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now the first time I covered the Gigabyte ax7 it was groundbreaking for a

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few reasons number one was that it was incredibly thin for a full powered

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gaming notebook number two was that it featured not one but two graphics cards

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and finally I was incredibly impressed by the cooling and Acoustics the

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Gigabyte had achieved when you factor in

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how thin it was

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okay so there was a bunch of other cool stuff as well the all aluminum housing

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white backl keyboard that's actually surprisingly nice to type on the

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flexible storage Arrangement and Surround monitor gaming support made

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this a solid easy to recommend product for me but that's all old news fast

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forward to today and the X7 has got a bit of a facelift now instead of a 3.4

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GHz turbo CPU we get a 3.5 gahz turbo CPU instead of DDR 3600

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MHz we get 1866 MHz the macro functions

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buttons programmable buttons on the side are now called the macro engine

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programmable buttons on the side and the power adapter has been boosted from 180

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watts to 200 okay so far nothing that

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impress impressive but then things get interesting this new model now supports

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up to three MSA ssds in raid zero and or

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Raid whatever you want I guess and it still has a 2 and 1 half in Drive Bay

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for either an additional SSD or a hard drive that's a lot of storage but still

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not the main event no the big change is

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the graphics cards instead of dual GTX

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765m the updated X7 has dual gtx8 60m 4

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gig cards which should amount to a real world performance Improvement of 20% or

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more and has Gigabyte making some pretty serious claims about how their upgraded

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AR sx7 can run with the big dogs and

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even beat the GTX 880m

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conveniently we have the excellent ASUS g750 JZ inhouse which features an only

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slightly slower CPU and a 4 gig GTX 8

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ADM so let's find out if it's happened

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in a notebook is SLI a valid alternative

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to a single more powerful GPU we'll be looking at the X7 from a few angles

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including raw performance power consumption and thermals where the

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benefit of spreading the heat out across multiple processors in a thin form

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factor like this should be pretty obvious one thing that I can tell you

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guys already is that compared to the g750 JZ it's definitely Lou ouder but we

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expected that so without further Ado

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take it away Luke SLI versus single GPU

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notebook Battle Royale I'll start things off with power

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consumption I was kind of surprised to see only about a 5% difference between

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these two laptops due to dual gpus and

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completely different form factors and all that kind of stuff one thing to

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remember is that your power consumption is going to be a lot more important on a

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laptop because you're more often going to be gaming mobile and that power is

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going to be coming from the battery instead of the wall in terms of

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temperatures the X7 fell behind a little bit it was a lot hotter than our ASUS

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j-z that we had uh part of that's going to play in because it's much smaller

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form factor they don't have as much space for things like heat sinks and giant fans um but it does matter because

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it's going to predict the lifespan of your components inside of your laptop

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and really high temperatures are going to cause sweaty hand syndrome that

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annoying thing where your hands get really gross when you're G me on a laptop for too long because it is very

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hot in terms of noise we see the X7 fall behind again but this is again due to

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its form factor with the Jay-Z the big thick massive Jay-Z you are able to pack

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in big thick larger fans which are going to produce uh lower noise levels less

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annoying noise and they're going to be better at dissipating heat with the

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small nice Slimline X7 you're not able to pack that huge fan in there and

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that'll make it uh not as effective at dissipating heat louder and have a

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little bit more annoying noise with higher pitches and last but not least we

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get to Performance the unfortunate thing that happened with Watchdogs is the SLI

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profile didn't exactly take properly this is a very new game and this is a

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problem you're going to have when you're running SLI level systems things aren't

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going to be properly optimized profiles won't properly work so when I was

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playing Watchdogs only one of the gpus was able to go through so when I was

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running with the same settings on the Jay-Z and the X7 the X7 got crushed

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because only one of the gpus worked that being said in the future once the

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profile starts working it'll be fine and it'll run much better like you see in

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Far Cry 3 and BioShock Infinite it ran completely fine and even won in Far Cry

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3 by a very small margin in conclusion it comes down to what you're looking for

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if you're looking for a Slimline gaming laptop the X7 is probably not a bad idea

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because it is very slim line the form factor is very nice but then you have to

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deal with things like higher thermals and kind of annoying fan noise but you

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don't have to deal with more power because it's 5% less power but then you

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do have to deal with SLI problems which may or may not be fixed in a timely

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manner for you to play the games that you want to play so there's a bunch of

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different variables that are up in the air it's totally up to you and these

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laptops are very different when it comes down to it