While the desktop sector has been enjoying Coffee-Lake for months now, Intel's new CPU series will finally be launched on notebooks in April 2018. In addition to classic quad cores, which, like in the previous Kaby Lake series, can process a maximum of eight threads in parallel (Core i5), the manufacturer is releasing various six-core chips, which may process up to 12 threads simultaneously via hyper-threading (Core i7 & Core i9).

The Gigabyte Aero 15X v8 is equipped with what is probably going to be the most popular Coffee-Lake chipset, the Core i7-8750H, which, like its more expensive brother, the Core i7-8850H, contains 9 MB of L3 cache and is defined to have a TDP of 45 W. The Hexa-Core CPU is accompanied by 16 GB of DDR4-RAM (1x 16 GB @ 2.666 MHz). Since the second slot is still free, you can easily upgrade to 32 GB down the road.

As with its predecessor, the new Aero 15X is equipped with the Max-Q version of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070. Our configuration came with Windows 10, preinstalled on a 512 GB M.2 NVMe SSD. Sadly, a 2.5-inch drive bay is not present on the Aero 15X. Gigabyte prefers to use the available space to increase the battery capacity that is now at 94 Wh, is well dimensioned and should lead to a great battery life. Other highlights include the display. Depending on your configuration, your device could be equipped with either a full HD panel with 144 Hz refresh rate or a UHD panel that according to Gigabyte covers the entire AdobeRGB color space.

There is definitely no lack of competition in terms of 15-inch laptops. Other manufacturers offer similarly slim notebooks as well, be it MSI with the GS63VR or Acer with the Predator Triton 700. The Asus ROG Zephyrus M GM501 appears to be the toughest competitor in this field, featuring a Core i7-8750H, as well as a slightly more powerful regular GeForce GTX 1070.