GIGABYTE AERO 15 CLASSIC-XA Review
3DMark and SuperPosition
Synthetic 3D tests are a good indication of overall 3D system performance. While not games, they are to some degree indicative of how one system compares to another. Additionally, being somewhat universal, you don’t have to hunt down performance figures for various hardware running the same games for comparative purposes. With the engine being vendor agnostic, you can also directly compare NVIDIA to AMD.
3DMark FireStrike
3DMark FireStrike is a largely CPU-dependant benchmark as it isn’t very taxing on the GPU. It runs at 1920×1080 and makes use of the DirectX 11 API. We have included it regardless as the CPU in the GIGABYTE AERO 15 CLASSIC-XA is a cut above most others. The score of 14,661 3DMarks is respectable and not to be snuffed at.
3DMark FireStrike Extreme
Next up is FireStrike Extreme, which is very similar to the standard FireStrike test but more GPU dependant. The resolution is increased to 2560×1440 instead of 1920×1080. Here we see a score of 7,397 3DMarks. While not earth shattering, this is a respectable score.
3DMark Time Spy
Time Spy is the third test that we’re running in the 3DMark suite. This test makes use of DirectX 12 with a resolution of 2560×1440. The resulting score of 5,508 3DMarks is a bit on the low side. This is explained by the cooling design not quite being adequate, but for the most part can be overlooked. The rest of the results are good, so this shouldn’t of too large a concern. It is also possible that this is unique to the particular sample we had. It was the only result out of line with what we expected, even after multiple runs. The score is included for reference purposes only – we can only report what we see.
3DMark Port Royal
Port Royal is the latest test in the 3DMark suite and focusing on real-time ray tracing performance. While now compatible with many GTX cards thanks to NVIDIA opening the ability in drivers, performance is extremely lackluster on non-RTX cards. The score of 3,282 3DMarks sounds low, but is not far off two GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card running in SLI. This really shows the power of the ray tracing cores embedded in the GeForce RTX 2070 found in the laptop. It is also rather close to a desktop GeForce RTX 2060.
Unigine SuperPosition
SuperPosition was run using the 1080P Extreme setting, and the GIGABYTE AERO 15 CLASSIC-XA pumped out a smooth frame rate throughout. The resulting score of 3,831 points is not to be sniffed at when you keep in mind that this is a laptop with mobile components.
