Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF Review

With the look of a more premium gaming laptop, Gigabyte's Aorus 15 BMF slides in at a lower price than you might expect. It starts at $999.99 (as tested), and Gigabyte puts up quite an attractive offer for the money. This budget model's 1080p, 15.6-inch display won't win any awards, of course, but its internals don’t disappoint, coming out ahead of some of its equally affordable competitors. While it generally outpaces the new MSI Cyborg 15 at the same price (and some forthcoming cheap gaming laptops that we're in the process of testing), some laptops with last year’s most-comparable components refuse to give in. Still, for bringing such a premium experience and the latest PC gaming tech to budget-strapped gamers, we give this year's Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF our current Editors' Choice award for budget gaming laptops.

A Slick Aorus Design on a Budget

Gigabyte's Aorus 15 BMF is effectively a sub-configuration within the Aorus 15 line. While it shares much of the same chassis and hardware design, it gets its own set of component options and is built exclusively around an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics processor.

The model sent for testing is Gigabyte's base configuration, starting at $999.99, which includes an Intel Core i5-13500H processor, 8GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and a 15.6-inch 1080p display running at a 144Hz refresh rate. You can opt for a better CPU (an Intel Core i7-13700H) in higher-end models, and the display comes in three other flavors: two more 1080p options (with 240Hz or 360Hz refresh rates) and a 1440p option with a 165Hz refresh rate. Those three alternative screens are also rated to cover a significantly higher color gamut than the base model’s display. Regardless of configuration, the panel measures 15.6 inches on the diagonal and has a 16:9 aspect ratio.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

While the internals are subdued in this BMF variant, the Aorus 15 BMF benefits from its Gigabyte DNA, providing a substantially better build than you’d usually find on a $999 gaming laptop. The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF has a metal display lid and base, though the keyboard deck is plastic. The display panel flexes quite a bit despite its construction, but the base feels about as sturdy as they come. You'll find some minor depression under pressure near the spacebar, but that’s about it.

The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF measures in at just 0.82 inch closed, so it’s still on the thin side for a gaming laptop. It’s no lightweight, but it's not quite painfully weighty at 5.25 pounds. The 14.2 inches of width and 10.7 inches of depth—a symptom of the display bezels and protruding rear end—do, however, make it a little unwieldy for slipping into a backpack that might otherwise accommodate a 15-inch laptop.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Gigabyte's Aorus logo appears in blackout matte, and diagonal accent lines dominate the design, some for style and some for the exhaust grilles across the base. It makes the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF something of a gaming laptop incognito, with subdued branding. The mirror-finished Aorus logo on the back cover is a bit of a tell for those in the know, as is the three-zone RGB lighting for the keyboard, but it could just as easily have been a general (if a little sleek) desktop replacement to the outside observer. Perhaps the biggest tell is the RGB light bar that lines the bottom edge of the lid.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

This laptop's keyboard isn’t perfect, but it leans on the side of being rather pleasant to use. With fairly stable keycaps, the keys have 1.7mm of travel that makes them feel snappy for typing. Despite being a 15.6-inch laptop, you'll find no number pad here. Gigabyte includes a nifty column at the right side with Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, which can be handy for navigation and text editing.

Where Gigabyte goes wrong is in its arrow keys. A full-size set is included, but rather than shifting them down like Lenovo does on its Legion laptops (brilliant move), Gigabyte shrinks the right shift key. On just about every laptop I’ve used that does this, it results in frequent errors that see me move up a line while typing instead of capitalizing a word.

The touchpad provides a sizable surface that’s glassy and smooth. It also has some more of the diagonal line work cutting across it for a flashy accent.

A 1080p webcam provides a bit of extra detail and clarity compared with the 720p webcams found on most laptops, save those that make the extra effort to include the upgrade. The performance isn’t incredible, with even fairly bright settings looking a bit dim, but it’s still leagues better than the bog-standard webcams out there. It also supports Windows Hello facial recognition, which works simply and promptly.

As for audio, you'll find a pair of 2-watt (W) speakers residing on the underside of the laptop near the front corners. That's an interesting, questionable design choice, especially when the laptop has so much bare space on the keyboard deck that had the potential to house up-firing speakers.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Regardless, borrowing design cues from more expensive siblings continues to benefit the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, this time with port selection. It’s loaded up with USB, containing three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (two Type-A, one Type-C) on the right side, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port on the left side, and a Thunderbolt 4 port with Power Delivery along the rear edge.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

That rear edge also includes a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.4 connection, an Ethernet jack, and a DC power input. The system also includes a 3.5mm headset jack on the left side. The only thing it seems to lack is an SD card slot, which is a miss on Gigabyte’s part for a laptop that has some prosumer pretensions with a “Creator Mode” in its settings. Meanwhile, the wireless connectivity available is the latest available: Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Using the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF: How It Feels

Gigabyte's Aorus 15 keyboard strikes a strange balance. On the one hand, it feels decent and makes for quick typing. I was able to hit up to 114 words per minute in Monkeytype(Opens in a new window) with 97% accuracy, which felt comfortable to achieve. However, the extra travel and resistance of the keycaps have me sometimes fail to press a key down if I’m being a little bit light with my touches in an attempt to be extra fast. Overall it’s still a rather pleasant typing experience, if not truly excellent.

The keys feel almost perfectly flat, which I don’t love. Also the LEDs underneath the keyboard provide uneven coverage of the keycap legends, and actually shine out from around the edges of quite a few keys, which lends a somewhat unpolished look to the system when they’re turned on. And you’ll want them on often, as the black keycaps are paired with an almost dark gray legend that’s somewhat hard to see in anything but the brightest conditions. So, you'll find some design quirks, but they can easily be overlooked, thanks to the largely positive feel of the keyboard.

Unfortunately, the touchpad isn’t quite as pleasing to use. The surface is delightfully smooth and feels a cut above, but the clicking mechanism is super stiff and inconsistent across the surface of the pad. Some areas, I find, I fail to click because of the resistance it puts up. If you’re used to just tapping to click instead of actually depressing the touchpad, you’ll be fine. But otherwise it's a trying experience.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Unsurprisingly, the display on the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF is a weak point. Though the panel has space to go taller, Gigabyte opted for a 16:9 screen. Its 15.6-inch size matched with a 1080p resolution also doesn’t make it overly sharp. Pair that with a low color gamut, and it looks the budget-screen part.

The anti-glare coating helps keep the screen visible in various situations, but some shoppers won't want to settle just for “visible” when many laptops go for “beautiful.” Even though it can run at 144Hz, if how your games look matters more than the raw gameplay, you might want to consider a more premium machine.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Despite their sub-optimal placement, the speakers on the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF muster satisfactory sound. They’re certainly weak when it comes to bass, but it doesn’t feel entirely absent from the mix like the speakers on so many laptops. They can push up in volume, too, holding up reasonably well in a 100-square-foot room. The laptop comes with special DTS software for sound processing, but I find it actually significantly degrades the sound coming out of the on-board speakers and may serve best for headphones and external speakers.

Beyond that DTS software, Gigabyte doesn’t overload the system with extraneous apps. It has a special program for managing system performance profiles, keyboard color schemes and macros, and the like, but you'll find little else of note beyond the typical pre-installed apps and games found on most Windows 11 laptops.

Testing the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF: A Purring Pair of Processors

The $1,000 price on the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF puts it in an interesting spot, as you'll find still few laptops coming with the newer, lower-power RTX 40 Series GPUs. It’s also sitting firmly in the budget-gaming-laptop segment.

This sees it run against 2023 budget options, like the MSI Cyborg 15 A13VE ($999) and MSI Katana 15 ($1,599 as tested), as well as last year’s Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 7 ($1,549.99 as tested). Then, for an idea of what a bit more money gets you, we have the recent Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 ($1,839 as tested).

While the matchup with the MSI Cyborg 15 is one-to-one, Gigabyte contends with upgraded configurations in MSI's Katana and the latest Legion Pro laptop. But, with lower-power hardware from 2023, the Aorus will have an interesting matchup against the 2022 Legion 5i Gen 7, which was pricier last year with higher-tier hardware but still competes on performance and value.

Productivity Tests

We use PCMark 10's main benchmark to simulate a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We follow that up with PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to measure the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

To further evaluate processors, we run three more benchmarks specifically focused on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. (Unfortunately, a recurring error common among recent Intel CPUs prevented our PugetBench Photoshop test from running properly on the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF and both MSI systems.)

At PCMag, any score above 5,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark is viewed as a mark of excellence and suggests that the machine will easily handle everyday office work. The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF made a decent showing in these tests, well above that threshold. It lagged behind the more expensive models, as you'd expect, but not by big gaps. The Aorus proved especially potent in the storage test, which is an area in which Gigabyte could have more easily skimped without it showing up too plainly in the specs. (Storage was an area that held back the MSI Cyborg 15, for instance.) The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF also managed to use its 12 cores (four Performance, eight Efficient) better in Cinebench and HandBrake than the Cyborg 15 used its 10 cores (six Performance, four Efficient).

Though the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF wasn't the front-runner in this section, it kept up reasonably well, while running on half as much memory. This may be a testament to Gigabyte’s cooling system, which seems ample for a 45W CPU and GeForce RTX 4050.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

To see how each system handles graphical workloads and tasks, we run two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark. The Night Raid simulation is more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics, while Time Spy is more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs.

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

Finally, we round out the benchmarks with tests run in real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from a AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology (or AMD's equivalent).

Predictably, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF fell behind the MSI Katana 15 and Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 in graphical performance as a result of their much more powerful GPUs. Its matchup against the MSI Cyborg 15 was a knockout, though: Despite the two running similar hardware and having equal pricing, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF led the MSI Cyborg 15 by considerable margins.

Unfortunately, it didn't do so impressively against the RTX 3060 inside the Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 7, which narrowly won out in 3DMark’s Time Spy and Night Raid, though barely lost in GFXBench. That close matchup is dangerous for Gigabyte, as the age of the Lenovo laptop could see discounts that make it more attractive—I’ve seen with this similar AMD-powered RTX 3070 Legion models(Opens in a new window).

The real-world gaming tests continue to show Gigabyte’s domination of the MSI Cyborg 15. Across all of these benchmarks, it established a clear performance advantage. While it was not a staggering lead, it felt close enough to the difference of a single GPU tier to make for a pointed win. Given the superior design of Gigabyte’s machine, it’s that much easier to recommend at the $1,000 price. However, since this laptop uses SO-DIMM modules for its memory, I would advise adding extra RAM after the fact; this model can accept up to 64GB.

Naturally, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF doesn’t keep up with the MSI Katana 15 or Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 and their RTX 4070 GPUs. But again, it’s not so far behind that the $500-plus saved on the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF doesn’t feel worth the trade-off in performance. Regardless, the rivalry with last year’s Legion 5i Gen 7 and its RTX 3060 stayed hot here, with the older Lenovo showing a fairly consistent advantage, even running Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at 1440p Ultra faster than the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF ran it at 1080p Ultra.

This puts the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF in a perilous position against last year’s gaming laptops. However, remember that only the RTX 40 Series GPUs have access to DLSS 3 frame generation rather than DLSS 2 with the RTX 30 Series. As more games release supporting the new tech, this will widen the appeal gap between RTX 40 and 30 Series GPUs.

Battery and Display Tests

To see how much life each laptop can get out of its battery, we play a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with the display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

We also analyze the quality of the display with a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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).

Battery life wasn't awful for the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF. It managed 7 hours and 10 minutes in our battery test, which is on the long side for some gaming laptops. It’s also a better result than two of its competitors here. Even though the Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 7 outlasted it by a hair, the Legion is so dim at its 50% brightness setting that it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF really shows its budget nature in the display test. Though Gigabyte has a range of configuration options, the base display included is simply not a looker, though not much worse than the other budget gaming-laptop screens here. Not only is 1080p stretched across a 16:9, 15.6-inch panel not all that exceptional in 2023, but the color and brightness are lacking. The display managed only 64% coverage of the sRGB color space and couldn't even achieve half of the AdobeRGB or DCI-P3 color spaces. It managed to score a bit lower than even MSI’s two laptops, which also had distinctly disappointing displays. While it was a little brighter than those two, this screen's 287-nit peak isn’t up to a level that can do any HDR content justice, nor is it suitable for outdoor use.

Neither Lenovo laptop had a killer display panel either, but both are downright regal next to this competition. For the price, both produce substantially better color, higher brightness, sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel images, and a speedy 165Hz refresh rate. If a premium display panel is high on your list of wants, those higher prices start to feel more justified.

Verdict: A Worthy $1,000 Gaming Machine

When it comes to retail price, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF is an impressive little package that benefits considerably from the hand-me-down Aorus design. With us coming fresh off testing a couple of budget MSI laptops, the Aorus 15 BMF feels like it’s in another league, despite sitting squarely at just under $1,000. This laptop's performance for the price is decent, and it features niceties—like a 1080p webcam, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and upgradable memory—not found on some gaming notebooks twice its price.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

While the display and the use of chassis space may disappoint, the system holds up in most other regards. Of course, Lenovo pricing fluctuates often (and sometimes drastically), and the key things that the Aorus 15 BMF lacks are exactly what those pricier gaming laptops provide. Still, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF brings budget-tight gamers enough of that premium experience to earn our Editors' Choice award among low-cost gaming laptops.