Aorus X7 DT V8 Review

The Aorus X7 features a 17” 144 hz display, packs an overclockable i7-8850H, a full GTX 1080 that is also overclockable, up to 64 GB of ram, 2 M.2 slots + 1 2.5” terabyte drive, as well as a plethora of ports. And the kicker is… it’s only .9” thin and only weights 7.05 lbs. There are very few laptops out there that are this thin and light, and still packs this much punch.

Now I’ve got this unit in for review from HIDEvolution, a 3rd party custom reseller who wanted me to check out this unit. Now this is not a sponsored video by any means, but I do want to thank HIDEvolution for sending this over for review. They’ve when ahead and upgraded this unit with Grizzly Conductanaut and thermal pads for increased cooling efficiency, which means that this Aorus X7 will run at lower average temps than your standard unit.

Ports

Along the left side we have a speaker grill, headphone and mic jacks, 3 usb type A, and a LAN port, lastly we have the exhaust. Along the back, we have exhaust ports on the sides, the power plug, and our forth USB 3 Type A. Moving to the right side, the other speaker grill, a super speed SD Card reader capable of hitting ultra fast read speeds with high speed SD cards, a USB Type C, Thunderbolt, HDMI, and Mini display port.

This is one of the most fully kitted out ports you’ll find on literally any laptop out there today, including when you compare it to the big beefy ones.

Overclocking & Performance

So how well does this thing handle overclocking? Shockingly well for both the CPU and GPU. First of all, I wasn’t expecting the i7-8850H to be fully overclockable since it’s not a “K” processor, which is normally reserved for Intel’s processors that allow for direct overclocking, but this 8850H allows for full manual control up to 4.4 ghz across all cores. If you can cool the CPU well enough, you’ll be able to get very similar performance to the i9-8950HK, maybe just a 5% performance decrease when overclocking both processors.

Out of the box, the processor is undervolted by .75 mv, but is power limited to just 63 watts. It manages to maintain only a 1140 Cinebench score and throttle down to 3.5 ghz across all cores. So you’ll need to raise your power limits and increase your undervolt if you want to have stable clock speeds at 4.3 ghz. I did this with Intel XTU no problem. Just by undervolting to -125 mv and raising power limit to unlimited, I saw a jump up to 1340 on average and stable 4.3 ghz across all cores.

4.4 Ghz OC on Cinebench R15 Multi - 1380 or so consistently.

Now I did overclock it up to 4.4 ghz stable with Cinebench R15 and it scored 1380, and it was drawing a consistent 101 watts of power at those speeds. And the great thing is it temps were hovering right around 82C, which is just fantastic. Ultimately, I settled on a 4.3 ghz stable OC with a 2 ghz AVX offset for when rendering in premiere, which means that the processor will automatically downclock to 4.1 ghz when rendering video, since that is such a tough task for a processor to handle.

As far as the GPU goes, out of the box, we managed a fire strike graphics score of just 20141, which is good for how thin this laptop is, but its quite frankly a middle of the road score for a full GTX 1080. But the good news is, I was able to undervolt it and overclock it with MSI Afterburner just enough to outperform the highest performing laptop currently available on NotebookCheck.com’s laptops with the GTX 1080. With the right tweaking, the GPU can boost to the 1932-2000 Mhz range, which is the just fantastic clock for a GTX 1080 laptop like this one.

Temps

I never saw the temps above 84C, even when running benchmarks in a loop, gaming, or rendering video, which is just fantastic. This in a room at 72F. Warmer rooms will run warmer temps. The temps typically stayed around 70-75C for the GPU, and 75-80C for the CPU, and that’s while overclocking the system to the max possible specs. If you lower the overclocks down a bit, you’ll see noticeably cooler temps in the lower 68-75C for both CPU and GPU.

You can also tweak the fan curve in the Aorus command & control software, so if you don’t mind the noise you can have it running a few degrees cooler, or if you want a queiter gaming experience, you can undervolt and run at stock clocks for very cool temps when gaming with low fan noise.

Gaming Experience

Gaming on the Aorus X7 is fantastic. I’ve been able to stream sessions of Fortnite for five hours straight comfortably without throttling or slowdowns, and averaging about 200 FPS on a mixture of settings between low and epic.

Other games have performed equally as well with PUBG averaging about 112 FPS in my run through the city of Yasana test.

Display

This laptop is obviously a beast when it comes to performance, but how does it handle when it comes to actually just using it for day to day use.

First, I will say that the display is quite good, I tested it to 308 nits brightness after disabling windows 10 auto brightness. The contrast and colors are there too, and to top it off, this unit had minimal backlight bleed as well.

So far, this has been the best high refresh rate laptop display I’ve used so far. Beating out the Razer Blade 15, GS65 Stealth, and matching very closely to the Aorus X9.

Keyboard

The keyboard is excellent. With a good overall feel, full size arrow keys, dedicated home, end, and numpad. The keys are also individually lit RGB, but unfortunately the software isn’t my favorite and could use some improvement to really take advantage of the individually lit keys and make for more usable presets.

Touchpad

The touchpad on this laptop is great, though I think it could be a tad larger. Laptops like the Razer Blade 15 are sporting larger trackpads on smaller laptop frames, and I’d like to see a 15% increase in size of the trackpad here. But the good news is that the drivers are good, movements are precise, the pad itself is just the right amount of clicky.

Speakers

The speakers on this are solid, with a touch of bass, and okay mids and highs. But they are not as good as the Razer Blade Pro laptop I’ve been using, and they are far from the best when compared to the big and beefy systems. Here take a listen.

Battery Life

This laptop comes with a very large 94Wh battery, almost the maximum possible size of 99Wh. But because this laptop features G-Sync, the laptop cannot utilize the integrated intel graphics card for increased battery life. That means that you’re always running on the GTX 1080, even when on battery, and so battery life is just mediocre. You’ll get about 1.5-2 hrs of high intensity load, 3-4 hrs of webbrowsing, and about 5 hrs of super light load in airplane mode just working on documents, etc. Overall, that’s just about average for a system like this, but it’s certainly usable. I do wish G-Sync wasn’t included though, since it doesn’t benefit a system like this with so much power.

I also want to mention that the Aorus X7 comes with a smaller than average powerbrick for laptops of this power capability, smaller even than the one that came with my Aorus X5 that I’ve owned previously.

Conclusion

At $3089, this laptop is not cheap, but it does pack close to the absolute best performance you can find in a laptop period. Unlike many other laptops that are this thin, the Aorus X7 is actually fully capable of cooling down the CPU and GPU, even when overclocking the system. This thing really just doesn’t have any glaring flaws worth pointing out. It’s a rock solid ultra thin laptop.

When I compare it to many laptops that are trying to push the boundaries of the thin and light category, like the Razer Blade 15, I see a massive increase in performance for the Aorus X7 with a manageable increase in size.

And then when I compare this laptop to thicker laptops, such as the MSI GT75, I see the same level of performance, but the Aorus X7 is so much thinner. So in my mind, this Aorus X7 is right in the sweet spot between power and portability. If you’re looking for a high end gaming notebook, look no further. This is it.

Now I do want to mention a couple of additional options out there. If you really want the most performance, then I’d recommend looking at the Clevo P750 or P870 from HIDEvolution. If you really want something thinner and lighter, then I’d take a look at the Aorus X7’s little brother, the Aorus X5.