Aorus stated that they are centered on hardcore gamers, whatever they are. But below, its principal target appears to be on bigger numbers. The Aorus X3 Plus isn’t any greasy, but crams in a GTX 970M with 6GB of GDDR5 and squishes 5,760,000 into its 13.9 -inch display, to get a resolution of 3200×1800. Many games will battle to take advantage of it, although the monitor is stunning, Windows 8.1’s improved scaling feature resulting in superbly sharp text.
The fan control application generally keeps them in check, and you’ll wish to couple this using a surround sound headset anyway. As it is a laptop that’s to be expected, although the keyboard doesn’t possess a lot of important travel. The key on our review test thought as if it were bedding into mud in the place of pressing a micro-switch, which we hope isn’t an omen of what to come, but where the X3 plus really allows itself along is, in its trackpad. It seems very exclusive – as though the monitor from the stumped smartphone ever endured welded itself for the entrance of the casing – but seems slick and difficult to use the moment you start looking to aim or transfer files about, failing to respond to a few of our sinks.
Those files will move pretty easily, as inside a set of 256GB SSDs mixed as a 512GB RAID array along with the X3 plus hide 16GB of RAM. It has a slight reduction in running times, with the warning that, if among the devices fails, you’ll lose your entire info, although presented the styles of recent activities it’s not just a large amount of storage truly. SSDs are very reliable, so we’ll do not be concerned about it and take the increased responsiveness.
The (admittedly rather demanding) Metro 2033 benchmark managed just over 13fps at maximum settings, while Shadow of Mordor put out a more respectable average of 27.6fps. Nice. But not 60. Drop down to 1080p, however, and the problems evaporate. On a 14-inch screen at normal viewing distance (you’ll want a table for gaming on, this thing gets hot both underneath and on top), the higher framerate makes a bigger difference than the greater resolution, the screen upscale nicely, and it squeezed almost 73fps from BioShock Infinite on the highest settings. Elsewhere, the X3+ is weighty but slender, its contoured aluminum case proving that black is very slimming. Huge vents at the rear channel makes the heat from the GPU and the Haswell i7 away, or at least try to, the fans becoming very noisy at their maximum, ruining the sound from side-firing speakers that were never that great to begin with.
Verdict
Even though the fans are quite noisy, Aorus X3 Plus provides great screen, great components, great performance, great portability – there’s lots to like about the X3 Plus. It is definitely one of the best gaming laptops to date.
