60 PCWorld MAY 2020REVIEWS GIGABYTE AERO^17
laptop as auxiliary storage). The card reader is
also UHS-II-compliant, which will make some
unhappy because that’s old-school now—
other vendors are now touting UHS-III-
compliant slots. In the grand scheme of
things it probably doesn’t matter unless you
are moving a tremendous amount of data
from a high-speed UHS-III SD card.KEYBOARD,
TRACKPAD, WEBCAM
The trackpad on the Aero 17 is
glass-smooth and is Microsoft
Precision Touchpad driver-
compliant. It has a small biometric
fingerprint reader as well.
The keyboard deserves some
call-out for its per-key RGB. You’ve
seen per-key RGB but you probablyhaven’t seen one this
bright in a laptop—
almost painfully bright
when turned up. (You
can almost hear the
battery whimper). We
typically see keyboard
backlighting wash out
in a sunny room, but
not so with the Aero 17.
The keyboard
action, unfortunately,
isn’t as dazzling as the
RGB. We found it to be
a little stiff, and the keys
a little small. It’s far from a deal-breaker, but it’s
also far from our favorite keyboard.
Normally we wouldn’t give a hoot about
the webcam, which you’d immediately cover
with tape anyway. But webcam quality has
suddenly gotten everyone’s attention during
coronavirus shelter-in-place, so we took a
closer look.The Aero 17’s keyboard is so bright, it’s still visible in a room on a sunny day.