now the first time I covered the Gigabyte ax7 it was groundbreaking for a
few reasons number one was that it was incredibly thin for a full powered
gaming notebook number two was that it featured not one but two graphics cards
and finally I was incredibly impressed by the cooling and Acoustics the
Gigabyte had achieved when you factor in
how thin it was
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okay so there was a bunch of other cool stuff as well the all aluminum housing
white backl keyboard that's actually surprisingly nice to type on the
flexible storage Arrangement and Surround monitor gaming support made
this a solid easy to recommend product for me but that's all old news fast
forward to today and the X7 has got a bit of a facelift now instead of a 3.4
GHz turbo CPU we get a 3.5 gahz turbo CPU instead of DDR 3600
MHz we get 1866 MHz the macro functions
buttons programmable buttons on the side are now called the macro engine
programmable buttons on the side and the power adapter has been boosted from 180
watts to 200 okay so far nothing that
impress impressive but then things get interesting this new model now supports
up to three MSA ssds in raid zero and or
Raid whatever you want I guess and it still has a 2 and 1 half in Drive Bay
for either an additional SSD or a hard drive that's a lot of storage but still
not the main event no the big change is
the graphics cards instead of dual GTX
765m the updated X7 has dual gtx8 60m 4
gig cards which should amount to a real world performance Improvement of 20% or
more and has Gigabyte making some pretty serious claims about how their upgraded
AR sx7 can run with the big dogs and
even beat the GTX 880m
conveniently we have the excellent ASUS g750 JZ inhouse which features an only
slightly slower CPU and a 4 gig GTX 8
ADM so let's find out if it's happened
in a notebook is SLI a valid alternative
to a single more powerful GPU we'll be looking at the X7 from a few angles
including raw performance power consumption and thermals where the
benefit of spreading the heat out across multiple processors in a thin form
factor like this should be pretty obvious one thing that I can tell you
guys already is that compared to the g750 JZ it's definitely Lou ouder but we
expected that so without further Ado
take it away Luke SLI versus single GPU
notebook Battle Royale I'll start things off with power
consumption I was kind of surprised to see only about a 5% difference between
these two laptops due to dual gpus and
completely different form factors and all that kind of stuff one thing to
remember is that your power consumption is going to be a lot more important on a
laptop because you're more often going to be gaming mobile and that power is
going to be coming from the battery instead of the wall in terms of
temperatures the X7 fell behind a little bit it was a lot hotter than our ASUS
j-z that we had uh part of that's going to play in because it's much smaller
form factor they don't have as much space for things like heat sinks and giant fans um but it does matter because
it's going to predict the lifespan of your components inside of your laptop
and really high temperatures are going to cause sweaty hand syndrome that
annoying thing where your hands get really gross when you're G me on a laptop for too long because it is very
hot in terms of noise we see the X7 fall behind again but this is again due to
its form factor with the Jay-Z the big thick massive Jay-Z you are able to pack
in big thick larger fans which are going to produce uh lower noise levels less
annoying noise and they're going to be better at dissipating heat with the
small nice Slimline X7 you're not able to pack that huge fan in there and
that'll make it uh not as effective at dissipating heat louder and have a
little bit more annoying noise with higher pitches and last but not least we
get to Performance the unfortunate thing that happened with Watchdogs is the SLI
profile didn't exactly take properly this is a very new game and this is a
problem you're going to have when you're running SLI level systems things aren't
going to be properly optimized profiles won't properly work so when I was
playing Watchdogs only one of the gpus was able to go through so when I was
running with the same settings on the Jay-Z and the X7 the X7 got crushed
because only one of the gpus worked that being said in the future once the
profile starts working it'll be fine and it'll run much better like you see in
Far Cry 3 and BioShock Infinite it ran completely fine and even won in Far Cry
3 by a very small margin in conclusion it comes down to what you're looking for
if you're looking for a Slimline gaming laptop the X7 is probably not a bad idea
because it is very slim line the form factor is very nice but then you have to
deal with things like higher thermals and kind of annoying fan noise but you
don't have to deal with more power because it's 5% less power but then you
do have to deal with SLI problems which may or may not be fixed in a timely
manner for you to play the games that you want to play so there's a bunch of
different variables that are up in the air it's totally up to you and these
laptops are very different when it comes down to it