RTX 30: Gigabyte Aorus and Aero laptops get Nvidia’s latest mobile GPUs

Gigabyte has joined Razer, Asus and Acer in offering new laptops packed with Nvidia’s freshly unveiled RTX 30 mobile chips for high framerate, ray-traced fun.

RTX 30 GPUs can be found in the company’s Aorus and Aero lines. Gigabyte tries to make the distinction between them that Aorus hardware is for gamers, while Aero laptops are for creatives, but frankly it’s hard to sustain the argument that anything with the kind of power these machines have won’t work pretty well for both.

Still, that’s the divide that Gigabyte wants to make, and it goes some way to justifying its choices with the design decisions along the way. While all the new laptops come with the latest Intel Core i7 and i9 processors, the Aorus models have been co-designed with the help of the G2 Esports team, and boast FHD IPS displays with refresh rates of either 240Hz or 300Hz. The Aorus 17G – referred to by the company as “the ultimate mobile gaming solution” offers a true mechanical switch keyboard alongside its 300Hz IPS display, and can be configured with a RTX 3080 GPU if your budget allows.

The Aero range, meanwhile, goes for a sleeker design and has been honoured with the 2020 Reddot Design Award for its efforts. Here, it’s less about framerate and more about graphical fidelity, with the Aero 17 HDR offering a 4K HDR IPS LCD display along with your RTX 30 graphics. The Aero 15 OLED, meanwhile, ups this further by including a 4K HDR AMOLED screen – according to Gigabyte, it’s the world’s first Xrite Pantone colour calibrated OLED ensuring it offers real appeal to designers who like to game on the side.

In terms of connectivity, the Aero range has a few quality-of-life improvements too, with HDMI 2.1, miniDP and Thunderbolt 3 support for external monitors.

The laptops are up for pre-order now, and based on Ebuyer’s current pricing, they’re not going to be cheap. The lowest priced model is the Aorus 15G with an i7-10875H processor, 32GB RAM, 512GB of SSD storage and a RTX 3070 GPU for £1,789. Meanwhile the Aero 17 Core i9 model with 64GB (!) RAM, a 2TB SSD, a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and that lovely 17.3in 4K HDR screen will set you back £4,199 – the same price as the 15in model with the same internal specs, but a OLED 4K display.