Gigabyte announce slim Aero 14 laptop

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It’s Computex 2016, and that means big announcements from PC makers across the world. Gigabyte took the chance to announce a completely new laptop, the Aero 14. After 66 P-series laptops, it’s definitely time for a change – so let’s take a look at the new blood, which Gigabyte claim is the ‘most portable 14-inch laptop’.

Where past Gigabyte laptops tended to have rounded corners and a uniform thickness, the Aero series sports a boxier look, with thicker sections to accommodate ports on each side and a full aluminium build. Still, the total thickness is just 19.9mm, a millimetre thinner than the P34G v5 we reviewed recently. The 14-inch model comes with a 2560 x 1440 IPS screen, which sits atop a redesigned keyboard and an expansive touchpad.

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When it comes to the internals, we’re looking at a familiar spec sheet for a 2016 Gigabyte laptop: a Core i7-6700HQ processor and GTX 970M GPU, backed with 8 or 16GB of DDR4 2133MHz RAM. The port layout is also familiar, with a USB-C port, three USB 3.0 ports, mini Display Port, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm headphone and an SD card reader shared out between the two sides. A USB-to-ethernet adapter is also available.

Storage is more interesting, with no option for a mechanical hard drives as we’ve seen in the past. Instead, there’s room for two M.2 SSDs, which can operate over PCI-e (NVMe) or SATA. Could we see a RAID0 setup here, then? That would be pretty sweet.

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Battery life should also be improved over earlier Gigabyte laptops, as capacity has been improved substantially. The P34G v5 had a 61.25Wh battery, while the Aero 14 has a 94.24Wh battery. While the higher resolution 1440p screen of the Aero might make up some of the difference, we should still expect almost a 50% gain in longevity.

The Aero 14 will be available later this year (I assume) in green, orange and black. We’ll be looking to get a unit in for review, so stay tuned for that!

Which colour do you like the best? I’m quite partial to the green, but I think the orange might have some legs too. And if you’re really boring (or you have to pretend this laptop is for work), then the black might work too.

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