62 PCWorld MAY 2020REVIEWS GIGABYTE AERO^17
PERFORMANCE
You can read our Core i7 Comet Lake H
review (go.pcworld.com/875h) for a deeper
look at the Core i7-10875H’s performance. Of
the shorter list of tests we’ll show here, suffice
it to say the 8-core 10th-gen Core i7 is the
best CPU from this family so far, giving you
performance just behind what used to be a
pricey Core i9 chip. The Core i7-10875H’s
biggest problem is the new Ryzen 4000
CPUs, which make a compelling
counterpoint. It’s a moot point for the Aero
17, though, because Gigabyte is not offering
an AMD alternative.
For our testing, we didn’t rely on
Gigabyte’s “AI” feature, which references an
AI database for guidance on how hard it can
push loads. Instead we set the laptop to its
“gaming” fan threshold and set the GPU and
CPU settings to their maximum setting. Wedon’t believe this
to be an
overclock, but it’s
also hard to say
because the
Gigabyte utility
we used was a
hot mess in some
areas. It’s not
clear what certain
buttons do, and
the manual fan
curve settings
make no sense
unless you believe 12 comes before 7. Even
so, the Aero 17 and its Comet Lake H are
definitely in the 8-core club.
The Core i7-10875H’s secreat sauce is its
high clock speeds under heavy loads. Under
one or even two threads, it can hit 5.1GHz,
which puts it at the very top for single-
threaded performance. That’s no small feat
with a bunch of Core i9’s and a Ryzen 9 vying
for the top spot.
How a laptop and CPU combination
responds under heavy loads that last a long
time matters, too. For that we use HandBrake
to encode a 30GB file using the CPU only.
This test used to take an hour, but with these
higher-core CPUs we’re down to 20 or 25
minutes. It’s still long enough to burn off most
boost performance. We can see the Aero 17
earns its keep among the Core i9s and Ryzen
9 chip yet again.The Gigabyte Aero 17 features two M.2 slots and two SO-DIMM slots accessible
from the bottom.