Gigabyte Aorus 17G: A gaming laptop that's amazingly quiet

Awesome GeForce RTX 3080 performance without all the noise.

- GORDON MAH UNG

Gigabyte’s Aorus 17G gaming laptop, with its high-end parts and sharp-angled design, looks like it should be loud, but it’s not. It’s amazingly quiet, actually.

How quiet? On its default fan profile we registered the laptop at barely 38 dB. That’s barely louder than the background noise of our office in the daytime. Cars driving by on the street registered more noise than the Aorus 17G looping a graphically intense stress test. We’ve heard ultraportable laptops produce more noise under a load than the Aorus 17G does while gaming.

It may spoil your fun a bit to know that Gigabyte achieved this feat by taking the RTX 3080 mobile GPU down a notch in performance. If you always want to have the ultimate gaming machine, you’ll invest in a good pair of gaming headphones and put up with a shrieking hair dryer shaped like a laptop. But if you wished gaming laptops weren’t so loud, the Aorus 17G grants your wish with a modest trade-off.

DESIGN, SPECS AND FEATURES

The Aorus 17G’s design is basically the opposite of the austere laptops that seem embarrassed to be capable of gaming. It features a mostly aluminum body with sparing use of plastic. Its design is what you might call a nooks-and crannies approach, with many angles, fan inlets, and exhaust ports. While there’s no RGB strip, the angular contours and heavily vented bottom pretty much scream “gaming laptop.”

So do the specs, which we’ll break down.

CPU: 8-core Intel Core i7-10870H