The Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 has been put through its paces by the author to test its gaming prowess. The laptop features an Intel Core i9-9750H processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max Q graphics, and a 16GB DDR4 RAM, making it a formidable opponent in the world of gaming laptops.

In the built-in benchmark for Far Cry 5 with ultra settings, the Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 performed admirably, coming in at second place only behind the Alienware m15. This is a testament to its powerful specs and ability to handle demanding games. The author notes that this is their first test of a laptop with RTX 2070 graphics, and while there was some thermal throttling on the graphics card, it seems to be slotting in about where expected between the 2070 Max Q and 2080 Max Q laptops.

The Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark also saw the Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 perform well, coming out ahead of the Alienware m15 in some tests. However, this was partly due to thermal throttling on the graphics card, which is a trade-off for not having Nvidia Optimus. The author notes that without Optimus, the display is connected directly to the NVIDIA graphics, resulting in higher performance but at the cost of battery life.

The Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815's cooling system was put to the test by running Heaven Valley and Superposition from Unigine as well as Fire Strike Times by Portroyal and VR Mark from 3D Mark. The results showed that the laptop performed admirably, with the storage being praised for its performance with the 512GB M2 NVMe SSD.

In terms of pricing, the Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 is available in two versions: one with an Intel Core i9-9750H processor and another with an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor. The former costs $2175 in the US, while the latter is priced at $1975. In Australia, both versions are priced at $3300.

The author concludes that the Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 is a gaming laptop that checks many boxes but isn't perfect. While it has good specs and performs well in games, its lack of Nvidia Optimus means that it sacrifices battery life for better performance. The cooling system is also praised for its effectiveness, although the author would have liked to see more granular fan control. Overall, while the laptop's $200 price premium over the 8th Gen version may not be justified, it's still a formidable opponent in the world of gaming laptops.

The article concludes with a call to action from the author, inviting readers to share their thoughts on the Acer Predator Helios 300 GA815 in the comments section. For those new to the channel, the author invites them to subscribe for future tech videos and content.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe auras 15 gaming laptop is on the smaller side for a 15-inch machine with some nice pecs inside in this review we'll take a look at gaming performance thermals battery life and basically everything else you'd want to know help you decide if this is a laptop you should consider buying I've got the highest SPECT version of the Auris 15 the XA meaning it has an Intel i7 9750 H CPU and NVIDIA r-tx 2070 graphics no max-q here there's also 16 gig of memory running in dual channel a 15.6 inch 1080p 240 hertz IGZO screen and 512 gig m2 nvme SSD and 2 terabyte hard drive for storage fit network connectivity it's got Gigabit Ethernet 802 dot 11 AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 I've got the XA configuration here however it's also available in some other configurations the W a model has 2060 graphics while the SI has the 16 60 TI you can find updated prices to all models linked in the description the laptop has a matte black metallic body both on the exterior and interior and there are no sharp corners or edges anywhere the weight of the laptop is listed at around 2.4 kilos or 5.3 pounds and mine came in at 2.2 kilos or 3.2 kilos with the 230 watt power brick and cable for charging included the dimensions of the laptop are thirty six point one centimeters in width twenty four point six centimeters in depth and about 2.4 centimeters in height so it's on a smaller side for a 15-inch laptop without being unnecessarily thin this smaller footprint allows for small bezels around 8 millimeters based on my own measurements this is the first laptop I've had with a 240 Hertz screen visually I can't say there are any differences looking at this 240 Hertz sharp panel compared to other 144 Hertz laptops I've tested recently I've tested color gamut with the spider 5 and we're looking at 95% of srgb 69% of ntsc and 75% of Adobe RGB so pretty decent results for a gaming laptop at 100% brightness in the center I measured the panel at 343 mitts with a 860 to 1 contrast ratio so overall above-average compared to others meaning it doesn't look like there are any obvious compromises with this 240 Hertz panel viewing angles also looked fine to me on all angles in terms of backlight bleed it was looking pretty good some small imperfections down the bottom in this worst case test but perfectly fine during normal use though this will of course vary between laptops and panels there was a fair bit of screen flex as the lid is on the thinner side and the hinges in the center but overall it felt fairly sturdy when opening I was just able to open the laptop with one finger the hinge wasn't too stiff so this seems to show that there's more weight towards the back in any case I could use it on my lap perfectly stable despite the thin bezel the camera is still found above the display in the center the camera doesn't look great and the microphone sounds about average you can just hear some of the families idle and here's what it sounds like if we hit the fan button the keyboard has three zones of RGB backlighting which can be controlled through the included Oris control center software there are four different effects and the brightness can be adjusted between two levels or turned off if you prefer the software can also be used to change the lighting found on the front left and right corners although you've only got the option of red green blue or off for these the keyboard was good to type with although I did find the smaller error Keys annoying when I needed to use them I personally would have preferred larger arrow keys here's how typing sounded to give you an idea of what to expect there's also a dedicated fan button on the top right which will set the fan speed to maximum and unlike other laptops you don't need any software installed to use it there was only a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard overall it was fairly solid and there were no issues during normal use the touchpad was smooth to the touch and uses precision drivers it clicks down when pushed and there was the usual windows gestures available it's a bit wider than what I'm used to but it worked well and despite the extra width I never found it to get in the way when I needed to use the keyboard fingerprints show up on the matte black surfaces but as they're smooth they're easy to clean off on the left there's an air exhaust vent Gigabit Ethernet port USB 3.1 genuine type-a port micro SD card slot and status LEDs on the right there's a 3.5 millimeter audio combo jack two more USB 3.1 gen1 taipei ports and another air exhaust vent on the back there are two more air exhausts towards the corners then from left to right we've got the power input hdmi 2.0 port mini DisplayPort 1.3 output USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port which also has DisplayPort 1.3 support although 'nor Thunderbolt despite the logo and then Kensington lock on the lid in the center there's the horus logo with a mirrored finish as well as two lines on the side and both the lines and logo light up white wall powered on underneath this heaps of ventilation holes to assist F'lar the two speakers have found towards the front left and right corners and face down they sounded alright for a laptop clearer at higher volumes but not really any bass here's what we're looking at while playing music at maximum volume and the latency one results weren't excellent the bottom panel can be removed easily by taking out 11 screws with a Phillips head screwdriver once inside from left to right we get access to the single 2.5 inch drive bay Wi-Fi card battery to memory slots and 2 m dot 2 slots both of which support nvme and Sadam powering the laptop is a 60 to 1 hour battery and with a full charge and just watching youtube videos with the screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled I was able to use it for 1 hour and 47 minutes this lower result was caused by the RT X 2070 graphics being in use the entire time you don't have the option of using the Intel integrated graphics here with Optimus despite this there's still no g-sync however this does mean we should see higher performance when compared against a laptop with equivalent specs that uses Optimus while playing The Witcher 3 with medium settings and invidious battery boost set to 30fps the battery lasted for 58 minutes all up however with 12 percent charge left the frame rate dropped to 5 fps and was no longer playable the AI feature doesn't work while in battery power there as we'll see later it didn't help much anyway I'll also note that I never saw the battery discharged while the 231 power brick was plugged in before we get into the thermal testing I need to briefly talk about gigabytes new AI feature that comes with their new laptops it's been updated to include three modes AI edge and two cloud options ai download and ai download and upload ai edge processes data locally to make the best decisions in terms of what to change like power limits and clocks while the a iCloud settings get data from Microsoft as you are the download only option is new and rather than sending your data to the cloud to improve the service it only downloads profiles to help it run better the download and upload one on the other hand will submit data though all tests had a I disabled except where explicitly mentioned the Auris control center software allows you to choose between five levels of CPU power and two for the GPU the CPU settings boost to the maximum TDP between these levels while GPU level zero is stock and level one boosts the core clock by 140 megahertz and memory by 70 megahertz any time you press the fan button on the keyboard to boost the fan speed GPU mert one is automatically engaged overclocking the graphics for the purposes of this video when maximum fan speed is mentioned I'm running the CPU at level four for the highest limit and GPU at level one while it default stock settings I'm running the CPU at level two and GPU at level zero the large air intake vent on the bottom should help out when we test with the cooling pad the rubber feet also seemed to be angled such that they block the hot air being exhausted out the back from coming straight back into the fans so cooler air should only be pulled in from the front there are also quite a few heat pipes here and some are shared between the processor and graphics so a change in one component will affect the other for instance if the CPU gets hot the graphics will be affected as a result thermal testing was completed with an ambient temperature of 21 degrees Celsius expect different results in different environments there's a lot of data here CPU temperatures are shown by the blue bars and GPU temperatures are shown by the green bars we're looking at combined CPU and GPU load here so both are fully loaded as a worst case the gaming tests towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing watchdogs to as I find it to use a good amount of combined processor and graphics resources the stress tests were tested by running the aida64 CPU stress test and heav'n GPU benchmark at the same time to fully load the system this isn't meant to show typical performance these are worst-case results which you can use to compare with my other videos the idle temperatures down the bottom are looking fine let's start with the stress tests at stock the CPU is thermal throttling at 96 degrees Celsius while the GPU was thermal throttling at 92 even with the minus 0.15 volt under bolt to the CPU when not seeing changes to temperature however we'll see how clock speeds were affected in the next graph if we max out the fan the GPU temperatures drop back to 86 they're hot were in first still lists it as thermal throttling with the CPU under multiplied to the CPU is now thermal throttling intermittently rather than constantly and if we add on the thermal take massive 20 cooling pad the CPU temperature drops by 9 degrees though no change in temperatures to the GPU most likely due to the overclock applied from the max fan button moving up to the gaming results again there was thermal throttling with the fan at default speed I'll also note that for the gaming tests I'm under bolting the CPU and GPU rather than just the CPU only in the stress tests I didn't test with the GPU under volt due to reasons anyway in most cases both is still running quite hot the AI settings didn't appear to help in this game I got the same thermals as running the machine it's topped with default fan speed in the past the AI would control the fan speed in this case it didn't touch it and the fan speed remained unchanged resulting in the temperatures we've got here the best results are seen right up the top when the fan is a maximum CPU and GPU are under bolted and the cooling pad is in use these are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown if we start with the stress tests down the bottom we can see the GPU is down clocking quite a bit to keep cool same with the CPU with the minus 0.15 volt CPU under volt we can boost the average clock speed by 450 megahertz over all six calls simply by boosting the fan speed we almost see a similar improvement to CPU performance but also to the graphics as this helps reduce the thermal throttling now with the CPU under multiplied in combination with the fans maxed out we're basically reaching the full 4.0 gigahertz all core turbo boost speed of the I 790 750 H CPU with the cooling pad added despite thermal throttling still being reported on the GPU as we saw before and the CPU is now solid at 4 gigahertz which I think is a nice result in the gaming tests we can see the clock speed increase with the GPU Wonderbolts as this helps reduce the thermal throttling taking place the CPU Wonderbolt is also seeing us get pretty much full performance even without resorting to boosting the fan speed which is good because as you'll hear soon it gets pretty loud the AI settings like we saw in the temperatures are performing similar to stock settings again this seems to be due to the I feature not controlling the fan speed for some reason so hopefully that will be updated in the future I'm pretty sure the old model did it up the top we're getting the best results in terms of clock speed with the CPU and GPU under bolted and cooling pattern use as this was the only test the GPU was no longer thermal throttling the clock speed is the highest out of all results these are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any GPU load as mentioned earlier there are five different levels in the Auris control center software that controls CPU TDP so these are the clock speeds were able to achieve with each with the 62 month limit at level 4 early just below the full 4.0 gigahertz boost speed of the 97 50 H the undervolt gets us all the way there these are the temperatures for the same tests just shown as the TDP increases resulting in higher clock speed so - the temperatures the undervolt provided a massive improvement here of about 15 degrees while also performing the best here are the average CPU TTP's from these tests so the under bolt puts us around the power usage of level 1 with similar temperatures but with 500 megahertz of extra performance over all six calls to demonstrate how this translates into performance I've got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here there's no difference in single core as that's not enough to trigger throttling very even in this best case with the CPU under volt and no restrictions I was saying similar scores to the 8750 H I will be comparing these two CPUs in a future video though so make sure you subscribe for that here's what we're looking at in Cinebench are 20 until I have more data from other laptops I'll keep including results from birth here are the GPU and the clock speeds while under a graphical Earnie stress test just as a reminder the GPU 0 setting in the Auris control center software is default while GPU 1 / clocks the call by 140 megahertz with my crappy undervolt I was getting similar speeds to default and when we checked the temperatures the thermal throttling was removed with this though it only lowers by 1 degree under this workload given its thermal throttling at both levels 0 & 1 with the same temperature the clock speeds in the previous graph are likely not accurate it does seem a bit strange that even with the fan maxed out the GPU is thermal throttling under GPU only stress test but I suppose it is the full fat 27 t and this is the first laptop I've had with it so I don't really know what the norm is there as for the external temperatures will actually be putting your hands at idle it was about average in the low 30s while gaming it gets to the mid 40s in the center a little warm that definitely not hot feeling with the stress tests running it's a little cooler with noticeably cooler WASD Keys as for the fan noise produced by the laptop I'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle that was quiet however the fan was making this sort of pulsating noise with the stress tests running or gaming it was about average compared to other gaming laptops I've tested but when we hit the fan button to max it out it gets very loud normally I like at least having the option of raising fan speed however in this case there doesn't seem to be granular control I wasn't able to adjust it like in previous models so it seems to be all or nothing in terms of fan speed in general the Auris 15 XA runs fairly hot at least in my top-end configuration here with full 2070 and 9750 age I'd expect others to run a bit cooler even with under volting we didn't really improve temperatures by that much however this did significantly improve the performance it's worth noting that we're able to boost the power limits over the CPU specified 45 watt TDP rating there many laptops don't give us the option and perform worse as a result due to power madelung though the trade-off to this increased performance is of course higher temperatures so it's good the Auris has equipped with such powerful fans the only downside of those powerful fans is that at this time they don't seem to give you the ability to customise the fan speed like with other models hopefully that changes in the future in most cases once on the voltage we're able to get the full 4.0 gigahertz all quarter bow speed from the 97 50 H CPU even under worst-case combined CPU and GPU load which I think is pretty good given there are other laptops that cannot hit full boost speed under these tasks in my tests they I didn't seem to do much so I would just stick to under vaulting and if you can put up with the extra fan noise boosting the fan speed also finally let's take a look at some gaming benchmarks I've tested these games with these Nvidia drivers and old windows updates to date installed the drivers are a little behind but they're the latest gigabyte currently offer I've also tested with the fan maxed out with CPU at setting 4 and GPU at 1 so raised CPU TDP and graphics overclocked battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode and not in multiplayer mode as it's easy to consistently reproduce the test run the purple bars show the results with ray tracing disabled while the green bars show RT X on the RT X results weren't great at Ultra and high settings though it was usable at high for a game like this I want my framerate third and RTX off at Ultra settings both looks and runs better than our txon at low settings apex legends was tested with either all settings at maximum or all settings at the lowest possible values as it doesn't have predefined setting presets the results in this game were a little lower than I expected based on the specs but it's running well enough even maxed out while minimum settings boosted FPS by 30% farcry new dawn was tested with the built-in benchmark not too much to say here above 60 fps at Ultra settings is good oh and it was coming out ahead of the 2080 max-q in the razor blade I recently reviewed at every setting level this may be due to the slightly better CPU though fortnight was tested with the replay feature and while I have to regularly refresh the replay jutsu updates I test in the same area this game doesn't need powerful hardware to run so even with epic settings we're seeing 120 FPS averages with low settings actually able to make good use of the 240 Hertz display however which is another well optimised game and was tested in the practice range as other players but and even different maps in actual gameplay affect the framerate and this allows for consistent testing at low and medium the 300 FPS frame cap is hid while epic settings still played extremely well shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark the results were pretty good just a couple of FPS behind the 2080 mxq in the razor blade i recently tested and actually ahead at lower settings possibly due to the higher clocked 9750 h cpu csgo was tested using the u Etica LEF PS benchmark and like always high frame rates were coming out of this test this is the sort of game the 240 Hertz screen would be more useful for if you're playing competitively Rainbow six siege was tested with the built-in benchmark and in general is a game I found a benefit from invidious nuturing architecture I'll also note this was another test where low settings were getting frame rates that would be well matched with the 240 Hertz screen pub G was tested using the replay feature and even at Ultra settings almost 100 FPS was possible in this test with lower settings getting us closer to 130 FPS which seems to be about as well as this game performs on laptop hardware I don't think I've ever seen it much above 140 fps in my test run assassin's creed Odyssey was tested with the built-in benchmark and I was seeing some fairly high frame rates at the lowest setting levels when compared with laptops I've tested this is my first 9750 H machine and this does seem to be a CPU heavy game so it may be helping out a bit there dota 2 was tested playing in the middle lane with an average amount of action going on and it was running very smoothly without any problems at all at maximum settings it was still performing very well at 150 FPS with closer to 200 at lowest settings also possible watchdogs 2 was a resource intensive game there with the solid 30fps it plays just fine to me so hitting the 60fps sweet spot at Ultra on this laptop was quite a nice result The Witcher 3 was running well with her works disabled and it played perfectly fine for me even with ultra settings 90 FPS with 64 the 1% low works well and while you can get higher FPS at lower settings I don't think this game benefits much from it and would prefer the higher visual quality with high settings I've tested more games in the dedicated gaming benchmark video check the card in the top right corner if you want to see more results let's also take a look at how this config you've the Auris 15 compares with other laptops to see how it stacks up use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different drivers in battlefield 5 I've tested Ultra settings and I've got the Auris 15 up the top in red and it was doing quite well only coming in behind the 90 120 80 max Q laptops I've tested it's worth remembering this is my first 9750 H laptop test so all others here have the 8750 H here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark and the Auris was doing well here coming in at second place only behind the associate 701 which is ahead of the other 2080 max Q laptops Judah G sync these are the results from shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at highest settings and in this test the Auris was a little ahead of the Alienware m15 which isn't too surprising as I had some thermal throttling on the graphics and that one this is the first time I've tested a laptop with RT x 2070 graphics and for the most part it seems to be slotting in about where I expected between the 20 70 max Q and 20 80 max Q though it does of course depend on the game in some it was beating the 20 80 max Q machines overall we're seeing pretty good performance it's worth noting that as there was no Nvidia Optimus here the display is connected straight to the Nvidia graphics meaning we should be seeing higher performer this does come at the expense of battery life it's a trade-off I've got a video linked in the description covering this topic further if you're after more information now let's see how the under vaulting in AI settings actually help improve gaming performance far cry 5 was tested using the built-in benchmark at 1080p with ultra settings down the bottom I tested with both the CPU and GPU maxed out in the Auris control center software the only difference was one had the fan at default speed and the other at maximum this simple change gave 9 percent higher FPS as it helps reduce thermal throttling I'll note that the AI settings and themselves do not modify fan speed as covered earlier though I think they should that I tested with the fan maxed out to try and show best case performance with them though as we can see it's basically the same as not using it at least in this test the results up the top with the manual under volting gave us the best performance now for the benchmarking tools I've tested Heaven Valley and superposition from Unigine as well as fire strike times by portroyal and VR mark from 3d mark just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results I've used crystal disk mark to test the storage and the 512 gig m2 nvme SSD that was installed was giving nice raids and alright writes the two terabyte hard drive was performing about as expected for a 5400 rpm hard drive unfortunately I couldn't test the microSD slot as I don't have any cards that size for updated pricing check the links in the description as prices will change over time at the time of recording in the US the XA version with these specs is going for two thousand one hundred and seventy five US dollars while the 8th gen model is over two hundred dollars less meanwhile here in Australia it's going for 3300 Australian dollars so what do you guys think about the Auris 15x a gaming laptop overall I think it's checking a lot of boxes but as always nothing is perfect it's well-built the chassis is on the smaller side for a 15-inch laptop allowing it to have nice thin bezels and it's got good specs which allow it to perform well in games there's no Nvidia Optimus so while gaming performance will be improved battery life suffers as a result that's the trade-off it does get warm but it's good good performance behind that along with some powerful fans to help with cooling though I would have liked to have seen granular fan control considering how loud maximum speed gets the big opening on the bottom was great for helping air flow especially with the cooling pad I heard more companies go this way in the future once under bolted even under worst case combined CPU and GPU load still being able to hit the full 4 gigahertz turbo boost speed of the 97 50 H was pretty impressive despite the temperatures for more than two hundred US dollars more money over the 8th gen version I honestly think I just get the slightly cheaper 8th gen model I don't think you're getting $200 of value going from the 8750 H to 97 50 H at least in this laptop and the 240 Hertz screen is realistically only beneficial in eSports titles so depends on the types of games you'll be playing let me know what you guys thought about the Auris 15 gaming laptop down in the comments and if you're new to the channel get subscribed for future tech videos like this onethe auras 15 gaming laptop is on the smaller side for a 15-inch machine with some nice pecs inside in this review we'll take a look at gaming performance thermals battery life and basically everything else you'd want to know help you decide if this is a laptop you should consider buying I've got the highest SPECT version of the Auris 15 the XA meaning it has an Intel i7 9750 H CPU and NVIDIA r-tx 2070 graphics no max-q here there's also 16 gig of memory running in dual channel a 15.6 inch 1080p 240 hertz IGZO screen and 512 gig m2 nvme SSD and 2 terabyte hard drive for storage fit network connectivity it's got Gigabit Ethernet 802 dot 11 AC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 I've got the XA configuration here however it's also available in some other configurations the W a model has 2060 graphics while the SI has the 16 60 TI you can find updated prices to all models linked in the description the laptop has a matte black metallic body both on the exterior and interior and there are no sharp corners or edges anywhere the weight of the laptop is listed at around 2.4 kilos or 5.3 pounds and mine came in at 2.2 kilos or 3.2 kilos with the 230 watt power brick and cable for charging included the dimensions of the laptop are thirty six point one centimeters in width twenty four point six centimeters in depth and about 2.4 centimeters in height so it's on a smaller side for a 15-inch laptop without being unnecessarily thin this smaller footprint allows for small bezels around 8 millimeters based on my own measurements this is the first laptop I've had with a 240 Hertz screen visually I can't say there are any differences looking at this 240 Hertz sharp panel compared to other 144 Hertz laptops I've tested recently I've tested color gamut with the spider 5 and we're looking at 95% of srgb 69% of ntsc and 75% of Adobe RGB so pretty decent results for a gaming laptop at 100% brightness in the center I measured the panel at 343 mitts with a 860 to 1 contrast ratio so overall above-average compared to others meaning it doesn't look like there are any obvious compromises with this 240 Hertz panel viewing angles also looked fine to me on all angles in terms of backlight bleed it was looking pretty good some small imperfections down the bottom in this worst case test but perfectly fine during normal use though this will of course vary between laptops and panels there was a fair bit of screen flex as the lid is on the thinner side and the hinges in the center but overall it felt fairly sturdy when opening I was just able to open the laptop with one finger the hinge wasn't too stiff so this seems to show that there's more weight towards the back in any case I could use it on my lap perfectly stable despite the thin bezel the camera is still found above the display in the center the camera doesn't look great and the microphone sounds about average you can just hear some of the families idle and here's what it sounds like if we hit the fan button the keyboard has three zones of RGB backlighting which can be controlled through the included Oris control center software there are four different effects and the brightness can be adjusted between two levels or turned off if you prefer the software can also be used to change the lighting found on the front left and right corners although you've only got the option of red green blue or off for these the keyboard was good to type with although I did find the smaller error Keys annoying when I needed to use them I personally would have preferred larger arrow keys here's how typing sounded to give you an idea of what to expect there's also a dedicated fan button on the top right which will set the fan speed to maximum and unlike other laptops you don't need any software installed to use it there was only a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard overall it was fairly solid and there were no issues during normal use the touchpad was smooth to the touch and uses precision drivers it clicks down when pushed and there was the usual windows gestures available it's a bit wider than what I'm used to but it worked well and despite the extra width I never found it to get in the way when I needed to use the keyboard fingerprints show up on the matte black surfaces but as they're smooth they're easy to clean off on the left there's an air exhaust vent Gigabit Ethernet port USB 3.1 genuine type-a port micro SD card slot and status LEDs on the right there's a 3.5 millimeter audio combo jack two more USB 3.1 gen1 taipei ports and another air exhaust vent on the back there are two more air exhausts towards the corners then from left to right we've got the power input hdmi 2.0 port mini DisplayPort 1.3 output USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port which also has DisplayPort 1.3 support although 'nor Thunderbolt despite the logo and then Kensington lock on the lid in the center there's the horus logo with a mirrored finish as well as two lines on the side and both the lines and logo light up white wall powered on underneath this heaps of ventilation holes to assist F'lar the two speakers have found towards the front left and right corners and face down they sounded alright for a laptop clearer at higher volumes but not really any bass here's what we're looking at while playing music at maximum volume and the latency one results weren't excellent the bottom panel can be removed easily by taking out 11 screws with a Phillips head screwdriver once inside from left to right we get access to the single 2.5 inch drive bay Wi-Fi card battery to memory slots and 2 m dot 2 slots both of which support nvme and Sadam powering the laptop is a 60 to 1 hour battery and with a full charge and just watching youtube videos with the screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled I was able to use it for 1 hour and 47 minutes this lower result was caused by the RT X 2070 graphics being in use the entire time you don't have the option of using the Intel integrated graphics here with Optimus despite this there's still no g-sync however this does mean we should see higher performance when compared against a laptop with equivalent specs that uses Optimus while playing The Witcher 3 with medium settings and invidious battery boost set to 30fps the battery lasted for 58 minutes all up however with 12 percent charge left the frame rate dropped to 5 fps and was no longer playable the AI feature doesn't work while in battery power there as we'll see later it didn't help much anyway I'll also note that I never saw the battery discharged while the 231 power brick was plugged in before we get into the thermal testing I need to briefly talk about gigabytes new AI feature that comes with their new laptops it's been updated to include three modes AI edge and two cloud options ai download and ai download and upload ai edge processes data locally to make the best decisions in terms of what to change like power limits and clocks while the a iCloud settings get data from Microsoft as you are the download only option is new and rather than sending your data to the cloud to improve the service it only downloads profiles to help it run better the download and upload one on the other hand will submit data though all tests had a I disabled except where explicitly mentioned the Auris control center software allows you to choose between five levels of CPU power and two for the GPU the CPU settings boost to the maximum TDP between these levels while GPU level zero is stock and level one boosts the core clock by 140 megahertz and memory by 70 megahertz any time you press the fan button on the keyboard to boost the fan speed GPU mert one is automatically engaged overclocking the graphics for the purposes of this video when maximum fan speed is mentioned I'm running the CPU at level four for the highest limit and GPU at level one while it default stock settings I'm running the CPU at level two and GPU at level zero the large air intake vent on the bottom should help out when we test with the cooling pad the rubber feet also seemed to be angled such that they block the hot air being exhausted out the back from coming straight back into the fans so cooler air should only be pulled in from the front there are also quite a few heat pipes here and some are shared between the processor and graphics so a change in one component will affect the other for instance if the CPU gets hot the graphics will be affected as a result thermal testing was completed with an ambient temperature of 21 degrees Celsius expect different results in different environments there's a lot of data here CPU temperatures are shown by the blue bars and GPU temperatures are shown by the green bars we're looking at combined CPU and GPU load here so both are fully loaded as a worst case the gaming tests towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing watchdogs to as I find it to use a good amount of combined processor and graphics resources the stress tests were tested by running the aida64 CPU stress test and heav'n GPU benchmark at the same time to fully load the system this isn't meant to show typical performance these are worst-case results which you can use to compare with my other videos the idle temperatures down the bottom are looking fine let's start with the stress tests at stock the CPU is thermal throttling at 96 degrees Celsius while the GPU was thermal throttling at 92 even with the minus 0.15 volt under bolt to the CPU when not seeing changes to temperature however we'll see how clock speeds were affected in the next graph if we max out the fan the GPU temperatures drop back to 86 they're hot were in first still lists it as thermal throttling with the CPU under multiplied to the CPU is now thermal throttling intermittently rather than constantly and if we add on the thermal take massive 20 cooling pad the CPU temperature drops by 9 degrees though no change in temperatures to the GPU most likely due to the overclock applied from the max fan button moving up to the gaming results again there was thermal throttling with the fan at default speed I'll also note that for the gaming tests I'm under bolting the CPU and GPU rather than just the CPU only in the stress tests I didn't test with the GPU under volt due to reasons anyway in most cases both is still running quite hot the AI settings didn't appear to help in this game I got the same thermals as running the machine it's topped with default fan speed in the past the AI would control the fan speed in this case it didn't touch it and the fan speed remained unchanged resulting in the temperatures we've got here the best results are seen right up the top when the fan is a maximum CPU and GPU are under bolted and the cooling pad is in use these are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown if we start with the stress tests down the bottom we can see the GPU is down clocking quite a bit to keep cool same with the CPU with the minus 0.15 volt CPU under volt we can boost the average clock speed by 450 megahertz over all six calls simply by boosting the fan speed we almost see a similar improvement to CPU performance but also to the graphics as this helps reduce the thermal throttling now with the CPU under multiplied in combination with the fans maxed out we're basically reaching the full 4.0 gigahertz all core turbo boost speed of the I 790 750 H CPU with the cooling pad added despite thermal throttling still being reported on the GPU as we saw before and the CPU is now solid at 4 gigahertz which I think is a nice result in the gaming tests we can see the clock speed increase with the GPU Wonderbolts as this helps reduce the thermal throttling taking place the CPU Wonderbolt is also seeing us get pretty much full performance even without resorting to boosting the fan speed which is good because as you'll hear soon it gets pretty loud the AI settings like we saw in the temperatures are performing similar to stock settings again this seems to be due to the I feature not controlling the fan speed for some reason so hopefully that will be updated in the future I'm pretty sure the old model did it up the top we're getting the best results in terms of clock speed with the CPU and GPU under bolted and cooling pattern use as this was the only test the GPU was no longer thermal throttling the clock speed is the highest out of all results these are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any GPU load as mentioned earlier there are five different levels in the Auris control center software that controls CPU TDP so these are the clock speeds were able to achieve with each with the 62 month limit at level 4 early just below the full 4.0 gigahertz boost speed of the 97 50 H the undervolt gets us all the way there these are the temperatures for the same tests just shown as the TDP increases resulting in higher clock speed so - the temperatures the undervolt provided a massive improvement here of about 15 degrees while also performing the best here are the average CPU TTP's from these tests so the under bolt puts us around the power usage of level 1 with similar temperatures but with 500 megahertz of extra performance over all six calls to demonstrate how this translates into performance I've got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here there's no difference in single core as that's not enough to trigger throttling very even in this best case with the CPU under volt and no restrictions I was saying similar scores to the 8750 H I will be comparing these two CPUs in a future video though so make sure you subscribe for that here's what we're looking at in Cinebench are 20 until I have more data from other laptops I'll keep including results from birth here are the GPU and the clock speeds while under a graphical Earnie stress test just as a reminder the GPU 0 setting in the Auris control center software is default while GPU 1 / clocks the call by 140 megahertz with my crappy undervolt I was getting similar speeds to default and when we checked the temperatures the thermal throttling was removed with this though it only lowers by 1 degree under this workload given its thermal throttling at both levels 0 & 1 with the same temperature the clock speeds in the previous graph are likely not accurate it does seem a bit strange that even with the fan maxed out the GPU is thermal throttling under GPU only stress test but I suppose it is the full fat 27 t and this is the first laptop I've had with it so I don't really know what the norm is there as for the external temperatures will actually be putting your hands at idle it was about average in the low 30s while gaming it gets to the mid 40s in the center a little warm that definitely not hot feeling with the stress tests running it's a little cooler with noticeably cooler WASD Keys as for the fan noise produced by the laptop I'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle that was quiet however the fan was making this sort of pulsating noise with the stress tests running or gaming it was about average compared to other gaming laptops I've tested but when we hit the fan button to max it out it gets very loud normally I like at least having the option of raising fan speed however in this case there doesn't seem to be granular control I wasn't able to adjust it like in previous models so it seems to be all or nothing in terms of fan speed in general the Auris 15 XA runs fairly hot at least in my top-end configuration here with full 2070 and 9750 age I'd expect others to run a bit cooler even with under volting we didn't really improve temperatures by that much however this did significantly improve the performance it's worth noting that we're able to boost the power limits over the CPU specified 45 watt TDP rating there many laptops don't give us the option and perform worse as a result due to power madelung though the trade-off to this increased performance is of course higher temperatures so it's good the Auris has equipped with such powerful fans the only downside of those powerful fans is that at this time they don't seem to give you the ability to customise the fan speed like with other models hopefully that changes in the future in most cases once on the voltage we're able to get the full 4.0 gigahertz all quarter bow speed from the 97 50 H CPU even under worst-case combined CPU and GPU load which I think is pretty good given there are other laptops that cannot hit full boost speed under these tasks in my tests they I didn't seem to do much so I would just stick to under vaulting and if you can put up with the extra fan noise boosting the fan speed also finally let's take a look at some gaming benchmarks I've tested these games with these Nvidia drivers and old windows updates to date installed the drivers are a little behind but they're the latest gigabyte currently offer I've also tested with the fan maxed out with CPU at setting 4 and GPU at 1 so raised CPU TDP and graphics overclocked battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode and not in multiplayer mode as it's easy to consistently reproduce the test run the purple bars show the results with ray tracing disabled while the green bars show RT X on the RT X results weren't great at Ultra and high settings though it was usable at high for a game like this I want my framerate third and RTX off at Ultra settings both looks and runs better than our txon at low settings apex legends was tested with either all settings at maximum or all settings at the lowest possible values as it doesn't have predefined setting presets the results in this game were a little lower than I expected based on the specs but it's running well enough even maxed out while minimum settings boosted FPS by 30% farcry new dawn was tested with the built-in benchmark not too much to say here above 60 fps at Ultra settings is good oh and it was coming out ahead of the 2080 max-q in the razor blade I recently reviewed at every setting level this may be due to the slightly better CPU though fortnight was tested with the replay feature and while I have to regularly refresh the replay jutsu updates I test in the same area this game doesn't need powerful hardware to run so even with epic settings we're seeing 120 FPS averages with low settings actually able to make good use of the 240 Hertz display however which is another well optimised game and was tested in the practice range as other players but and even different maps in actual gameplay affect the framerate and this allows for consistent testing at low and medium the 300 FPS frame cap is hid while epic settings still played extremely well shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark the results were pretty good just a couple of FPS behind the 2080 mxq in the razor blade i recently tested and actually ahead at lower settings possibly due to the higher clocked 9750 h cpu csgo was tested using the u Etica LEF PS benchmark and like always high frame rates were coming out of this test this is the sort of game the 240 Hertz screen would be more useful for if you're playing competitively Rainbow six siege was tested with the built-in benchmark and in general is a game I found a benefit from invidious nuturing architecture I'll also note this was another test where low settings were getting frame rates that would be well matched with the 240 Hertz screen pub G was tested using the replay feature and even at Ultra settings almost 100 FPS was possible in this test with lower settings getting us closer to 130 FPS which seems to be about as well as this game performs on laptop hardware I don't think I've ever seen it much above 140 fps in my test run assassin's creed Odyssey was tested with the built-in benchmark and I was seeing some fairly high frame rates at the lowest setting levels when compared with laptops I've tested this is my first 9750 H machine and this does seem to be a CPU heavy game so it may be helping out a bit there dota 2 was tested playing in the middle lane with an average amount of action going on and it was running very smoothly without any problems at all at maximum settings it was still performing very well at 150 FPS with closer to 200 at lowest settings also possible watchdogs 2 was a resource intensive game there with the solid 30fps it plays just fine to me so hitting the 60fps sweet spot at Ultra on this laptop was quite a nice result The Witcher 3 was running well with her works disabled and it played perfectly fine for me even with ultra settings 90 FPS with 64 the 1% low works well and while you can get higher FPS at lower settings I don't think this game benefits much from it and would prefer the higher visual quality with high settings I've tested more games in the dedicated gaming benchmark video check the card in the top right corner if you want to see more results let's also take a look at how this config you've the Auris 15 compares with other laptops to see how it stacks up use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times with different drivers in battlefield 5 I've tested Ultra settings and I've got the Auris 15 up the top in red and it was doing quite well only coming in behind the 90 120 80 max Q laptops I've tested it's worth remembering this is my first 9750 H laptop test so all others here have the 8750 H here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark and the Auris was doing well here coming in at second place only behind the associate 701 which is ahead of the other 2080 max Q laptops Judah G sync these are the results from shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at highest settings and in this test the Auris was a little ahead of the Alienware m15 which isn't too surprising as I had some thermal throttling on the graphics and that one this is the first time I've tested a laptop with RT x 2070 graphics and for the most part it seems to be slotting in about where I expected between the 20 70 max Q and 20 80 max Q though it does of course depend on the game in some it was beating the 20 80 max Q machines overall we're seeing pretty good performance it's worth noting that as there was no Nvidia Optimus here the display is connected straight to the Nvidia graphics meaning we should be seeing higher performer this does come at the expense of battery life it's a trade-off I've got a video linked in the description covering this topic further if you're after more information now let's see how the under vaulting in AI settings actually help improve gaming performance far cry 5 was tested using the built-in benchmark at 1080p with ultra settings down the bottom I tested with both the CPU and GPU maxed out in the Auris control center software the only difference was one had the fan at default speed and the other at maximum this simple change gave 9 percent higher FPS as it helps reduce thermal throttling I'll note that the AI settings and themselves do not modify fan speed as covered earlier though I think they should that I tested with the fan maxed out to try and show best case performance with them though as we can see it's basically the same as not using it at least in this test the results up the top with the manual under volting gave us the best performance now for the benchmarking tools I've tested Heaven Valley and superposition from Unigine as well as fire strike times by portroyal and VR mark from 3d mark just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results I've used crystal disk mark to test the storage and the 512 gig m2 nvme SSD that was installed was giving nice raids and alright writes the two terabyte hard drive was performing about as expected for a 5400 rpm hard drive unfortunately I couldn't test the microSD slot as I don't have any cards that size for updated pricing check the links in the description as prices will change over time at the time of recording in the US the XA version with these specs is going for two thousand one hundred and seventy five US dollars while the 8th gen model is over two hundred dollars less meanwhile here in Australia it's going for 3300 Australian dollars so what do you guys think about the Auris 15x a gaming laptop overall I think it's checking a lot of boxes but as always nothing is perfect it's well-built the chassis is on the smaller side for a 15-inch laptop allowing it to have nice thin bezels and it's got good specs which allow it to perform well in games there's no Nvidia Optimus so while gaming performance will be improved battery life suffers as a result that's the trade-off it does get warm but it's good good performance behind that along with some powerful fans to help with cooling though I would have liked to have seen granular fan control considering how loud maximum speed gets the big opening on the bottom was great for helping air flow especially with the cooling pad I heard more companies go this way in the future once under bolted even under worst case combined CPU and GPU load still being able to hit the full 4 gigahertz turbo boost speed of the 97 50 H was pretty impressive despite the temperatures for more than two hundred US dollars more money over the 8th gen version I honestly think I just get the slightly cheaper 8th gen model I don't think you're getting $200 of value going from the 8750 H to 97 50 H at least in this laptop and the 240 Hertz screen is realistically only beneficial in eSports titles so depends on the types of games you'll be playing let me know what you guys thought about the Auris 15 gaming laptop down in the comments and if you're new to the channel get subscribed for future tech videos like this one\n"