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Gigabyte Aero 15 Y9 review: RTX 2080 performance, at a price
With last year's Aero 15X, Gigabyte managed an impressive feat: putting powerful gaming performance and long battery life into a 4.4-pound body. This year, the Taiwanese company is trying to top itself with the Aero 15 Y9, its new flagship laptop. Weighing just a bit more at 4.5 pounds, it's now equipped with top-of-the-line components: an Intel i9-8950HK 6-core CPU and NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU. The latter component has become rather controversial. NVIDIA revealed that the portable Max-Q version, while packing the same Turing Tu104 chip, is underclocked by up to half that of the desktop RTX 2080 GPU. It comes in an 80-Watt version with a 735-1,095MHz core clock and a faster, more power-hungry 90-Watt variant that runs at 990-1,230MHz. The desktop RTX 2080, meanwhile, runs at 1,515-1,710MHz -- over double that of the lower-powered Max-Q version. So performance and battery life depend on which chip the manufacturer uses and how much it's overclocked, which brings us back to the Aero 15 Y9. It's the first RTX 2080 Max-Q laptop we've tested, so I was interested to see how Gigabyte handled it. The good news is that performance is definitely better. But it's not that great a leap and, unfortunately, it's much costlier. Some of the other defining qualities of the last Aero have been lost, too.
Gigabyte's Aero laptop uses AI to optimize gaming performance
Gigabyte was one of the first PC makers to introduce practical light and thin gaming laptops, but now that every manufacturer is doing the same, it has to find other ways to stand out. With its latest Aero 15-X9 and all-new Aero 15-Y9 models, it has found an interesting angle. They use Microsoft's Azure AI to figure out the optimal CPU and GPU wattage setting depending on whether you're gaming, editing videos or surfing the web -- a sort of intelligent "overclocking."
