GIGABYTE - 15.6" 4K OLED Creator Laptop - Intel Core i7-11800H - 16GB - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 1TB SSD

Pros: - Gorgeous 4K color accurate display (Samsung OLED) - Thunderbolt 4 - Content creator/gaming/portable desktop I also own a high refresh rate monitor, but I definitely rather have beautiful vivid display over high frame. 60 FPS is perfectly fine for me. Cons: - You must have heavy AC brick plugged (230W) in for full graphics card power. The AC charger brand is Chicony (19.5V at 11.8 A = 230 watts). - The screws for the back uses a TR6 head (star shape) - Gigabyte Control Center is annoying to work with - Can't bend the screen all the way - Fingerprint sensor placement - For USB-C charging to work, it must be 100W cable/charger - 2 Hour battery life (when it's not in battery save mode) - Turbo mode fan is ridiculously loud - The secondary function label on the keys have no backlight! (Seriously?!)

TL;DR: Get this magic piece of plastic/silicon and cross your fingers for a winner. It is amazing. Read the story if you want to be mildly entertained/annoyed. I never write reviews... ever! Way too busy, a zillion other "Creator" projects, etc. This is the 1st out of nearly 100 Best Buy products in the past few years. Maybe it will be the start of a new hobby? Maybe I'll work my way up to a best-selling novel? Back to the point: After such a dour impression leading up to my initial purchase I felt compelled, possessed even, to share my experience so others could to avoid the same purchase angst that I went through. I was on the fence as the specs on this laptop are near perfect but the reviews are sub-par, to put it kindly. Disconnecting WiFi? One guy got one that wouldn't even turn on? What had I gotten myself into?? A huge consolation was knowing I could return it effortlessly (without RMAs or any kind of trip of shame to UPS) within my extended return period. This is a testament to Best Buy which has gone from a generally hated store to my favorite go-to electronics shop over the past few years. The first thing I noticed was how small and light this laptop is. Last year's laptop, also from Best Buy, is a 17-inch i7 Dell G7 (with a 2060) that I got "open box" for a deal that I just couldn't turn down. The G7 is a tank compared to the Aero. One of my other laptops died recently, a nearly 10-year old MSI from Newegg. I basically slotted the Gigabyte Aero to be the new design laptop (self-proclaimed "Creator") and moved the Dell G7 to fill MSI's overheated shoes. Ok. Back to the point again. The Aero is super lightweight and my initial impression of the 4k OLED screen is that it is absolutely, stunningly excellent. The 15-inch screen is a technical marvel. To pack all those pixels in 17-inches would have been gorgeous, but to do it in 15? There are no words for the DPI heaven in each square inch with those squid-ink blacks... it's like looking into a little portal into heaven. The screen finish is very shiny and it does wobble a little if it gets nudged. You will know when you need a shave when working on this laptop. The per key LED keyboard is very nice and the keys feel shallow but high-quality. Unfortunately the keyboard defaulted to a very fast moving rainbow cycle which was as absurd as it was anxiety inducing. So, then I shut it off, flipped it over and popped a 980 Pro (PCIE 4.0) into the second M.2 slot. Easy as pie, despite the family screaming that I was "holding up pancakes by monopolizing the table". Seriously? I was done in under 15 minutes... can't catch a break on that one. I must add that the supplied thermal tape/putty only covers about half of the SSD chips, plus there are two colors of film to remove, leading me to think that the tape may have a dedicated chip side. No instructions or mention of the blue/clear film sides anywhere. That was a head-scratcher as I could find nothing on it. My solution was simply to peel the slightly longer blue tape first and assume that was the chip side. Since it was short, I stretched it to try to get a bit more coverage. 980 Pro worked perfectly after a quick format. Now for the elephant in the room... the WiFi: I don't know if I won the "Gigabyte lottery" but I have had no problems whatsoever. In fact, as part of my setup test I transferred 70 gigs of source video from the Dell G7 to my server which took around 9 hours by WiFi. The same files took under 1 hour to move to the Aero wirelessly and without a single interruption, disconnection or error. In my limited experience I consider the WiFi to be quite stable. I did notice that it disconnected a few times (maybe 3 out of the 40 power cycles) briefly but it returned promptly or switched over to the other network. I added two connections (regular and 5G) so maybe that's confusing it or maybe it's actually helping to have a fallback. It seems to be randomly choosing from the 2 remembered networks with each power cycle. This is my first fingerprint sensor and I like it a lot. Very fast and convenient. I don't find it obtrusive or miss the tiny fraction of trackpad real estate as I don't use it (the trackpad) much. I paired the Aero with with a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse and while it's not the fanciest mouse it runs for a year without a battery change... try that with a deluxe 25k DPI model. I don't plan on using the "nose camera" but I'd say it's more accurate to dub it a "chin camera". During setup I closed the very thoughtful camera hatch feature (which was surprisingly difficult to slide) and it will probably never be opened again. So the "chin camera" was not even remotely a deal breaker for me. There is a dash of bloatware which I generally hate but my understanding is that "Gigabyte Control Center" manages the drivers and that is a very good tradeoff. In fact, the very first update got rid of that awful rainbow cycling and replaced it with exactly what I actually wanted... plain white keys (yes, I'm a plain white Christmas-light kind of guy). On the down side, some relentless Gigabyte pop-up has been pestering me to join their QA telemetry program with some tiny fine print about reverse-engineering my soul and trapping it in their server headquarters in Taipei. Not sure what that's all about. The 3060 is a formidable mobile GPU. It rivals the 2080 mobile GPU from last generation but with 6GB of VRAM instead of 8GB. Ironically I'd say it's actually the feature that gave me the most pause. It's a phenomenal GPU but at this stratospheric hardware level, paired with an 11th Gen i7 it seems natural to just go for the pinnacle. Gigabyte if you're listening I'd gladly pay an extra 600 dollars to bring this whole divine deal to an even 2k... Or just send me the 3080 model and I'll review it? Please?? It's still early and I'd like to tell more about the mighty 11th Gen i7 horsepower, how it deals with 3D, rendering, RTX, gaming and heavy-duty productivity but that will have to wait for an update to this review. A sticker proudly claims "Made in Taiwan"... I agree and I'm liking Gigabyte. The only negative I've encountered so far is that I'm getting crashes on 3D filters in Photoshop. I think I may need to specifically update the RTX 3060 driver with GeForce Experience rather than rely on Gigabyte Control Center. My last point: At the time of writing, there's still time to claim this extraordinary deal with 4k OLED, 11th Gen i7, 1TB PCIE 4.0 SSD and RTX 3060. Thanks for drudging through this chimera of guidance and drivel; may you win the silicon lottery also.

I purchased this laptop in 2021 so I've had it for about 2 years. Absolutely the best laptop I have ever owned. I maxed out the memory and added a 2nd SSD for storage. I used it to edit video and it FLEW! Rendering was super fast and never crashed the machine, as my previous laptops did. I did a lot of work in PhotoShop and Illustrator and never did it slow down. It was light weight and durable. The battery life was fantastic even when using PS and AI strictly off battery. The display was crazy awesome! You may be wondering why I'm wring in the past tense? Well, today I killed it. I spilled a coffee on it straight into the keyboard. Did I buy the extended warranty from Best Buy... Nope. In hindsight, should I have? Yep. I was in the middle of 3 projects on it and killed it. I used to work I.T. so I know my way around a laptop. I opened it up and dried it out but now the power turns on... keyboard lights up... fans work but there is no display. I tried hooking up the HDMI to a monitor and even went old school with an adaptor but no luck. No display. I am heartbroken and stressed out because I can't complete my projects which are coming up due. Please learn from my mistake... 1: No food or drinks near the laptop or other machines. 2: Backup all your stuff often. 3: BUY THE WARRANTY. 4: If you are sinking into a depression over killing your machine and losing everything try not to take it out on yourself as bad as i am. This sucks.

At first I was a bit hesitant to see the negative reviews, wi-fi and battery life being top concerns, but it turned out to be an excellent buy! I've been testing it for several days and the wi-fi never dropped, the battery lasted about 2-3 hours on average giving normal use to the laptop, social networks, making documents, videos on YouTube. I also saw complaints about problems with the Gigabyte Control Center software, and although at first I also noticed that it was not working as it should, it was enough to automatically download and install all pending updates, after that it worked normally. The best thing about this laptop is undoubtedly the screen, seeing content in 4K with such vivid colors for being AMOLED is incredible for the current price. That overcompensates for any details that may be found against (working properly with no factory errors). As I said before, it has a couple of details that I did not like, but that are not so serious anyway. The laptop does an excellent job with the cooling system, I was able to test it with a couple of somewhat demanding games, and at no point did the performance decrease, the temperatures increased and with that the fans cooled well BUT, the noise I understand can be a bit annoying, I usually play with headphones so it wasn't a big deal for me. And that is related to the other problem, the laptop speakers aren't good, sounds too flat, there is almost no bass. but since I'm used to listening to music with headphones or bluetooth speakers, it's not something that affects me that much either. There are other details such as poor camera quality, but in those price ranges there are NO laptops with decent camera quality, so in short, it seems to me that with everything it offers, it is an excellent purchase option.

This laptop have a gorgeous monitor that I’ve ever seen before. If you r a 4k lover you can`t miss it. However, every product have its pros and cons. The biggest issues for this laptop is the lasting time. It could just last around 2 hours by the latest bios under a very light working statues such as Word, Excel or YouTube. The fan is loud but that is what most laptops issue(except Lenovo 7i). I may be not profession al but I almostly have most median or high level laptop for this year. But it is still my daily laptop. Because it looks perfect, the rgb keys, 4k oled monitor and smoothly touching design all crash my heart. The performance of the GPU is not a Max monster, compared to other gaming or designers` laptop. But it is good enough for me to use it as a mobile station.

I have used it heavily for 2 years, no problems yet.

I ordered this Aero Gigabyte 15 OLED "twice" having the same problem. I bought this laptop brand new, July 1, 2021, and powered it on for the first time out-of-the-box only to find that the keyboard displayed RGB colors but had a "black" screen, no power was going to the monitor. I exchanged it and waited another eight days for a brand new one to arrive, only to find out it also had the same problems. I opened my new Aero Gigabyte 15 OLED laptop to power it on for the first time again, only to find out that the keyboard displayed RGB colors but had a "black" screen again. No power was going to the monitor, but this time, the laptop would not power off. I put it back in the original packaging and am returning it tomorrow. If you can risk buying one of these laptops to see if one actually works, than the best of luck to you. I need a laptop soon because my semester is starting this Fall 2021. I need a laptop capable of producing high-quality renderings fast. I study interior design and bought this laptop for the specifications. I needed a fast high-end processor and graphics card, a high resolution monitor, lots of storage space, plenty of RAM, and xrite pantone color match. All of these are hard to find in one laptop at a great price. The problem is, is it doesn't work. Because I am stupid, I will try one more time before I give up completely on this laptop. I need a laptop that can produce high-quality 3D renderings fast. If you don't have the time or patience to see if one actually works, than take my advice and research another laptop to suit your needs.

Well, I wasn't expecting such a brand of laptop would make such a big difference. This laptop actually does what it was built for. However, nothing on earth is 100% perfect because some function on the keyboard can't work. But, I am kinda satisfied with its overall performance so far. Thanks!