Gigabyte's Aorus brand was already ahead of the curve when it comes to powerful-but-thin gaming laptops. The company's 15-inch Aorus X5 v6 packed a GTX 1070 into a 22.9 mm frame, and now it's updating that line of laptops with the X5 MD, featuring a GTX 1080 in that same slim frame.
The laptop, unveiled at Computex this week, uses Nvidia's new Max-Q design philosophy to maximize thin-and-lightness while maintaining top performance.
“The NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 1070 was already fast, then the NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 1080 designed with Max-Q came along to satisfy gamers’ demand for even more performance,” said Aorus's Patrick Lai, Product Marketing at AORUS. “The X5 MD with GTX 1080 is an absolute beast. Gamers will love it!”
Conservative estimates from Gigabyte say the Max-Q version of the GTX 1080 will perform about 15 percent faster than a GTX 1070 (compared to about a 40 percent increase for the desktop GTX 1080) at a cooler temperature than the GTX 1070.
In addition to pushing the GPU up to a 1080, the X5 MD also bumps the CPU up to an overclockable Core i7-7820HK, which Gigabyte says will offer performance gains of up to 15 percent over the i7-7700HQ. The laptop also features Thunderbolt 3, ESS SABRE 32-bit Hi-Fi audio DAC, RGB Fusion keyboard, and a proprietary cooling system to keep temperatures in check. It will have a 4K UHD IPS display with G-Sync, though Aorus hasn't mentioned the screen refresh rate yet.
The X5 MD's spec sheet puts it in direct competition with other recently-announced Max-Q laptops, such as Acer's Triton 700 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus. The X5 MD with GTX 1080 is estimated to retail at $3,000.
