Amid the normal onslaught of gaming laptops, a few stood out, and high up on that list was the Gigabyte Aorus X3plus, the latest offering from the company's new brand for high-end gaming notebooks.
It's packed with goodies, including its Intel Core i7 Haswell processor and an NVidia GeForce GTX 870M graphics and a 3K display. The starting configuration is the Core i7-4710HQ, running at up to 3.5 GHz.
The display measures 13.9-inch with QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1800). For storage, this laptop has dual M.2 SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, each 512 GB, so up to 1 TB of storage capacity. There's no optical drive. It includes 8 GB of internal memory and 6GB of GDDR5 graphics memory. Among the usual assortment of connectivity options, we also found a Mini DisplayPort interface.
The laptop is small for its power. It weighs 4.12 pounds, and is 0.9 inches thick (22 mm). There is no battery life test data or clear guidance on that spec so far, but a Gigabyte spokesperson estimated 4 - 6 hours of battery life, depending on the workload. Yes, vague, but that's all we've got so far.
We only had a few minutes with the device, not enough to game on it or do much beyond develop cursory impressions. The chassis is made mostly of plastic exterior it felt quite solid. The keyboard has a set of configurable G-keys -- the top button can shine with a variety of different background colors, each one representing a different profile for the set of five keys below it. First impressions: the keyboard was very comfortable and the track pad showed no noticeable flaws. The X3plus pricing starts at $2,229, and will likely be available in Q3.
