Gigabyte AORUS 17 XE4 Review – 12700H + 3070 Ti Gaming Laptop

This is Gigabyte’s AORUS 17 XE4, a 17” thick-boi gaming laptop with some top-tier specs and performance. I’ll be honest and say I quite like it, although there are some things that drive me up the wall about it, so let me explain.

I’ll start with the specs, this near 3cm thick beast is rocking an i7-12700H, a 6P8E core chip, with just 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL22 RAM, a 1TB Gen 4×4 SSD and an RTX 3070 Ti laptop chip with a peak 130W power limit and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. That’s not bad, and with the cooling potential that this has – which I can assure you is a lot, just look at the beefy heatpipes inside – you get pretty healthy performance out of it too.

Cinebench R23 single threaded shows strong performance, a clear tier above the rest of the pack, although somewhat as expected a hair behind the higher boosting i9-12900H in the Flow Z13. However when we swap to multi-threaded performance, thanks to the excellent cooling potential you get top-tier performance. It’s the fastest machine I’ve tested, and not by a small margin. Interestingly the turbo mode – with its much louder fan profile – isn’t much faster here.

The BMW scene in Blender again has the XE4 on top, although the gap to the 12700H in the ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is pretty small. Still, a fair margin above everything else though. Gooseberry is a similar story, with the XE4 topping the leaderboard, albeit not by a large margin. It’s still a healthy improvement though, with well over a minute off of the 12900H’s performance from Asus’ gaming tablet.

Using Puget Bench in Premiere Pro again has the XE4 at the top of the charts, even beating out the 10C M1 Pro in the newest MacBook Pro, and a clear lead over literally everything else I’ve had my hands on. After Effects is much more modest, possibly thanks to only having 16GB of RAM on hand – although it does still beat out the M1 Pro and the ZenBook Pro 14. Finally in Photoshop it’s again more mid-field, although it’s much closer to all the other scores here, meaning you can expect a perfectly decent experience.

Of course being a gaming machine, you’ll want to know how it handles in games. In short, rather well. Starting off with CSGO, the XE4 is the second fastest machine I’ve tested, only behind the many-thousand-pound RTXA5000 based ProArt StudioBook, and only by 3 FPS average. I’m gonna call that a win for the XE4, plus it has the best 1% low times I’ve seen too!

As for Cyberpunk, it’s worth noting that the XE4 was benchmarked with the new built-in benchmark, which gives slightly different results to the manual benchmarking I’ve done previously. With that said there is no denying just how fast this new combo is, especially with adequate cooling, and you get pretty exceptional performance from it.

Fortnite is a similar story, with a very healthy lead over the rest of the pack, both in average and 1% low performance. Running over 10 FPS faster on average than the next fastest machine I’ve tested, and 30 FPS up over the next. Not bad!

Watchdogs is the same, where again the XE4 is extraordinary high by comparison, netting over 100 FPS average compared to under 70 FPS average for any other machine I’ve tested.

And finally for today, Microsoft Flight Simulator. Again we see an incredible leap in performance, jumping from just 52 FPS average to 86 FPS! In fact even the 1% low figure beats out the next best AVERAGE result I’ve seen. Absolutely incredible performance!

Since this is a gaming machine, Gigabyte have gone all-in with the display too. This is a 17.3” 1080p 360Hz IPS panel that I really really like. It’s smooth as hell, snappy and responsive too, and just makes for an excellent gaming experience. Fast paced games play rather well on this, the combination of enough horsepower and enough hertz works really well.

Gigabyte claims this is a “3ms response time”, sadly my testing suggests more like 7.5ms which still isn’t bad at all but it does mean frames don’t get fully drawn before the next is ready. You can see that in the UFO test, where no frame is quite 100% done drawing before a new frame starts, and you can see the white marks taking 5 or 6 milliseconds to clear off too. Still, it’s a fair bit faster than most gaming laptops and to the eye it’s a pretty great experience.

What’s also impressive is the colour accuracy – while the panel only covers 100% of the limited sRGB spectrum, it covers it fully and with an average DeltaE of just 0.86 in my testing which is excellent. That means if you want to use this as a part-time creator laptop, especially say editing your game clips, you should have a pretty good experience. Or of course on the content consumption side you end up with a fairly vibrant and enjoyable panel. You get around 350 nits of peak brightness which isn’t enough for outdoor or bright room usage, but is plenty for most places you’d game on a laptop like this.

What’s less of a great experience, for me anyway, is the keyboard. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s off for me – maybe the spacing, maybe the mushy keys with a touch too long travel before actuating – either way it wasn’t quite as nice as I’d like. I mostly got used to it though so that’s more of a personal preference. You do get both white and RGB backlighting for that, along with automatic profile switching from the “Azure AI” feature in Gigabyte’s Control Center app.

Yes, you heard that right, “Azure AI”. That’s the “Ai Boost” toggle here, which supposedly – and I quote – “can automatically & dynamically optimize CPU/GPU power for different apps through deep learning on the Microsoft Azure servers”. Basically it’s an auto-profile switcher feature so when you launch a game it’ll swap to gaming mode, when you launch an Adobe app like Premiere it’ll swap to creator mode, and you can manually pick Turbo mode if you fancy a whiny jet engine next to you.

Also, a note here Gigabyte. In your reviewer’s guide you claim that this software offers a “clear panel, user-friendly and information rich” dashboard. I have to disagree. The text is tiny and hard to read and controls like the battery charging limit – an excellent feature – is unintuitive as hell. To set a charging limit you have to use a tiny drop down to select “Customize”, then you get a slider that doesn’t tell you anything about its value – no to see that you have to click and drag to get a tooltip to know this is a 75% charge level cap. Make All these settings bigger, get rid of all the wasted space and make everything easier to access.

Oh, and on the dashboard tab, don’t just show big single figures, make all of those data points graphs so you can see what has been happening. If you want to know what temperature your GPU is running at while gaming, alt-tabbing and seeing a rapidly declining value isn’t useful.

Although, speaking of the battery, you get a 99Wh battery here – the largest they can put in and you can still bring it on a plane. Sadly, thanks to the rather power-hungry hardware that only nets you around 3 hours of battery life (at least with high screen brightness) – lowering the brightness can eke out a little more, but you’ll want to be near to a wall plug pretty much whenever you use this thing.

One other thing you should know is the I/O. That’s a little strange – you get 2 USB A ports, one Thunderbolt 4 USB C port, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, Ethernet, headphone jack and DC in. Yeah, Mini Displayport… Personally I’d have rather had a USB C port with DisplayPort ALT Mode, instead of the Mini DisplayPort, and why Gigabyte… Why did you put the massive DC in jack on the right? You know, where you want as much space as possible to use your mouse properly…

Perhaps it was an internal routing issue – not that you’ll know because Gigabyte decided to use TWO stealth warranty stickers on both front screws. The stickers don’t expressly say they will void your warranty if you open it, but it sure makes it look like that’s what they’ll do. It’s even more strange because internally there is a spare M.2 slot – and the RAM is actually two SODIMM slots which you’ll probably want to upgrade as 16GB especially in this class of machine isn’t exactly top notch, so to have them make it clear they don’t want you to get in here is strange.

As a whole package, I think it’s a very impressive machine. It’s quite clearly focused on being a great gaming laptop, and in general I’d say it hits that mark. The 360Hz screen is fantastic, the performance is exceptional, and for £2,000 I’m actually remarkably impressed by the price tag. Of course that’s a crazy amount of money for most people, but for this style of machine, this level of hardware, I’m surprised and impressed. There are some drawbacks for sure, but if you are in the market for a larger powerhouse machine and can stomach the price tag, maybe give this one a look.