Gigabyte Aorus X3 Plus review – a beastly 13.9-inch gaming ultraportable

22 Comments

  1. Christophe

    September 14, 2014 at 3:27 pm

    Thanks for this great review
    Your website is surely the best for choosing a laptop

  2. alessio

    September 14, 2014 at 4:18 pm

    hi mike, your reviews are great but you often confuse me with the details of the GPU instead of a GTX you just write GT, in this case the AORUS equips a GTX 870m, not a mere GT 870 the same goes for the the review of the Asus nx500, I became confused

    • Andrei Girbea

      September 15, 2014 at 12:40 pm

      The model should be enough to understand what sorts of graphics we’re talking about. If we’re talking about the Nvidia 8XX series, then everything up to 845M is a GT, and all the others above are GTXs, from what I know. But I’ll try to be more careful about it.

      • Michael Gossett

        January 21, 2015 at 10:18 am

        Not true at all. There’s the GTX 860M/870M/880M models. Definitely not GT’s.

  3. Charles

    September 14, 2014 at 9:42 pm

    I chose ASUS Zenbook UX303LN at the end. The price is just too good for a high end ultrabook.

    • Ruda

      October 15, 2014 at 4:32 pm

      My words man (y) The only thing i wonder about is to buy it without SSD and change the SSHD to my-own-choosen SSD.

  4. brown bear

    September 15, 2014 at 6:24 am

    It’s a shame that this laptop was built so poorly. It has such nice specs on paper, and its photo-op looked great.

    I need to find an ultrabook that will be able to play Evolve on atleast med-low settings at 1080p.

    I might just have to go with the Alienware 13. I hope the Yoga 3 has more horesepower in the iGPU realm.

    Or if Asus makes the updated UX32VD with a decent dGPU. We can only hope!

    Love your reviews man, very informative.

    • Andrei Girbea

      September 15, 2014 at 12:41 pm

      The UX303LN is the updated UX32VD with a decent GPU (Nvidia 840M)…

  5. Kaustubh Joshi

    September 23, 2014 at 6:38 am

    can you please do a comparison between, aorus 3+ and razer blade

    • Derek Sullivan

      September 24, 2014 at 1:38 am

      I don’t have either machine available anymore but I could possibly do a hands off comparison if you think that would be helpful. I tried to keep everything consistent from when I reviewed the Razer Blade, so I have pretty much all the same type of benchmarks to make a proper comparison. The only thing I won’t have is side by side pictures. I also have been using a 3k GS60 for the past week that I could add to the list.

  6. yawnbox

    September 29, 2014 at 7:24 am

    I’d really like to see memory specs, like CAS/RAS

  7. Benpo

    October 1, 2014 at 2:44 am

    I’d just like to say that I actually own this laptop and have been using it for about a month now. The inconsistencies in the wifi performance are actually due to crappy drivers. The RAID 0 configuration seems to be hardware, so I actually uninstalled every driver but the touchpad, geforce experience, bluetooth 4.0, killer lan, and Macro keys. The computer basically crashed, rebooted a couple times, windows 8.1 is awesome at finding generic windows drivers and installing them. After it finished updating this comp has been a beast. Not as fast as my desktop obviously, but for the light weight materials, low heat, low price etc. It was definitely an awesome buy. Surprisingly cool too.

  8. Musa

    October 16, 2014 at 10:59 pm

    Thanks for the great review!
    How’s the image quality of the downscaled res on gaming and on desktop? and are you happy with it? Let’s say on 1920×1080 or 1600×900? Usually i can predict the result image quality (which is more blurry,yes) but on this laptop i thought (and i hope) its different because it is 13.9″ which is basically smaller screen and maybe even 1600×900 still looks crisp and sharp in this laptop, i don’t know.

    • Derek Sullivan

      October 23, 2014 at 4:59 pm

      Sorry for the delayed response. Downscaling to 1600×900 and 1920×1080 was not a problem for me. There are those out there that claim there is blurriness that is caused from downscaling. This may be true, but the pixels are so small so I doubt many will be able to notice it.

  9. Niels

    December 8, 2014 at 3:49 pm

    I just bought the laptop. In general I am happy with the laptop. But I have some problems with the wifi. Most of the time the internet is fast. But on sometimes the wifi is really slow on my laptop. Benpo is saying that The inconsistencies in the wifi performance are actually due to crappy drivers. So what can i do if it is a hardware problem?

    please let me know!

    Niels

    • Derek Sullivan

      December 15, 2014 at 2:42 am

      You might be able to check some of the online forums about your Wifi settings for the particular card. I also had issues but didn’t spend enough time with it in order to try and fix the problem through software. Other laptop models with that card have also had issues and I’ve heard they were solved through driver settings.

  10. Mark Rivera

    June 21, 2015 at 12:15 am

    Hello, how’s the laptop so far? I’m debating on it.

  11. Hans Deyssenroth

    July 6, 2016 at 3:00 pm

    Hi Andrei,
    I read your article about thunderbolt. With thunderbold and a firewire adapter one can connect audio devices like mixers in a daisy chain, which is not possible with USB. Do you know wether TB3 is capable for that as well?
    Thanks and best regards,
    Hans

    • Derek Sullivan

      July 7, 2016 at 1:24 pm

      It should be. There are a number of devices with two thunderbolt connections for daisy chaining. Problem is, some only have one connection so for those, it’ll stop there.

  12. Robert Forsman

    February 22, 2017 at 4:54 pm

    I actually like physical buttons. I need the middle mouse button to be able to use the blender 3D modeling and animation software. I also use it when I'm playing games.

    I actually returned one Dell laptop that has the new software-defined buttons on the trackpad because its inability to trigger a middle click without connecting an external mouse prevented me from using the laptop for its intended purpose.

  13. Yahtadi

    March 7, 2017 at 11:36 am

    Huge fans of your work andrei!
    Can you do a review for Dell lattitude E7280 and E7280 ?
    Would be fantastic

  14. Tom

    April 19, 2020 at 7:37 pm

    I bought an Aorus x3 in 2017
    To call it a disappointment it Would be an understatement

    Never ever ever in my life I’ve been so mad at a computer

    After few months the bottom left part of the screen basically split in 2 like if Moses himself did it

    Since then, the WiFi doesn’t work anymore, so I can’t connect to Internet unless I have a LAN cable connected to it

    It keeps overheating even for the most basic tasks like using Word or PowerPoint and the fan noise compares to a 50kW power generator

    I live in Central Europe so it wasn’t easy to buy one since they don’t sell it in my country (I had to order from UK for ~1400 pounds), so forget about sending it in for repairs

    Oh and how about the font size of some software (like VLC) or some
    games like AoE II on Steam that not even the most skilled of my IT friends could find a solution to

    I could go on, but suffice to say I wouldn’t recommend my version of the x3 to my worst enemy

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