Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED 2023 has the core i7-13700 H CPU. It also has the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU in a thin and light chassis. So, I’m really curious to see how this is going to perform. Yes, of course, we’re talking about the Aero 14 OLED for 2023.
It does have a gorgeous 14-inch OLED display with a 90 Hz refresh rate. We’re going to get into all that we need to know about this thin and light laptop that certainly packs a punch. And this is the Aero 14 OLED 2023 Review.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Specs and Price
| Display | 14-inch 16:10, 2880×1800 Resolutions OLED, HDR, 90Hz |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-13700H |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU 6GB VRAM, 35W TDP, Intel Iris Xe 96 EUs |
| Memory and Storage | 16GB DDR5 Soldered RAM, 1TB PCIE 4.0 NVMe SSD Storage. |
| Battery | 63Wh Lithium-Polymer |
| Webcam Camera | 1080p FHD IR Camera |
| Speakers | 2x 2W Speakers, Microphone DTS:X Ultra Audio Technology |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Price | $1,499 |
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Design and Build
Inside the box you get a compact 130Watts USB Type-C power adapter, and it’s pretty compact for that kind of wattage, you also get the power cord as well. and the Aero 14 OLED itself, you also get some documentation, which includes a user guide and warranty information.
It’s pretty nice in terms of the build quality, It’s an all-metal design, silver in color, which will show the least amount of fingerprints, so that’s good. It feels good in the hands, it doesn’t feel too bulky, and the edges aren’t too sharp. I think they did a nice job in terms of the design. And you can open the lid with one finger. It can go as far back as, it doesn’t have a 180-degree hinge or anything like that, and it has very little flex or give in the chassis. As far as the weight is concerned, you’re looking at 1.49 kilograms or 3.28 pounds. Considering this has a nice CPU-GPU combination, that’s pretty thin and light for the category.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Ports and Connections
On the left side, there’s a USB Type-C port that is the one you’re going to charge on. Next to that is a Micro SD card reader and a 3.5 millimeter microphone/headphone combo jack.
Moving over to the right side, there are two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and the heating vent next to that. Now, those two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports do not support charging, but they do support data and display out, just so you know.
On the back, there’s an HDMI 2.1 port, which is always good to see, and a USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port to round out the ports on this laptop. I would say all in all, it’s a good port selection, although I would have liked to have seen the two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports support power delivery, but you don’t get that, so that’s something to keep in mind.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: User Upgradeability
Now, as far as what’s user-upgradable, the RAM is soldered into the motherboard, meaning it’s not user-upgradable. That’s a little bit unfortunate but not too surprising here in 2023 and in such a thin and light chassis. This unit has 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAM, and it is running in dual-channel mode.
| All | Read (MB/s) | Write (MB/s) |
|---|---|---|
| SEQ1M Q8T1 | 7019.39 | 5012.63 |
| SEQ1M Q1T1 | 2869.64 | 3785.05 |
| RND4K Q32T1 | 1013.15 | 766.53 |
| RND4K Q1T1 | 81.53 | 291.98 |
But the good news is the SSD is user-upgradable, and the one-terabyte SSD is showing Gen 4 speeds, as indicated by these reads and writes. Excellent results here that we’d like to see. When it comes to the wireless, you’re looking at Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 combo card that is slotted in, not soldered in. So, that means if you need to change it out down the road, you have that option, although I am seeing excellent results here with the Wi-Fi. The Bluetooth has no issues on either front.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Display
Gigabyte Aero 14 has OLED 14-inch 2.8K OLED display with a resolution of 2880 by 1800, and it has a 90 Hertz refresh rate. and that’s going to give you a really nice smooth, fluid experience but also doesn’t sacrifice too much battery life when you compare it to 120 Hertz. Although battery life is not going to be the greatest on this, we’re going to talk about that in a moment.
But as far as the display itself is concerned, you have all the hallmarks of an OLED display: the really deep blacks, the super vibrant colors, the high contrast – it’s all there. You’ve got great coverage of the color gamut, and you also have a very color-accurate display. It’s also an HDR 600 true black display. Watching high dynamic range content on Netflix, Amazon, YouTube has been superb on this panel. And as I mentioned earlier, it has a 90 Hertz refresh rate – very smooth scrolling, a very fluid experience is what that brings to the table. Although you will take a little bit of a hit on the battery life, it’s not as bad as if it were 120 Hertz or above, but it definitely will take a hit.
FHD IR Wecam and Internal Mics
So the camera on the Aero 14 OLED 2023 is a full HD camera, providing 1080p video quality. It’s also an IR camera, which means you can log in with face recognition using Windows Hello. Also it has the Nvidia Broadcast app, which allows you to blur the background, remove the background, and provides features like auto-framing and auto-exposure, along with studio effects similar to what we’ve seen with other brands, they’ve got it here again pretty nice features.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Performance and Gaming
| PCMARK 10 | 7,244 |
| Geekbench 6 (Single-Core) | 2,661 |
| Geekbench 6 (Multi-core) | 13,563 |
| Cinebench R20 | 5,378 |
| Cinebench R15 | 2,566 CB | 206.98 FPS |
| CiNEBENCH R23 | 1,922 Single-Core, 14,356 Multi-Core |
| 3DMARK Fire Strike | 15,334 |
| 3D Mark Time Spy | 6,159 |
As I mentioned earlier, Aero 14 OLED laptop is running the Core i7-13700H, a 45-watt CPU with 14 cores, including eight efficient cores and six performance cores. As you can see above benchmark results, it delivers good performance, both single and multi-core performance are very good. Cinebench R23 scores of 1922 for single core and 14356 for multi-core are impressive. Overall, it performs well for everyday tasks such as Microsoft Office, email, and web browsing.
| Asus ZenBook Pro 16x OLED Core i9-13905H RTX 4050 | 1 minute 32 Seconds |
| Lenovo Slim/Yoga Pro 9i Core i9-13905H RTX 4050 | 1 minute 50 seconds |
| HP Envy 16 (2023) Core i9-13900H RTX 4060 | 1 minute 55 second |
| Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED BMF Core i7-13700H RTX 4050 | 2 minute 00s |
When it comes to more demanding tasks like video editing in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, it’s certainly capable, thanks to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU it has. When I rendered a three-minute H.264 4K video in DaVinci Resolve, it took two minutes, which is a respectable result for a thin and light laptop.
| Titles | Low | Medium | High | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Witcher 3 | 110 FPS | 100 FPS | 87 FPS | 59 FPS |
| GTV V | 183 FPS | 180 FPS | 161 FPS | 72 FPS |
| DOTA 2 Reborn | 147 FPS | 139 FPS | 134 FPS | 69 FPS |
| F1 22 | 156 FPS | 149 FPS | 100 FPS | 32 FPS |
However, the RTX 4050 is not the most powerful GPU with a total TGP of 45 Watts in Aero 14 OLED laptop. So, while it helps with graphics performance, don’t expect to play AAA titles on their highest settings. When it comes to gaming, this isn’t a dedicated gaming laptop, but the RTX 4050 is capable of playing some games on certain settings. The frame rates will vary depending on the game and settings, but it’s worth noting that if gaming is a priority, there are dedicated gaming laptops out there that are more capable and better suited for gaming at this price point.
Surface Temperature and Fan Noise
The Gigabyte Control Panel gives you a lot of options when it comes to the fan profiles, especially the power mode, which I like to use most of the time. There’s also the turbo mode, which keeps the fans on full blast in a constant state, but it can get a little bit annoying, and I didn’t really see that much of an improvement in terms of performance between the power mode and the turbo mode.
When I ran the Time Spy stress test to see if this laptop would thermal throttle under heavy load, it got a score of 94, meaning it detected a little bit of thermal throttling, although not too bad since 97% would be the passing score, so it’s very close to that with just a bit of thermal throttling detected.
When it comes to surface temperatures, there are a few hot spots here and there, nothing too concerning, although the side where the vent is gets the hottest, which makes sense because that’s where the heat dissipates from. On the underside, there are some hot spots reaching as high as 59 degrees Celsius, so something to be aware of.
Regarding fan noise, it’s about 41-42 decibels in power mode, but when you put it into turbo mode, it shoots up to about 60 decibels, which is quite noticeable. It’s one of the loudest I’ve ever heard, and the fans will be constantly on in this mode. So, that’s something to be aware of, and as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t really notice that much of a performance boost in turbo mode compared to power mode, so I don’t see the benefit of using it, especially considering the increased fan noise.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Battery Life
| Apple MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro (70Wh) | 13 hours 28 minutes |
| Acer Swift X 14 (58.7WH) | 10 hours 14 minutes |
| Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED BMF (63Wh) | 7 hours 37 minutes |
| Asus Zephyrus G14 (76Wh) | 7 hours 29 minutes |
The Aero 14 OLED has a 63 watt-hour battery, which is not a bad size for a 14-inch laptop, although there are other laptops in this category with larger batteries. It did 7 hours and 37 minutes on the PC Mark 10 Modern Office battery test, which is a middle-of-the-road result. It also did 7 hours and 27 minutes on the PC Mark 10 Video Playback test, another middle-of-the-road result.
My overall takeaway is that this laptop has mediocre battery life. Keep in mind that I had the 90 Hertz refresh rate enabled, which does impact battery life. You can expect maybe an hour more if you reduce it to a 60 Hertz refresh rate. Of course, everyone’s use case is different, so your mileage may vary. Just please keep that in mind.
Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED: Keyboard and Touchpad
As I mentioned earlier, yes, you can open the lid with one finger, and the screen goes back as far as you see here. The hinges are on pretty nice and tight, with very little screen wobble when typing. That’s a good thing and addresses a pet peeve of mine. I don’t see too much of that here, which is good.
Now, as for the keyboard itself, it’s pretty good to type on with decent key travel and comfortable typing for longer documents and emails. However, one little nitpick I have is that the keys are white against the white LED backlight, making it hard to see the contrast and differentiation when you’re using the backlight. So, it’s not very effective in that regard. But overall, I would say it’s pretty good to work with this keyboard.
Regarding the touchpad, it’s nicely sized, with a bit of branding as you can see. It worked well for scrolling, gestures, and everything seemed to work as expected. It’s a glass touchpad and not haptic, but it is a more traditional type touchpad that worked very well without any issues.”
Speakers
There are two two-watt speakers on Aero 14 OLED, and it’s equipped with DTS audio. I thought the volume was good, and the mids were decent, although it could use a little bit more bass. Overall, I would say it delivers good sound, but not great sound.
Final Thought
To sum it up, there’s a lot to like about the Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED 2023, It’s a thin and light laptop that packs a punch with its bright and sharp 2.8K OLED display, 90 Hertz refresh rate, solid productivity performance, competitive gaming performance, plenty of ports, good keyboard, and a full HD webcam capable of 1080p video. Its rock-solid aluminum build is another plus.
However, there are some downsides to consider, including mediocre battery life, noticeable fan noise under load (especially in turbo mode), and the lack of USB power delivery on the two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. Despite these drawbacks, the Gigabyte Aero 14 brings a lot to the table and checks many boxes for a thin and light laptop that delivers solid performance.
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Design9
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Display10
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Hardware9
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Ports8
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Performance10
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Thermals / Fan Noise8
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Keyboard9
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Touchpad9
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Webcam8
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Audio7
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Battery7
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Price8
