The New Era 15 Laptop: A Review of Thermal Performance and Gaming Capabilities

As I put the new Gigabyte ER15 laptop through its paces, I was eager to see how it would perform in terms of thermal management and gaming capabilities. The laptop's internal temperatures were a major concern, with the center area reaching levels of up to 45 degrees Celsius under normal operating conditions. However, the fan curve was designed to keep temperatures in check, even when the system is under stress.

The fan noise produced by the laptop was surprisingly quiet, especially when using the "Quiet Profile". At idle, the fans were almost completely silent, which made it easy to forget that they were even on. When using the normal fan profile, the fans were audible but still relatively quiet. This is why I saw differences in idle temperatures between the two modes - it's all about finding a sweet spot.

When gaming with the default fan speed not even at 70% we're reaching the mid-40s in the center however the WASD Keys are noticeably cooler due to the fan below them pretty much the same results with the stress test and fan at normal speed and then with the fans at maximum it's not really too different which isn't surprising as the internal temperatures were the same as we saw earlier. As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I'll let you have a listen to some of these tests - they're completely silent at idle.

With the stress test and fan at normal speed the results show that even with maximum performance the temperature stays below 90 degrees which is pretty impressive considering the high level of granularity that Gigabyte are providing through the control center software. As it should allow you to customize a sweet spot overall I think these are some nice improvements when compared against the older era 15 yeah it's still thermal throttles and many of the workloads but the performance is much improved and with some under vaulting and occasional cooling pad use them all totalling could be eliminated.

It's worth remembering that these tests were meant to be worst case as well - most people aren't going to be hammering the machine with full load for hours at a time. There are of course other machines with these specs that perform better and don't quite run as hot but as you've probably heard me talk about in the past there are 15 otherwise has a lot to offer if you're willing to accept this.

Gigabyte is limiting the CPU to 90 degrees - if they did what Dell did in the G5 and let it run up to 100 degrees and we could get a bit more performance out of it but personally I'm happy to take the performance hit and not go above 90. I'm hoping that the new 17-inch model takes advantage of the extra space and has even better cooling hopefully I'll get to test it out once it's available.

If you're doing multi-threaded work, the extra two cores should still give a nice performance improvement in such workloads in the future. Ideally if Gigabytes starts under bolting out of the box like we've seen in the Helios 300 and Razer Derp in the Blade Pro 17 and it should be in pretty good shape.

The 231 power brick that Gigabyte included with the ER15 appears to be adequate for these specs I was seeing some drain during my testing but it would stuff it around the 95% mark which is pretty standard behavior. These differences in performance shown aren't hard-and-fast rules - there are different factors which will vary results primarily the temperature of the room you're running in application of thermal paste and even the specific hardware which comes down to the silicon loitering.

You may not be able to under bolt or overclock your hardware the same as me it depends on the chip and its specific power requirements so they're just blindly copy my settings and do some testing to find out where your stable point is for best results. It may be possible to further improve temperatures by swapping the thermal paste however as this is a review unit that I have to send back - I'm not able to change the paste otherwise the next reviewer will unknowingly report different results due to what I've done.

In the past, when I changed the paste on my ER15 didn't see an improvement as it looked like the thermal interface material wasn't the bottleneck but rather the heat pipes and fans. I think this explains why many people trying liquid metal didn't see further improvement so I'd be very interested to hear how liquid metal goes with the new model.

Under bolting boosting fan speed or using a cooling pad much easier for most people to do anyway as we've seen these tweaks did help improve the performance of the new ER15 laptop let me know what you thought about the thermals from the new Era 15 laptop - is it still too hot for you or is the performance boost over the old model a good improvement.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGigabyte have redesigned the error 15 laptop and a claiming that this results in 30% better cooling when compared against the older model so let's put the new error to the test and find out just how hot it gets the new error 15 laptop is available in different configurations my model has the Intel i7 9750 h cpu nvidia r TX 2070 max q graphics and 16 gig of memory running in dual channel so expect different results with different specs it's also available with 8 core overclockable cpu and from gtx 1660 TI graphics all the way up to RTX 2080 max q you can find examples and updated prices linked in the description on the bottom of the laptop we've got a nice large mesh area towards the back for air intake while the back rubber feet are sort of angled which i think may help reduce them sucking the hot exhaust straight back in unlike the old error the new model has air exhausts on the left and right hand sides towards the back along with additional air vents above the keyboard otherwise air is still pulled in through the keyboard - in terms of heat pipes we've got more compared to the older error which as we can see here just had two shared heat pipes on top of that gigabyte have stated that they're using thermal grizzly hydronaut thermal paste which should hopefully be better than most of the others out there using who knows what all in all we're looking at some nice cooling upgrades compared to the older error 15 which if you saw my older thermal testing video would severely thermal throttle under these tests the gigabyte control center software allows us to set the CPU between five different levels of power in the GPU between two levels as defined here throughout this testing I've tested stock settings with the CPU at level 2 and GPU at level 1 with the fans on the normal profile here's with the default fan curve of the normal profile looks like so we're not even getting to 70% max speed and expect it to run warmer but quieter as a result however you can of course customize the curve when testing with maximum fan speed however I've boosted the CPU to level 4 and GPU to level 1 for highest levels of performance so up to 62 watts on the CPU and 90 watts on the GPU thermals permitting of course gigabyte also have a feature which basically automatically controls these power limits based on the workload being run the idea is that you just enable the AI and over time it learns what you do on the machine and then you don't need to go through and constantly change these settings around yourself Thermal testing was completed in an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius so expect different results in different environments let's start with the idle results so the machine is just sitting there doing nothing with the normal fan profile the fans were slightly audible so it's a little cooler while quite murdered made it completely silent so the temperatures were a bit warmer as a result these results are from combined CPU and GPU workloads and meant to represent worst-case scenarios as I ran them for extended periods of time the gaming results towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing watchdogs - as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics the stress test results shown on the low half of the graph are from running the a 264 CPU stress test with only the stress CPU option checked and the heav'n GPU benchmark at max settings at the same time to fully load the system let's start with the stress test results at stock with the normal fan profile where thermal throttling on the CPU and this happens basically any time the blue CPU bar is at 90 degree Celsius when we max out the fan the CPU is still thermal throttling however the GPU lowers back a bit despite now receiving more power but we'll see in the next graph how clock speeds were affected by applying a minus 0.18 bolt under volt to the CPU it's still thermal throttling and if we instead use a cooling pad with no one to vault that's still the case only when we combine the under vault with the cooling pad did we finally completely remove thermal throttling under this workload the gaming tests with thermal throttling on the CPU in a similar manner however interestingly with the AI and use plus maximum fan speed the CPU temperature dropped down a fair bit otherwise just the CPU under volt was also enough to remove the thermal throttling with this particular game and when combined with the cooling pad we saw quite a large improvement these are the average clock speeds for the same tests - shown with the CPU set to the default level - we're seeing lower CPU performance both in the stress test and gaming toast setting the fan speed to maximum helps boost clock speed as the current limitation is thermal throttling interestingly in the gaming test with AI and the fans at default speed I saw no real difference compared to without AI however with the fan at maximum and AI enabled it was now performing better though at the same time we're getting better performance by just manually setting the CPU to maximum power limit it's worth remembering that the point of the AI software is to automatically handle these changes for us so we don't have to go around and manually tweak settings while it was making an improvement manually setting things to maximum works out better but then you'll have to keep controlling these options manually and leaving the gigabyte control center software open seemed to use about 13% CPU so you'll want to close it after making manual changes almost every time the CPU is under vaulted we're reaching the full 4 gigahertz all core turbo boost speed of the i7 9750 h cpu with the one exception being in the stress test without the cooling pad as it was still just thermal throttling in that instance that's why we see a 300 megahertz improvement with and without the cooling pad in the stress tests despite the CPU still thermal throttling at 90 degrees its throttling less with the cooling pad all right I know a lot of people in the past have not liked the gigabyte error due to the thermal throttling and that's fair however despite thermal throttling in many of these tests I think we need to take a step back and compare these results to the old error and see how far it's come these are the clock speeds I got under the same workloads a few months ago when I tested the error 15 X 9 with 8750 H and 2070 max Q graphics so pretty similar specs though I did also test it with a warmer room temperature at stock web 1 gigahertz behind on the CPU compared to the new model and even the best-case result here with under vaulting and cooling pad topped out at 3.3 gigahertz which we could easily get in the new model just by increasing fan speed the old model had no chance of hitting the 3.9 gigahertz or Core turbo speed in these specific workloads it was quite far off in fact while the new one can at least hit the 4 gigahertz turbo speed with some modifications yes the new error still thermal throttles on the CPU under many of these workloads but you can't argue that these are some great improvements over what they had previously these are the average TDP values reported by Hardware inferred during these same tests basically we can see the CPU and GPU rise up when we increase from CPU level to GPU level zero in the control center software these are the average clock speeds while under a CPU only workload with aida64 and just the stress CPU option checked I couldn't get the full 4 gigahertz turbo boost speed even using the highest level 4 option for the CPU available through the control center software however under vaulting or manually boosting the power limit did allow this to get all the way this is because it was hitting the 62 watt power limit defined by this mode so raising the power limit uses more power to hit the 4 gigahertz clock speed while under vaulting instead requires less power to do so this reflects in the thermals where more power equals more heat we're getting a higher temperature of taking the approach of boosting power limit whereas under bolting is cooler than using CPU level 2 to demonstrate how this translates into performance I've got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here I haven't bothered testing CPU levels 0 to 3 so down the bottom we're starting with level for maximum stock performance using the options available through the control center software the result wasn't great however with some modifications we could get very impressive performance with the power limit burst until x2 you was reporting the CPU is running at 100 watts and it was thermal throttling in this test under bolting instead of touching the power limit gave a better score but when combining the two a 3100 score was possible so this just goes to show that we can push the CPU power limit higher manually which will be useful for intensive CPU workloads so how do these performance boosts actually translate into games I've tested Far Cry 5 with the built-in benchmark at 1080p at the bottom we've got the default settings the laptop comes with which is still outperforming the 81 fps the old error with same GPU bit 8750 h got in this test the AI mode did actually improve on this however it's not going to beat us setting the max CPU and GPU speed through the control center software and manually maxing out the fan when we undervolt the CPU and boost the power limit we see the best result I didn't do GPU overclocking here as I actually averaged one fps worse performance with it on as the GPU is always paola throttled which is pretty standard with r-tx laptops before under vaulting as for the external temperatures where you'll actually be putting your hands at idle it was in the low 30s in the center about average while gaming with the fan at default speed not even at 70% we're reaching the mid-40s in the center however the WASD Keys are noticeably cooler due to the fan below them pretty much the same results with the stress test and fan at normal speed and then with the fans at maximum it's not really too different which isn't surprising as the internal temperatures were the same as we saw earlier as for the fan noise produced by the laptop I'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle with the quiet profile it was completely silent while with the normal fan profile the fans were audible but it was still quiet and this is why we saw the different idle temperatures earlier between these two modes with the normal profile weather gaming or under stress test the fan curve makes the fan run at the same speed which isn't even hitting 70% so we do at least have the option of making it run quieter at the expense of lower performance otherwise with the fans at maximum it can get quite loud however I think this is a good thing considering the high level of granularity that gigabyte are providing through the control center software as it should allow you to customize a sweet spot overall I think these are some nice improvements when compared against the older era 15 yeah it's still thermal throttles and many of the workloads but the performance is much improved and with some under vaulting and occasional cooling pad use them all totalling could be eliminated it's worth remembering these tests and meant to be worst case as well most people aren't going to be hammering the machine with full load for hours at a time there are of course other machines with these specs that perform better and don't quite run as hot but as you've probably heard me talk about in the past there are 15 otherwise has a lot to offer if you're willing to accept this it's worth mentioning that gigabyte are limiting the CPU to 90 degrees - if they did what Dell did in the g5 and let it run up to 100 degrees and we could get a bit more performance out of it but personally I'm happy to take the performance hit and not go above 90 I'm hoping that the new 17-inch model takes advantage of the extra space and has even better cooling hopefully I'll get to test it out once it's available I'd expect the 8 core model to run hotter however if you're doing multi-threaded work the extra two cores should still give a nice performance improvement in such workloads in the future I think if gigabytes start under bolting out of the box like we've seen a Sidhu in the Helios 300 and Razer derp in the blade pro 17 and it should be in pretty good shape ideally if the AI software controlled this dynamically with a known stable range it could make it much more useful the 231 power brick that gigabyte included with the error 15 appears to be adequate for these specs I was seeing some drain during my testing but it would stuff it around the 95% mark which is pretty standard behavior these differences in performance shown aren't hard-and-fast rules there are different factors which will vary results primarily the temperature of the room you're running in application of thermal paste and even the specific hardware which comes down to the silicon loitering you may not be able to under bolt or overclock your hardware the same as me it depends on the chip and its specific power requirements so they're just blindly copy my settings and do some testing to find out where your stable point is for best results it may be possible to further improve temperatures by swapping the thermal paste however as this is a review unit that I have to send back I'm not able to change the paste otherwise the next reviewer will unknowingly report different results due to what I've done we do at least know they're using somewhat decent paste now anyway in the past when I changed the paste on my error I didn't see an improvement as it looked like the thermal interface material wasn't the bottleneck but rather the heat pipes and fans I think this explains why many people trying liquid metal didn't see further improvement so I'd be very interested to hear how liquid metal goes with the new model under bolting boosting fan speed or using a cooling pad much easier for most people to do anyway and as we've seen these tweaks did help improve the performance of the new error 15 laptop let me know what you thought about the thermals from the new era 15 laptop down in the comments is it still too hot for you or is the performance boost over the old model a good improvement if you're new to the channel you'll definitely want to get subscribed for the full review of the new gigabyte error 15 laptop it's got a lot of other nice improvements over the old modelGigabyte have redesigned the error 15 laptop and a claiming that this results in 30% better cooling when compared against the older model so let's put the new error to the test and find out just how hot it gets the new error 15 laptop is available in different configurations my model has the Intel i7 9750 h cpu nvidia r TX 2070 max q graphics and 16 gig of memory running in dual channel so expect different results with different specs it's also available with 8 core overclockable cpu and from gtx 1660 TI graphics all the way up to RTX 2080 max q you can find examples and updated prices linked in the description on the bottom of the laptop we've got a nice large mesh area towards the back for air intake while the back rubber feet are sort of angled which i think may help reduce them sucking the hot exhaust straight back in unlike the old error the new model has air exhausts on the left and right hand sides towards the back along with additional air vents above the keyboard otherwise air is still pulled in through the keyboard - in terms of heat pipes we've got more compared to the older error which as we can see here just had two shared heat pipes on top of that gigabyte have stated that they're using thermal grizzly hydronaut thermal paste which should hopefully be better than most of the others out there using who knows what all in all we're looking at some nice cooling upgrades compared to the older error 15 which if you saw my older thermal testing video would severely thermal throttle under these tests the gigabyte control center software allows us to set the CPU between five different levels of power in the GPU between two levels as defined here throughout this testing I've tested stock settings with the CPU at level 2 and GPU at level 1 with the fans on the normal profile here's with the default fan curve of the normal profile looks like so we're not even getting to 70% max speed and expect it to run warmer but quieter as a result however you can of course customize the curve when testing with maximum fan speed however I've boosted the CPU to level 4 and GPU to level 1 for highest levels of performance so up to 62 watts on the CPU and 90 watts on the GPU thermals permitting of course gigabyte also have a feature which basically automatically controls these power limits based on the workload being run the idea is that you just enable the AI and over time it learns what you do on the machine and then you don't need to go through and constantly change these settings around yourself Thermal testing was completed in an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius so expect different results in different environments let's start with the idle results so the machine is just sitting there doing nothing with the normal fan profile the fans were slightly audible so it's a little cooler while quite murdered made it completely silent so the temperatures were a bit warmer as a result these results are from combined CPU and GPU workloads and meant to represent worst-case scenarios as I ran them for extended periods of time the gaming results towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing watchdogs - as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics the stress test results shown on the low half of the graph are from running the a 264 CPU stress test with only the stress CPU option checked and the heav'n GPU benchmark at max settings at the same time to fully load the system let's start with the stress test results at stock with the normal fan profile where thermal throttling on the CPU and this happens basically any time the blue CPU bar is at 90 degree Celsius when we max out the fan the CPU is still thermal throttling however the GPU lowers back a bit despite now receiving more power but we'll see in the next graph how clock speeds were affected by applying a minus 0.18 bolt under volt to the CPU it's still thermal throttling and if we instead use a cooling pad with no one to vault that's still the case only when we combine the under vault with the cooling pad did we finally completely remove thermal throttling under this workload the gaming tests with thermal throttling on the CPU in a similar manner however interestingly with the AI and use plus maximum fan speed the CPU temperature dropped down a fair bit otherwise just the CPU under volt was also enough to remove the thermal throttling with this particular game and when combined with the cooling pad we saw quite a large improvement these are the average clock speeds for the same tests - shown with the CPU set to the default level - we're seeing lower CPU performance both in the stress test and gaming toast setting the fan speed to maximum helps boost clock speed as the current limitation is thermal throttling interestingly in the gaming test with AI and the fans at default speed I saw no real difference compared to without AI however with the fan at maximum and AI enabled it was now performing better though at the same time we're getting better performance by just manually setting the CPU to maximum power limit it's worth remembering that the point of the AI software is to automatically handle these changes for us so we don't have to go around and manually tweak settings while it was making an improvement manually setting things to maximum works out better but then you'll have to keep controlling these options manually and leaving the gigabyte control center software open seemed to use about 13% CPU so you'll want to close it after making manual changes almost every time the CPU is under vaulted we're reaching the full 4 gigahertz all core turbo boost speed of the i7 9750 h cpu with the one exception being in the stress test without the cooling pad as it was still just thermal throttling in that instance that's why we see a 300 megahertz improvement with and without the cooling pad in the stress tests despite the CPU still thermal throttling at 90 degrees its throttling less with the cooling pad all right I know a lot of people in the past have not liked the gigabyte error due to the thermal throttling and that's fair however despite thermal throttling in many of these tests I think we need to take a step back and compare these results to the old error and see how far it's come these are the clock speeds I got under the same workloads a few months ago when I tested the error 15 X 9 with 8750 H and 2070 max Q graphics so pretty similar specs though I did also test it with a warmer room temperature at stock web 1 gigahertz behind on the CPU compared to the new model and even the best-case result here with under vaulting and cooling pad topped out at 3.3 gigahertz which we could easily get in the new model just by increasing fan speed the old model had no chance of hitting the 3.9 gigahertz or Core turbo speed in these specific workloads it was quite far off in fact while the new one can at least hit the 4 gigahertz turbo speed with some modifications yes the new error still thermal throttles on the CPU under many of these workloads but you can't argue that these are some great improvements over what they had previously these are the average TDP values reported by Hardware inferred during these same tests basically we can see the CPU and GPU rise up when we increase from CPU level to GPU level zero in the control center software these are the average clock speeds while under a CPU only workload with aida64 and just the stress CPU option checked I couldn't get the full 4 gigahertz turbo boost speed even using the highest level 4 option for the CPU available through the control center software however under vaulting or manually boosting the power limit did allow this to get all the way this is because it was hitting the 62 watt power limit defined by this mode so raising the power limit uses more power to hit the 4 gigahertz clock speed while under vaulting instead requires less power to do so this reflects in the thermals where more power equals more heat we're getting a higher temperature of taking the approach of boosting power limit whereas under bolting is cooler than using CPU level 2 to demonstrate how this translates into performance I've got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here I haven't bothered testing CPU levels 0 to 3 so down the bottom we're starting with level for maximum stock performance using the options available through the control center software the result wasn't great however with some modifications we could get very impressive performance with the power limit burst until x2 you was reporting the CPU is running at 100 watts and it was thermal throttling in this test under bolting instead of touching the power limit gave a better score but when combining the two a 3100 score was possible so this just goes to show that we can push the CPU power limit higher manually which will be useful for intensive CPU workloads so how do these performance boosts actually translate into games I've tested Far Cry 5 with the built-in benchmark at 1080p at the bottom we've got the default settings the laptop comes with which is still outperforming the 81 fps the old error with same GPU bit 8750 h got in this test the AI mode did actually improve on this however it's not going to beat us setting the max CPU and GPU speed through the control center software and manually maxing out the fan when we undervolt the CPU and boost the power limit we see the best result I didn't do GPU overclocking here as I actually averaged one fps worse performance with it on as the GPU is always paola throttled which is pretty standard with r-tx laptops before under vaulting as for the external temperatures where you'll actually be putting your hands at idle it was in the low 30s in the center about average while gaming with the fan at default speed not even at 70% we're reaching the mid-40s in the center however the WASD Keys are noticeably cooler due to the fan below them pretty much the same results with the stress test and fan at normal speed and then with the fans at maximum it's not really too different which isn't surprising as the internal temperatures were the same as we saw earlier as for the fan noise produced by the laptop I'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle with the quiet profile it was completely silent while with the normal fan profile the fans were audible but it was still quiet and this is why we saw the different idle temperatures earlier between these two modes with the normal profile weather gaming or under stress test the fan curve makes the fan run at the same speed which isn't even hitting 70% so we do at least have the option of making it run quieter at the expense of lower performance otherwise with the fans at maximum it can get quite loud however I think this is a good thing considering the high level of granularity that gigabyte are providing through the control center software as it should allow you to customize a sweet spot overall I think these are some nice improvements when compared against the older era 15 yeah it's still thermal throttles and many of the workloads but the performance is much improved and with some under vaulting and occasional cooling pad use them all totalling could be eliminated it's worth remembering these tests and meant to be worst case as well most people aren't going to be hammering the machine with full load for hours at a time there are of course other machines with these specs that perform better and don't quite run as hot but as you've probably heard me talk about in the past there are 15 otherwise has a lot to offer if you're willing to accept this it's worth mentioning that gigabyte are limiting the CPU to 90 degrees - if they did what Dell did in the g5 and let it run up to 100 degrees and we could get a bit more performance out of it but personally I'm happy to take the performance hit and not go above 90 I'm hoping that the new 17-inch model takes advantage of the extra space and has even better cooling hopefully I'll get to test it out once it's available I'd expect the 8 core model to run hotter however if you're doing multi-threaded work the extra two cores should still give a nice performance improvement in such workloads in the future I think if gigabytes start under bolting out of the box like we've seen a Sidhu in the Helios 300 and Razer derp in the blade pro 17 and it should be in pretty good shape ideally if the AI software controlled this dynamically with a known stable range it could make it much more useful the 231 power brick that gigabyte included with the error 15 appears to be adequate for these specs I was seeing some drain during my testing but it would stuff it around the 95% mark which is pretty standard behavior these differences in performance shown aren't hard-and-fast rules there are different factors which will vary results primarily the temperature of the room you're running in application of thermal paste and even the specific hardware which comes down to the silicon loitering you may not be able to under bolt or overclock your hardware the same as me it depends on the chip and its specific power requirements so they're just blindly copy my settings and do some testing to find out where your stable point is for best results it may be possible to further improve temperatures by swapping the thermal paste however as this is a review unit that I have to send back I'm not able to change the paste otherwise the next reviewer will unknowingly report different results due to what I've done we do at least know they're using somewhat decent paste now anyway in the past when I changed the paste on my error I didn't see an improvement as it looked like the thermal interface material wasn't the bottleneck but rather the heat pipes and fans I think this explains why many people trying liquid metal didn't see further improvement so I'd be very interested to hear how liquid metal goes with the new model under bolting boosting fan speed or using a cooling pad much easier for most people to do anyway and as we've seen these tweaks did help improve the performance of the new error 15 laptop let me know what you thought about the thermals from the new era 15 laptop down in the comments is it still too hot for you or is the performance boost over the old model a good improvement if you're new to the channel you'll definitely want to get subscribed for the full review of the new gigabyte error 15 laptop it's got a lot of other nice improvements over the old model\n"