Gigabyte Aero 17: A gorgeous 4K laptop that finally makes sense

Power users looking to ditch tiny laptop screens.

- GORDON MAH UNG

If you’re squinting at this review from your tiny 13-inch laptop screen, you may be like the many people who started working from home a few weeks ago and realized that portability means nothing if you’re going blind using a tiny screen.

Gigabyte’s Aero 17 has the answer, by offering superb performance and a gorgeous, 17.3-inch UHD 4K HDR 400 panel to boot. Never mind that the laptop also features Intel’s newest 10th-gen, 8-core, Core i7-10875H Comet Lake H CPU (go.pcworld. com/875h) and Nvidia’s stellar GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q GPU.

A 4K LAPTOP THAT MAKES SENSE

We haven’t been big fans of 4K displays on smaller laptops, as the hit on battery life typically hasn’t been worth the pixel-density tradeoff. With the Aero 17 though, we’re pleased to say battery life was far better than we expected for a 4K panel (more on that later).

And yes, the 4K pixel density is far more useful on a 17.3-inch screen than a 13.3-inch panel. It’s enough resolution that you can tile multiple windows and they’re all still legible.

The Aero 17’s panel is also rated for VESA’s HDR 400 spec (go.pcworld.com/ hdr4), which mandates such things as its name implies: a minimum of 400 nits’ peak-level brightness, and sRGB color gamut support.

We measured the Aero 17’s brightness peak at about 423 nits. While the HDR 400 rating is the entry level for HDR specs and mandates only 100 percent of sRGB, Gigabyte brings more to the table with 100 percent of Adobe RGB color gamut. The panel, an AU Optronics B173ZAN03.2, is a rated 10-bit panel, which means it’ll push more than 1.07 billion colors.