Gigabyte Aero 14 (2023) hands-on review: the super sleek laptop of your dreams
Classy and thin
Like a knife honed to a razor’s edge, the Gigabyte Aero 14 is looking slimmer than ever. The popular 14-inch laptop for creators received a major redesign at Computex 2023 with a new all-metal CNC’d chassis that makes it look incredibly sharp and feel completely solid.
The new Gigabyte Aero 14 looks truly sleek as hell. The new completely cnc’ed (or machine cut) aluminum chassis has been cut down to just barely contain its powerful internals. Meanwhile, the screen bezels are pretty small too, measuring only two millimeters on the sides and at most a centimeter at the top and bottom. It almost could have an edgeless display if it didn’t have to make room for the necessary web camera.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Sharp design and an OLED screen for much less than a Macbook Pro
📺 Gorgeous 14-inch OLED screen that’s high-resolution and 90Hz
🪒 Sleeker, thinner design overall with a nearly bezel-less display
💪 Intel Core i7 H-series CPU with a Nvidia RTX 4050 as a base model
💸 Starts at $1,699 making it a bargain compared to the MacBook Pro
Similarly, the keyboard and trackpad just barely fit below the screen—though I wish the keys were just a bit bigger. I found typing a bit of a pain with the closely spaced together keys, but the sample on show had a keyboard formatted for Asia, so the experience might change with an American-style keyboard I’ve yet to test.
Another thing that makes the Aero 14 such a beauty is its 14 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel display. Not only is it sharper than most 14-inch screen notebooks that just get a Full HD screen (1920 x 1080), it’s also an OLED display that has perfect blacks and vibrant colors that pop off the monitor. Plus it’s also 90Hz so scrolling and all Windows 11 animations look smooth.
Of course, 90Hz doesn’t sound terribly impressive for gaming, but that’s because it isn’t meant for gaming as much as previous iterations. The slimmer chassis and overall aesthetic, reflects the new Aero’s greater focus on being an everyday machine for creators, instead of a powerhouse for gamers.
At the heart of the laptop is an Intel Core i7-13-700H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics chip. On paper the 14-core and 20-thread CPU should get you through a day of power tasks and the extra GPU grunt helps with image/video editing and other graphics heavy workloads. Of course, at the Computex showroom we only got to sample the Aero 14’s performance with some light webbrowing, so we’ll have to test this machine’s full capabilities in a full review.
This machine’s starting spec also comes at a $1699 USD price point with 16GB LPDDR5 memory and 1TB SSD storage. An equivalently equipped MacBook Pro would run you about $2,499, so the Gigabyte Aero 14 looks pretty good on a value standpoint—at least on paper.
There’s also a larger Gigabyte Aero 16 with 4K 60Hz OLED display, plus a beefed up Intel Core i9-13900H processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics and 32GB of RAM. This larger model will sell for $2099 and up.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.