Aorus X7 Pro V5 Gaming Laptop Review

Performance Analysis

Let's start at the most interesting part of the performance results - the CPU overclocking. Normally, we don't touch any laptop or PC when it comes to overclocking, but in this case we decided to make the exception. There aren't too many controls and, in short, thermal throttling kicks in at around 75°C which kills anything you've applied anyway, but you have access to the usual active core overclocking you'd see on a desktop system, where you can adjust the multiplier to a certain amount depending on the number of cores that are being used.


If you're putting the CPU under high load on several or all cores, you will likely not see much benefit from overclocking - we pushed the multiplier for three and four active cores up from x33 and x34, to x36 and x36 respectively, while pushing the one and two active core settings to x40 and x38. As we suspected, in Terragen 3 where all four cores are under heavy load, there was no improvement and we observed the CPU quickly throttling back to its default settings. In this tough 8-minute benchmark, this means there was no extra performance overall. Cinebench R15 responded better, though, as the score rose from 708 to 779.

There was no improvement in either of our game tests so we've omitted these and Terragen 3 from the overclocked results too, but Unigine Valley leaped from 4,236 to 4,756 to become the best result we've seen from a laptop. The video editing time in PCMark 8 dropped a substantial 8 seconds from 142s to 134s and the photo editing time was nearly 10 percent quicker, falling from 32s to 30s. However, this masks some pretty average results in some of our tests at stock speed.


Our game tests saw slight improvements over the previous model, but in general there's loads of headroom here with minimum framerates of 76fps and 74fps in Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3 respectively, averaging between 86fps and 92fps. The SSDs powered their way to the best results we've seen by a long way too - basically double the result we saw with the Aorus X3 PLUS V5's single SSD and both results smashing the 2,000MB/sec barrier for read and write speeds.

Battery life is arguably not that important for a machine of this type as we wouldn't imagine carrying a 17in 3kg beast around is something you'd want to do that often except to plug it in at the other end, be it at a LAN party or friend's house. Even so, there were substantial gains over its predecessor, with nearly 20 minutes gained at idle and nearly 10 minutes more load time. However, the low load tests were very similar.

Conclusion

With an above average screen, great performance and an excellent chassis, the X7 Pro V5 is a superb 17in laptop. It's not worth an upgrade over the older model, but for a desktop replacement and general gaming/multi-purpose machine it ticks all the boxes. Performance was a tad slow in some of our stock speed results, which can only put down to the way the CPU turbo is handled as temperatures were kept fairly cool at stock speeds.

Once you dabble in overclocking though, it's right up there with the fastest laptops we've tested and even traded blows with some desktop systems too. However, it will need fine-tuning here based on your requirements and also the ambient room temperature - ramping up all four cores will likely see things throttle but boosting one, two and three-core load multipliers definitely boosts performance and quite noticeably so, especially outside of games.

Overclocking isn't something we normally associate with laptops, so the X7 Pro V5 adds a new dimension to performance, especially for those willing to tweak the settings and further bridge the gap between laptops and desktops. The only issue here is price. For the same money even as the base model, you could build or buy a monstrous PC that's capable of 4K gaming and probably include a 4K monitor too. If you must have a laptop though, for space reasons or otherwise, then the X7 Pro V5 has some serious grunt and the chassis to back it up too.