Bo Moore
The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is the company’s latest laptop designed for the upper crust of gamers-on-the-go. It comes to market with your choice of an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 (an RTX 5070 Ti version will be available later), while prices start at $3,099 and go up from there. Paired with its Intel Core 9 Ultra processor, it offers top-tier performance, gamer-friendly looks, and a great display. It’s not the laptop to choose for “thin and light,” but if you don’t care about that, it has a lot to offer.
Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 – Design and Features
The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is a flashy laptop with plenty of RGB and decorations to suit your fancy. Like many of the 16-inch launch models we’ve seen since Nvidia debuted its RTX 50-series laptop GPUs last week, it features a 2,560 x 1,600 OLED display with a boxier 16:10 aspect ratio than a normal widescreen laptop, and plenty of horsepower under its hood.
And AI, it has that too – and it wastes no time letting you know it’s there. Within minutes of booting it up for the first time, a notification was popping up from my “GiMate” assistant, letting me know that I should disable the Nvidia graphics card for better performance. AI is also interwoven with its configuration software, but more on that later.
The laptop is available in two configurations for now, separated by your choice of an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 and about $1,200. Both versions come with the following specs, apart from the 5090 version which adds a second NVMe SSD for 2TB of total storage (you can add a second drive to the 5080 variant on your own if you’re tech-inclined):
- Display: 2560 x 1600 (16:10), OLED, 500-nits
- Refresh Rate: 240Hz
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 (Mobile)
- VRAM: 16GB
- Memory: 32GB LPDDR5 – 8000 MT/s
- Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD
- Connectivity: WiFi 7, 1G Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.4
- Ports: 2 x Type-A support USB3.2 Gen2, 1 x Type-C with Thunderbolt 5 (USB4, DisplayPort 2.1, and PD 3.0), 1 x Type-C with Thunderbolt 4 (USB4, DisplayPort 1.4 and PD 3.0), 1 x HDMI 2.1, 1 x MicroSD (UHS-II), 1 x Audio Combo Jack
- Audio: 4 x built-in speakers, Dolby Atmos with Smart Amp, built-in microphone
- Webcam: 1080p, Windows Hello Support
- Battery: 99wHr
- Dimensions (LxWxH): 14.05 x 10 x 0.9 x 1.14 inches
- Weight: 5.51 pounds
Both models are expensive, but that goes with the territory when it comes to flagship gaming laptops right after a new launch. The RTX 5080 version I received to test costs $3,099. The RTX 5090 version will set you back $4,299. There’s also a larger Aorus Master 18 version of each that swaps the OLED screen for mini-LED and includes 2TB of storage by default. The RTX 5090 version there also bumps total system memory up to 64GB, which really isn’t bad for only $100 more than the 16-inch version ($4,399). The Aorus Master 18 with the RTX 5080 is a bit more marked up at $3,299, but at this kind of price, an extra hundo probably isn’t going to be the big decision-maker.
The Aorus Master is certainly designed to catch your eye and tempt a purchase in other ways. It’s an RGB showcase with an illuminated falcon logo on the lid, a wraparound 3D light bar, and even a small RGB projector that beams Aorus branding down onto your desk. The keyboard is also RGB, but it’s not per-key, which is disappointing at this price. Instead, it is broken into three zones and includes seven translucent keys that include WASD as well as Q, E, and R, with bright light passthrough. Even without per-key customization, it’s more than a little showy.
Everything but the lid is made from plastic. Functionally, it doesn’t make a huge difference, though an aluminum frame would be far better matched to its high price (and would help dissipate heat at the same time) and would have made it feel a bit more premium. The lid is very nice, however, and has a ripple pattern creating a wave pattern across its surface. It’s microtextured with such fine detail that you can only see it when it catches the light just so and feels smooth to the touch.
In fact, I first realized it wasn’t bead-blasted purely from sound. It reminds me of the zip you get when you drag your nail across an old-school holographic Trapper Keeper. This quality makes it impervious to fingerprints in normal use, which immediately gives it a one-up on normal metal lids which tend to look grungy after a handful of uses.
The laptop isn’t thin and it’s not light. Unlike the Razer Blade 16 which checks off both of those boxes while toting an RTX 5090, the Aorus Master is much more to expectation, measuring 0.9 inches at its thinnest and 1.14 inches at the thickest. It also weighs 5.5 pounds. Compare that to the Blade 16’s 0.69-inch front lip and 4.7 pound weight: it doesn’t seem like much on paper, but it’s immediately noticeable. Those small dimensional changes make the difference between “wow, this is surprisingly thin and light” and “yup, that’s definitely a gaming laptop.”
That extra space has its benefits, though. The Aorus Master offers both upgradeable memory and storage. There are two memory slots, allowing you to increase its capacity up to 64GB or swap out to a set with faster clock speeds. There are two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, so you can add extra storage without needing to reinstall Windows and drivers to get running again. Only the pre-populated slot supports PCI-e 5.0, however, so you’ll be limited to PCI-e Gen 4 for anything you’d like to add without formatting.
It also allows Gigabyte to go full-on with its other components. This machine is packing an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU with a full, 175-watt RTX 5080 (or other 50-series GPU). The processor is fast, topping out at 5.4GHz to maximize in-game fps and offers 24 cores (eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores) cores for great multitasking performance and workload efficiency. It’s enough to make you wonder why Gigabyte only outfitted the laptop with 5,600 MHz memory when higher speeds would seem like the better match. The Razer Blade 16 uses 8,000MHz memory, for example, and higher memory speeds can directly translate into high fps.
To keep this hardware cool, Gigabyte has opted for a dual fan solution with densely packed, 158-fin fans. These come in new housing that’s supposed to channel airflow better and also reduce their overall noise. It’s still a gaming laptop, however, which means you should plan on hearing those fans quite prominently when you’re running games. For web browsing and productivity use, it features a 0dB mode that relies on passive cooling when the components aren’t generating as much heat. Like the Razer Blade 16, it features a large vapor chamber that covers more than 50% of the motherboard for improved performance overall.
The keyboard and trackpad are both decent. The keys have a generous amount of travel at 1.7mm and good tactility to avoid typos. I didn’t find them to be especially mushy, but have experienced crisp typing experiences, such as the one on the Lenovo Legion 9i. Still, it gets the job done in a very familiar 75% layout that balances productivity and gaming performance.
The trackpad is also fine. It measures just over 5 inches by 4 inches and has a nice glide when swiping your finger across it. The integrated buttons work well, though I did find that left and right clicks could get a little confused the further up the trackpad you tried to make them. This is something that you get used to over time and is part of the process of learning a laptop. But taken together, the input experience is good but not particularly special in any way.
If you’re planning on using the laptop for work or taking online classes, you can rest assured that it comes with a built-in 1080p webcam. In proper lighting conditions, it can look decent and offers a crisp, if slightly over-sharpened image. If you have a bright window behind you or are taking meetings in low lighting, it struggles to balance lighting and noise/grain in the image. There is no privacy shade, so you will have to manually turn it on and off if that’s something you look for.
Audio quality is pretty typical for a gaming laptop. It uses four speakers total and they did a good job of getting loud enough to play games on, but their tiny size prevented them from sounding full for explosions or the bass register in music. You can use them if you need to, but a good gaming headset is going to be the better choice for audio quality.
The Aorus Master 16 sports a 99WHr battery, which is the largest that can be used in a laptop currently. In our Procyon Office Battery Life test, it was able to run for seven hours and 49 minutes. With Advanced Optimus, Nvidia’s system for automatically swapping between the RTX 5080 and the integrated GPU, it meant that the test ran in its entirety without the full-powered graphics card turning on. When actually playing games, I averaged around two hours depending on how demanding the game was. RTX 50-series GPUs really seem to be coming into their own for gaming on battery.
Finally, for connectivity, it offers a decent array of ports to connect different peripherals and accessories. On the left side, it has a gigabit ethernet port, a full size HDMI 2.1, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and a USB Type-C port capable of both charging and video, as well as a dedicated charging port for its included power bright. On the right is another USB Type-A and Type-C, an audio combo jack, and a microSD card reader. Size has its benefits.
Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 – GiMate Software
In what’s sure to be a trend this year, the Aorus Master 16 features a software suite that’s integrated with AI. It offers all of the usual functionality, including setting your performance modes and fan settings, as well as customizing the laptop’s RGB. For meetings, there are AI clarity enhancements as well as versions of the Windows Studio setting to blur your background and add artificial eye-tracking, as well as a privacy-enhancing feature that can turn off your screen when you’ve stepped away.
The most important feature that it offers is that it can intelligently control the performance of your system based on what you’re doing. When you load a game, it’s smart enough to know to use the RTX 5080 instead of the processor’s integrated graphics chip, and then to switch that back over when you’re done to save on battery life. There’s also a chatbot that you can engage with to get insights into your system, adjust settings, and converse with on troubleshooting, learning more about what settings do within Windows, and more. It’s essentially a local version of ChatGPT that knows about the specifics of your system.
While all of this is cool, it’s all pretty base level. Automatic performance switching is a nice feature, but if you’ve gamed on a laptop before, you already know to switch to its high performance mode. That the AI can detect a big workload also isn’t all that impressive, and swapping modes when it does isn’t something that requires “AI.” The chatbot can be fun, but unless you’re wet behind the ears when it comes to Windows gaming, it really feels like more of a novelty.
But we knew this was going to happen. AI is the trend of the moment and I expect most big laptop brands will follow suit with systems of their own. Use it if you like or ignore it if you don’t, both are viable options.
Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 – Performance
The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is in a class where performance is rightfully king, and whether or not it’s going to earn your dollars is going to depend a lot on what you’re coming from, what you’re hoping to achieve, and how much you have to spend.
Before sharing performance numbers, it’s worth mentioning again that we’ve recently upgraded our testing methodology to better assess new technologies, rendering methods, and the performance demands of current games. Because of this, much of our prior testing data doesn’t align and we’ll be building up our data set over time. For this review, I’ll be comparing it to the Razer Blade 16 in the performance charts, but I was also able to do some testing with an RTX 4080 laptop on loan to remark upon in the text.
All of our tests are conducted at maximum settings. Upscaling is frequently used and is set to Quality at 1080p and Balanced at 1440p (or 1200p and 1600p in this case). These settings are also included in the charts.
Beginning with synthetic tests, we can see that the Aorus Master 16 performs quite well compared to the Razer Blade 16, despite the fact that it is running an RTX 5080 instead of an RTX 5090. Between the two systems, the Razer Blade is running an AMD Ryzen CPU, while the Aorus Master 16 is running an Intel Core Ultra CPU. This accounts for some of the differences here. However, it’s also worth remembering that the Razer Blade 16 is power capped at 160 watts and frequently doesn’t reach that limit, whereas the Aorus Master 16 can dynamically boost to the full 175 watt rating of the RTX 5080, pulling in higher performance.
What I find even more interesting is that in anecdotal testing against my end-of-last-gen Falcon Northwest DRX RTX 4080 system, the results are almost all close enough that you can chalk it up to margin of error. It’s worth noting that the DRX system has a different processor, so the comparison isn’t exactly apples to apples. Still, the 40-series impresses. That doesn’t take away from the comparative performance of the 5080 versus the 5090, however, especially looking at that Night Raid score and its performance in real-world games.
Gaming benchmarks are just as revealing. Here we can see that at 1200p, the Aorus Master 16 outperforms the Razer Blade 16 with its power-capped RTX 5090. That’s shocking. At the same time, when I ran some of these tests against the Falcon Northwest DRX, the two went back and forth offering very similar performance in these games and beyond. The Blade 16 still pulls out some wins in a wider selection of playtests, averaging 62 fps in Black Myth: Wukong while the others hovered closer to 50, but there’s a serious value consideration here.
Now, an important caveat does need to be given regarding the Razer Blade 16. It intentionally trades performance for portability, so it’s competing with a handicap. If you don’t care about it being as thin and light as possible, another RTX 5090 laptop may very well be a better choice. I’ll be testing exactly that in the weeks to come.
Another important consideration is fan noise. A loud laptop can draw unwanted attention and the Aorus Master 16, unfortunately, falls into that camp. Essentially, anytime you’re gaming, its fans will be running full throttle, and it’s loud enough to disturb a partner trying to watch a show in the room with you. I certainly wouldn’t play games in a library with it unless I could move well away from other people. Compared to the Blade 16, it’s much louder, which illustrates the competing visions for these products held between Razer and Gigabyte.
Here’s the thing: Nvidia hasn’t been shy about tying the 50-series to its AI capabilities versus pure native rendering performance. Though the RTX 5080 performs disappointingly close to the RTX 4080, this disappears when you’re playing a game that supports multi-frame generation. While “fake frames” have become a bit of a meme, the fact is that when it works, it’s pretty amazing and dramatically improves performance. This varies game to game based upon how well it handles latency. Alan Wake 2, for example, tends to feel a bit more laggy at higher multiplier settings while Cyberpunk 2077 does not. With this technology and others, like neural shaders, coming to future games, there’s an argument to be made about buying into these future technologies. But, you’re buying on a promise while Nvidia and game developers work to add support to new and existing games.
When it comes to living with the laptop on a daily basis, it offered snappy performance for just about anything I threw at it, including photo and video editing. I tend to prefer a laptop that’s significantly lighter since I carry the laptop throughout my whole day; however, if you’re already used to carrying a gaming laptop, this won’t feel very different. But, I would highly encourage anyone considering this to purchase a separate GaN charger for anytime you don’t plan to play games. Its charging brick is big and heavy, and carried with the laptop brings the total weight to more than seven pounds. It was enough to leave me with a sore shoulder at the end of the day.
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