Gaming laptops have come to a point where most of them will feature fancy RGB LED to attract attention and to tell you that it is a gaming centric laptop, but sometimes we just want these gaming laptops to be our regular working devices and you don’t need those fancy features for it to become a powerful workhouse, so Gigabyte has announced such a laptop called the Aero 14, announced in COMPUTEX this year, this laptop is technically a wolf hiding in a sheep’s clothing, it may look just like any Ultrabook but deep down inside, it has a powerful 6th generation Intel Core i7 CPU, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970M discrete graphics and a huge 94.24Wh battery that delivers up to 10 hours of usage.
The Aero 14 brings back memories of Dell’s older Inspiron laptops and ASUS’ very first G1 gaming laptop, Gigabyte has given the Aero 14 three very attractive colors – Black, Green and Orange – which is actually a good break from the usual gold and rose gold colors that we’ve been so accustomed to on recent tech gadgets. The Aero 14 feels incredibly slim and light for such a powerful device, with a mere 19.9mm thickness and weighing 1.89kg, it is even lighter than a common 14-inch notebook, the chassis is made of metal with a smooth finishing and the triangle shaped texture at the top is coated using the nano-imprint lithography process.
Gigabyte has generously given a number of modern input ports on the Aero 14, it has three USB 3.0 ports, a Type-C USB 3.1 port, one miniDisplay port, one HDMI 2.0 port, an SD card reader and a single microphone-audio combo jack. In addition, there’s also support for storage expansion with its dual-storage system and dual DDR4 2133 RAM slots that supports up to 32GB of memory.
Here’s a bonus, the AC adapter of the Aero 14 has a USB port that can charge your smartphones with a 2.0A power.
The hinges of the Aero 14 is pretty solid as I can lift up the lid with a single hand without having it falling over, I was greeted by the beautiful 14-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution IPS matte type display, there’s no touch support and viewing angles are really good as what you would expect from an IPS panel. While this is undoubtedly one of the highest resolution panels that I’ve seen on a 14-inch laptop, the screen refresh rate remains at 60Hz, which is quite a shame but I certainly understand the decision by Gigabyte to leave this feature out to differentiate it from the AORUS laptops.
One of the things that the Aero 14 has advantage against the P-series is the inclusion of five macro keys, every single key on the island-style keyboard is backlit with a white LED bulb (no RGB, sorry gamers!) that’s really beautiful, the typing experience is on par with the MacBook Pro and I really like the fonts that Gigabyte has used on the laptop’s keys, the trackpad is also a decent one which you won’t find the need to connect an external mouse while working with it.
Overall, my first impressions of the Aero 14 is a memorable one, it’s a powerful machine with a really simple yet attractive design, I wasn’t able to try out its full potential, particularly on its battery life in such a short period, I’m hoping that this would turn out to be a really good portable powerhouse for my video editing and gaming needs, let’s hope Gigabyte will pass us the Aero 14 really soon for a proper review, the Aero 14 is also expected to retail around $1600-$1700 on its release in Q3 this year.