display. That small bulge above the screen serves as a handy lip for easy opening and closing of the lid, but it’s also the home to the laptop’s HD webcam, which includes a dual-microphone array and IR sensing for Windows Hello. As handy as it is for opening the laptop’s lid, it also leaves the webcam exposed, and virtually guarantees that the webcam and the pinhole microphones will accumulate fingerprints and cruft as the protrusion gets handled every time you use the system.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The port selection is sparse, but capable, with two Thunderbolt 4 connections—one with USB power delivery for fast charging devices—along with a third USB-C port. Wi-Fi 6E provides speedy wireless networking.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

But what about connecting things via HDMI, or Ethernet, or even plain old USB-A? Never fear, Gigabyte has included a compact port hub in the box. It's a combination dongle that has HDMI, mini DisplayPort, USB 3.0 and an Ethernet connection. The included USB-C dongle also comes with a short USB-C extension cord, giving you the choice of either plugging the hub directly into the side of the laptop or adding some flexibility with the 3-inch cable.

One additional quirk that’s relevant in the discussion of ports: The cooling vents on the sides of the Aero 16 look a whole lot like USB-A slots at first glance. If you look closely, you’ll see the fins of a cooling system inside, instead of the standard USB plug connection, but the resemblance is close enough that you might have to worry about another user trying to jam a flash drive into the exhaust.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The keyboard uses a simple tile design, with a single-color white backlight. The basic layout benefits from the simplicity, and the only thing I might change is the font, which was a little too stylized for my liking— your tastes may vary.

The touchpad matches in basic matte black, measuring 3 inches tall and 4.8 inches wide. With a single seamless surface that incorporates the right and left buttons, there's a lot of room for swiping and tapping, and the tracking is good enough that you may find yourself wondering if you need to add an external mouse.

Premium OLED Quality on Display

One of the most stunning features on the Aero 16 is the screen, which stands head and shoulders above most gaming and content-creation machines, thanks to its 4K OLED technology. It also has a taller 16:10 aspect ratio, which has become popular lately because it offers more vertical real estate than the more common 16:9, which means less scrolling, more room for toolbars in media editing apps, and a more expansive visual experience across all use cases.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The laptop uses a Samsung-sourced AMOLED panel with 3,840-by-2,400-pixel resolution that offers VESA DisplayHDR 500 support, which translates into crisp detail and the impeccable color quality that photographers and visual artists demand.

In our testing, it wasn’t just a good display; it’s very nearly perfect. It covers 100% of the RGB gamut, 99% of the Adobe RGB gamut, and 99% of the DCI-P3 gamut. That’s Pantone-validated color, with the accuracy that’s needed for color-correcting photos, color-grading video, or otherwise getting exacting visuals for your most important projects. And it comes factory-calibrated, so you’ll get that top-notch color right out of the box, without having to futz around with calibration software or equipment.

Testing the Aero 16: Power for Artists and Auteurs

Our test unit is equipped with an Intel Core i9-12900HK processor, 32GB of DDR5 memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card (packing 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM) and a dual-SSD setup that totals up to 3TB of storage. That high-powered processor has a base clock speed of 2.5GHz, but can be boosted up to 5GHz.

The Aero 16 is a new model from Gigabyte, and at the moment, it’s only offered with Intel 12th Generation “Alder Lake” processors, the chip maker's latest mobile line. The most basic model is outfitted with an Intel Core i7-12700H and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, and starts at $2,199.99. Between the two extremes are several configurations, offering different combinations of Intel Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs, along with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti GPUs.

For testing purposes, we compared this high-powered media machine to other top-tier laptops, looking at both gaming machines and creator-focused systems. These range from the MSI Creator 17 and the HP ZBook Studio G8 to the gamer-centric Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) and the Intel Core i9-12900HK-equipped MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop, which boasts very similar hardware to the Gigabyte Aero 16 we’re reviewing here.

From similarly outfitted gaming systems to prosumer media-creation laptops, the name of the game is performance, and everything to which we compared the Aero 16 offers strong processing and graphics chops, because these systems all feature high-end components, particularly in the CPU and GPU.

Productivity Tests 

Our first stop when testing any system is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a full suite of productivity tools, from word processing and web browsing to videoconferencing, providing a good measure of overall system performance. We also use the benchmark's Full System Drive storage subtest to benchmark drive performance. 

Turning our focus to the CPU, we then use three benchmark tests to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 stress-tests a processor's multi-threaded performance using the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene over and over in a 10-minute test run. Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates real-world applications across several processor-heavy tasks like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning. 

Finally, we use HandBrake 1.4 to transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p, comparing how quickly systems handle this demanding task. This test speaks particularly to the media capabilities of a content-creator system, since it’s a real-world task that will be part of many video editing workflows.

The Aero 16 offers some really impressive performance, leveraging the Intel Alder Lake CPU and Nvidia 3080 Ti GPU to deliver some of the best results we’ve seen. It frequently came in second to the similarly equipped MSI GE76 Raider, but that seems to be due partly to the differences in cooling technology. And at any rate, that’s still second-best to one of the best gaming-focused performers we've ever tested. More important, it puts the Aero 16 ahead of both the MSI Creator 17 and the HP ZBook Studio G8—two of the best content-creation-focused systems we’ve tested.

The only quirk that gave us pause as we tested the machine was a hiccup that kept us from testing performance in Photoshop. Whether it was a driver issue with the newer GPU, a conflict with the PugetBench extension we use for testing, or some other issue, we don’t have proper results for photo editing performance, one of the core competencies of any content-creation laptop. (The photo editor would run; it was just our benchmark that hiccupped.)

Graphics Tests

Armed with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, it’s obvious that the Aero 16 wouldn’t struggle with any of our usual graphics and gaming tests. We test these functions with 3DMark Night Raid and 3DMark Time Spy, a pair of high- and low-end DirectX 12 tests.

We also run two tests from GFXBench 5, a cross-platform GPU benchmark which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation. The higher the frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps), the better the performance.

We also look at how well a system handles real games, using the built-in benchmark tools found in AAA games like F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. While the Gigabyte Aero 16 isn’t marketed as a gaming laptop, per se, the hardware inside lends itself just as well to gaming as it does to media editing.

In nearly every test, the graphics capabilities of the Aero 16 matched the best systems out there, which is expected, given the laptop’s Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU—currently the best of the best from the graphics giant. Even though the Aero 16 didn’t turn in the best score in every test, it still matched other leading systems, with a distinct advantage over last year’s top content-maker machines, the MSI Creator 17 and the HP ZBook Studio G8.

The end result is a potent tool for prosumer media work, with enough graphics muscle to let you enjoy the latest games when you’re done working on your latest project.

Workstation Tests

Just as the Aero 16 isn’t a gaming machine, it’s also not a workstation, but only in the strictest sense. The consumer GPU inside may not come with independent software vendor (ISV) certifications, but it’s meant to use that high-end hardware for the most demanding applications, like video editing and even animation or 3D rendering. And that puts it squarely into workstation territory, at least for testing.

We run three primary tests to measure workstation performance. The first is Adobe Premiere Pro, using the same PugetBench software that we use in our Photoshop tests. This automated extension performs live playback and file export with several codecs at 4K and 8K resolutions, as well as special-effects sequences that stress the CPU and GPU beyond normal Premiere Pro operations. We report the test's standard overall score, with higher numbers indicating better performance.

The next test is Blender, an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU. The quicker the time, the better.

Our final workstation test is SPECviewperf 2020, which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular ISV apps. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. Higher frame rates mean faster, smoother performance.

Once again, the Aero 16 managed to beat most of the systems we’ve tested. That puts it in a rarified circle of systems that can handily run workstation-grade applications without being an all-business system made specifically for engineers or professional animation studios. That’s an even bigger win for the home auteur —it puts professional-grade content creation into a package you can use at home, at school, or anywhere else.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We turn off Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting, then play the video file until the battery conks out.

Gigabyte touts the 99Wh battery it uses in the Aero 16, noting that it’s as large as a battery can be to be legally taken on an airplane, but that extra capacity doesn’t translate into the superb battery life we hoped for. In fact, when we ran our relatively simple video rundown test, the battery lasted less than 7 hours. And that’s not in a power-intensive situation, just basic video playback. If there’s a weak point to the Aero 16, it’s battery life.

But the display, on the other hand, is very, very good. We use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

And while we’ve already discussed the gorgeous 4K AMOLED panel that the Aero 16 has, and how the pre-calibrated display is perfect for color-critical tasks, it bears repeating. This display is one of the best I’ve ever seen on a laptop, from the 100% color gamut to the potent brightness and crisp detail.

A Premium Choice for Content Production

The Gigabyte Aero 16 is a genuinely impressive laptop, combining top-of-the-line processing and graphics with elegant design and a fantastic OLED display. In most respects, it’s a content creator’s dream come true. But that dream isn’t cheap, and it comes with a power brick that you can’t leave at home.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

More than just a desktop replacement laptop, the Aero 16 is a true content-creation machine that can handle everything from graphic design to video editing and animation, and everything in between. If you want professional power, and are willing to pay for it, this is the machine of choice for any media maker.