Performance and Battery Life
Hands up, who skipped right to the benchmarks? We don't blame you, these are the graphs that the Aorus X7 is designed to ignite, and we're off to a good start.
Pulling no surprises, the 3.4GHz Core i7-4700HQ is one of Intel's most-capable mobile processors, as evidenced by a score of 6.99 in the multi-core Cinebench test. Such performance is met by a noticeable burst in fan noise, yet CPU temperature peaked at 84ºC and we didn't experience any instances of throttling.
PCMark 7 takes overall system performance into account and the combination of a quad-core Intel CPU, 16GB of DDR3 memory and dual mSATA SSDs is enough to achieve a score of over 6,000.
The laptop feels suitably fast in use and could easily be classed as a desktop replacement. A lot of the responsiveness can be attributed to the RAID 0 SSDs, which together deliver stonking sequential read and write speeds of 953MB/s and 592MB/s, respectively.
Here's what we really want to know: how quick are two GTX 765M GPUs when paired together in SLI? 3DMark 11 returns a lofty score of 7,368, which is almost perfectly in line with the MSI GT60 2OD's single GTX 780M.
Our basic gaming benchmark is to run Just Cause 2 at 1,366x768 with medium quality settings. This is a light 3D test that can often trip-up some of the premium Ultrabooks, however it poses absolutely no challenge to today's high-end gaming laptops.
1080p Gaming Performance (Average FPS) |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Game | Quality Settings | Aorus X7 |
|||
2x GeForce GTX 765M |
GeForce GTX 780M |
GeForce GTX 770M |
GeForce GTX 765M |
||
| BioShock Infinite | Medium Quality | 108.4 |
112.0 |
72.1 |
55.8 |
| High Quality | 93.0 |
99.8 |
63.3 |
48.3 |
|
| Max Quality | 57.3 |
58.3 |
34.9 |
28.8 |
|
| DiRT Showdown | 4xMSAA, Medium Quality | 120.5 |
113.3 |
104.4 |
92.6 |
| 4xMSAA, High Quality | 117.9 |
111.1 |
87.2 |
76.4 |
|
| 4xMSAA, Ultra Quality | 47.3 |
55.2 |
35.7 |
29.4 |
|
To get a true feel for what these machines can do, we've benchmarked a selection of graphics configurations against two modern games - BioShock Infinite and DiRT Showdown - with varying degrees of image quality at a full-HD 1,920x1,080 resolution.
As depicted by the table above, the in-game performance served up by dual GeForce GTX 765M GPUs can be considered equivalent to that of a single GeForce GTX 780M. It's interesting to note, however, that the latter often pulls ahead with extreme quality settings: this can be explained by the 780M's larger 4GB frame buffer.
From a performance point of view, a single GTX 780M would be our preferred choice - if nothing else it avoids the potential foibles of SLI scaling - yet Aorus has achieved the desired effect. By using dual GPUs, the X7 is able to offer the gaming potential of chunky systems such as the MSI GT60 in a far sleeker form factor. And take our word for it, BioShock Infinite at near-60fps with maximum quality looks lovely on this 17.3in machine.
Poor battery life, however, is inevitable in an SLI gaming laptop. Unable to call on Nvidia Optimus technology, the X7 is always relying on the power-hungry discrete GPUs, and the 73Wh battery clearly struggles with the demand.
To gauge real-world battery life, we loop a 720p movie clip with 50 per cent screen brightness and all wireless radios disabled. The Aorus X7 managed to keep going for just 152 minutes. Disabling one of the two Nvidia GPUs by turning off SLI resulted in the run time increasing only fractionally to 164 minutes. Never mind getting through a full working day, the Aorus X7 will struggle to make it to lunch. Is sub-three-hour battery life acceptable on a modern-day laptop? Irrespective of performance in other areas, we're not so sure.