GIGABYTE - AORUS MASTER 18 - 18" 240Hz 2560x1600 WQXGA Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX - 2TB SSD - 64GB DDR5 RAM - GeForce RTX 5090 - 5-Degree Black

This is a very difficult review because there are so many problems out of the box that is almost makes it impossible to five star review this laptop. However once you get past all the bugs the laptop is amazing and I love it. Starting off: The Negatives My wife and I both got one of these on launch so yes we dropped 9k to buy two of them. The wife's laptop within the first week popped a bad stick of memory. Crucial is the brand inside the rig. Two days later mine started insane flickering in the background outside of gaming. We took her bad stick of ram and my flickering laptop and returned it. Got a brand new laptop. The initial windows boot took over two hours before it errored out then let us go into the default windows installation and enter Windows with no way to skip. This was absurd. Once in windows had to update the BIOS and GIMATE software immediately. I disagree with the other poster who claims GIMATE is bloatware I ran several benchmarks in 3DMark both with GIMATE enabled and disabled. The benchmarks were substantially better with AI boost enabled. IN GIMATE it shows the Memory is running at 5600 MHz which is advertised - however task manager shows under memory settings that the memory is only running at 4800. which is well below advertised specification. There was an initial bios update. Get it immediately. The Facial Recognition software will not work properly without it and other random crashes etc. were happening. Another problem I still haven't been able to get past is 2025-05 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5058411) Install error - 0x800f081f. I have manually downloaded the update and tried multiple reinstalls. For whatever reason this laptop cannot get the latest windows 11 updates. I assume the fix is coming soon as the laptop is less than a month old. Initially there were several other display problems that which many have been fixed already with NVidia updates. Black Screens, Flickering, Random Crashes ect. Enough about the negatives lets talk about. The Positives. The LCD Panel looks amazing. It is the largest in its class. When I say its the largest its like .2 larger than the closest competitor. I mean absolutely stunning. I had the Asus rog strix scar m18 with the 4090 2024 which uses the same display as the 2025 model and the screen was not even half as impressive as this one is. This lcd panel has the most vibrant colors I have seen in any laptop display the colors just pop and it looks great. I want to keep talking about how wonderful this thing looks because it really is impressive words cant describe it. For an LCD the colors pop and the blacks look really well black. There is no annoying yellow tinting. Not claiming its anywhere near the blacks of an OLED or the brightness of a 90 series Samsung QLED with 2900k nits. I believe this peak brightness is 1200 nits which is very reasonable. The battery life is quite impressive as well. I got several ours out of streaming Netflix unplugged. This is a nice change for a gaming laptop. The weight I don't find to be very cumbersome either. it does show dust under on the vents after just a few weeks so got to keep is clean regularly. In almost all of my 3Dmark tests I score better than almost all the competitors. The MSI Titan was the only laptop that had slightly higher marks and when I say slightly I mean negligible 50. All other 5090 laptops scored lower from my results albeit the one or two that someone clearly super overclocked somehow and scored 2000 score higher which is unrealistic you no the extreme tweakers I am going off the out of the box specification. The laptop 5090 is running about as fast as the lower end 5080 desktop scores. This is to be expected as the laptop 5090 is essentially a 5080 desktop GPU with 24gb of ram instead of 16 that comes with the 5080 desktop. The reason the scores are still on the lower side is because the power to the GPU is still less in the laptop then the desktop variants. The 64 GB of memory it comes with is a wonderful bonus. Most other laptops came with 32 with the MSI titan again being the exception and its crucial memory that is rated for 5600 so therefore the computer is capable of 5600 I assume a future bios update will fix the issue to make windows reflect said speeds not just the GIMATE software. I would have rather seen corsair dominator memory in such a pricey laptop but Crucial has made a name for their brand and many people feel they are very good memory modules so I cant complain on this and with concede they are using name brand components inside their setup. The keyboard is extremely comfortable. There are no noticeable hotspots while gaming at max setting on all current content. Air is sucked in through the keys to help cool the top of the laptop which is a nice feature over past laptops such as Alienware which gets extremely hot to touch. This feature also will help those with sweaty palms to keep their hands dry while gaming. The build feels really solid too. I am quite impressed.. I did open the laptop because I am a geek and that's what us geeks do. looking under the hood I did install a 4tb 980 pro with heatsink. One thing I did notice is that I had to make the 980 pro stay on or it would periodically lose the drive which was annoying. also the default ssd while it copied a 100 GB file in about 30 seconds it did slow down significantly half way through the transfer when I went to transfer the file back and took about 2 minutes. so the write starts out for the first 20 GB or so very fast then it slows down. The read however seamed fairly consistent but take the 980 pro it read and wrote the 100 GB file no problem in 30 seconds. I used multiple SSDs in my testing. I also don't understand why they give you two 1 TB SSD rather than one 2 tb SSD. The ports are very convenient I do wish the power plugged into the back of the laptop not the side like most other laptops. Also the power cord that comes with the laptop is sure but universal so easy to get a longer one. One month in My wife and I both are pleased that we retired our Asus Rog Strix Scar m18 4090s for these laptops. The display is what won us over. There is nothing more pleasing to gamers than to have a beautiful picture in front of you that pops. I recommend not enabling HDR as the default picture quality is so much better on this display. Remember the laptop is only a month old so their for updates will happen fixes will be done and most of the quirks should be worked out in the coming weeks. Last lets talk about Value. This comes in at 100 dollars cheaper than Asus and gives you 32 GB of more of memory that is capable of being faster and what I consider to be a much better display. The price point is very reasonable for a 5090 laptop if you consider dropping 4300 on a laptop reasonable. Which I still think is insane. I am so torn on this review because for me at this point personally this is a 5 star laptop. But with all these problems it probably should sit at a 2 or a 3 star. However I am going to rate this 4 stars because if you can get past all the problems listed and get this machine running smoothly it really is an exceptional piece of hardware. If you are not a TECH PERSON this laptop might be the right one for you because it has all sort of issues right out of the box. But if you want what I consider to be one of the best 5090 laptops on the market once configured properly. This is the one. One final note. Gigabyte SHAME SHAME SHAME on you for releasing a laptop with so many easy fixable issues and please up your quality control standards as this is unacceptable. I had to go through 4 of these laptops essentially to get two good ones. The only reason I give this 4 stars is because it performs so much better than almost every other 5090 laptop on the market and the display is incredible. I think I am going to keep this one. Last note I am accompany this with two pictures to show the memory discrepancies.

This laptop was dead out of the box, I could not get this thing to run whatsoever, the ram will not run at the advertised speed of 5600MT/s. Addressable RGB is extremely faulty and inconsistent. As far as performance, I could not verify or properly benchmark this computer as I was having thermal throttling issues at 99⁰ Celsius. My SSD temperature was 101° c. This Laptop should be recalled by Gigabyte immediately. I can't believe I wasted over $4,000 on this useless device.

Bought this open-box Gigabyte AORUS Master 18 (RTX 5090, Intel Core Ultra 9) mostly as a desktop replacement to mess around with AI stuff, thanks to the 24GB VRAM on the 5090. If I wasn’t into AI, I’d probably have grabbed a 5080 or 5070 Ti laptop instead. The open-box price at Best Buy was decent enough compared to paying full price. The setup was rough. Like another reviewer said, getting Windows activated and updated was a nightmare. I didn’t have the patience to wait for a static update progress bar! The BIOS boots into “Advanced mode” but doesn’t give you much to tweak or see, which kinda sucked. After hours of Googling & Groking around, I was able to sort out the software setup issues and even installed a third SSD running Pop!_OS Linux for dual-booting. Once the software mess was done, the laptop’s not too shabby. Feels well-built, and I like that it’s got 64GB DDR5, even if it’s not hitting the full 5600 speed they advertise. Having three SSD slots is nice for dual booting with Linux. Their GMate LLM stuff is pretty useless but also doesn’t seem to hog resources if you don’t launch it. You could probably hunt down the model files and just delete them to reclaim disk space. I did play around with their AI Creator software, which is basically a front-end for Hugging Face models like Flux and Stable Diffusion—kinda cool for image generation. I wouldn’t tell just anyone to buy this thing unless you’re ready to deal with the setup headache. But if you’re into gaming or AI and don’t mind some tinkering, it’s not bad at all. Open-box deal made it worth it, but you gotta put in the work.

First and foremost, this laptop would not boot for 8+ hours due to windows 242H update bug. Finally booted and i immediately began benchmarking this system. Go with MSI/ ASUS or anyone else. This craptop advertises 64GB of ram at 5600MT. Whatever Gimate is, it's also displaying 5600MT. HWinfo64 shows ALL RAM clocking at 2800MT. Attempting to adjust MT frequency in BIOS and there isnt even an option to adjust anything on this laptop. Worst BIOS ive ever been in. EVER. on top of everything else, their GiMate AI Bloatware and I mean BLOATWARE!! GiMate utilizes 20% of available ram All BY ITSELF!!! BECAUSE GIMATE RUNS A LLM IN THE BACKGROUND. GiMate even attattempted to flash BOIS to F4 without my permission and literally bricked my system for approximately 5 start up cycles. This one is garbage and I would not recommend this to anyone. YOU ALL HAVE BEEN WARNED! DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY/TIME/SANITY!

The GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 18 is a desktop-class performance beast in a laptop laptop. The RTX 5090 handles any game at max settings with ease. The screen is massive and incredibly smooth at 240Hz. I did end up returning it simply because it was a bit too bulky for my frequent travel needs, but for a stationary gaming setup, it's unbeatable.