Aorus X7 Pro v5 review: A 4K gaming monster

The X7 Pro v5 is Aorus’ top gaming laptop this year, and with good reason. For inside its plain black chassis lies two Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M chips, which work together in SLI to produce astonishingly quick frame rates that even a high-end GTX 980M – the chip inside Aorus’ X5s v5 Camo – would balk at.

Indeed, it produced a phenomenal 70fps in Metro: Last Light Redux on Very High with SSAO turned on at its highest resolution of 1,920×1,080, which is almost double the 48fps achieved by the X5s under the same conditions. As a result, Full HD gaming on the very highest settings shouldn’t be a problem for the X7 Pro v5, but the laptop’s key attraction is its ability to run games in 4K.

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You’ll need to connect it to an external 4K display via its HDMI 2.0 port in order to do this, but I managed a respectable 30fps in Metro with SSAO turned off on Very High, and a near perfect 54fps in Dirt Showdown with the graphics set to Ultra. This is incredibly impressive for a gaming laptop, and it puts the equally eye-wateringly expensive Asus ROG G752VY to shame.

Of course, the X7 Pro v5 isn’t left wanting when it comes to raw CPU power, either, as its quad-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK processor is a more than worthy partner for its dual graphics chips. Tearing through our 4K multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 118, the X7 Pro v5 joins the Gigabyte P55W v5 as the quickest laptop we’ve reviewed to date, so you shouldn’t have any problem running processor-heavy tasks such as photo and video editing software.

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Admittedly, the unit I was sent also had 32GB of RAM, which isn’t commercially available. Instead, the model you’ll be buying only has 16GB of RAM (which can be expanded up to 64GB), so our benchmark scores might not be a wholly accurate representation of its speed. However, it’s still a lightning fast laptop, and I wouldn’t expect the 16GB version to produce a noticeable dip in performance.

Even better, the X7 Pro v5’s effective fan controls means it doesn’t overheat like its cousin, the X5s v5 Camo. This is hugely impressive considering it measures just 22.9mm thick, and shows you don’t necessarily have to put up with a 49mm behemoth like the Asus ROG G752VY to get the very best levels of performance and heat distribution.

The X7 Pro v5 still got a little warm from time to time, but nothing like the 60 degree Celsius hotspots I measured on the X5s. You’ll need to download Aorus’ Command Centre software from its website, but once I’d installed it, it did an excellent job at keeping the X7 Pro v5 cool, giving you both set profiles and customisable fan options to keep it running smoothly.

Obviously, turning the fans down to Quiet (rather than its maximum Gaming setting) will affect the laptop’s overall performance, as frame rates practically halved when I re-ran our benchmark tests under these conditions. Thankfully, I was pleased to see that the Normal fan setting made much less of an impact, so at least you won’t have to contend with its noisy fans all the time to get the best frame rates.

Display

Of course, it’s a shame that the X7 Pro v5 doesn’t come with a 4K display as standard given the sheer amount of power hiding beneath its chassis, but at least its huge 17.3in, 1,920×1,080 provides plenty of room for your various gaming endeavours.

However, I was hoping for a higher quality screen given the price, as despite having very respectable viewing angles, its sRGB colour gamut coverage of 85.6% means that colours are rather lacking in vibrancy. Likewise, its contrast ratio of 782:1 was pretty underwhelming, so there wasn’t a huge amount of gradient shadow detail in darker scenes and images. It’s certainly no worse than the screen on the equally expensive Asus ROG G752VY, but not exactly the top-flight display you’d expect at over £2,000.