 Lately the high-end gaming laptop arena has been getting a little crowded with features like desktop class GPUs, NVMe, solid-state drives, and even freaking water-cooling docks. So it's not surprising that today's entrant into the fray, the Aorus X7 Pro V5, tries to set itself apart with features like mobile SLI and HDMI 2.0, but does it live up to the billing? Stay tuned to find out. Corsair claims unrivaled comfort and universal compatibility on its new Void Surround headset, featuring a genuine Dolby 7.1 headphone USB adapter. Click the link in the video description to learn more. The first thing I noticed about the X7 was how thin it is. With a height of only two and a half centimeters, even with the lid closed, it's pretty damn small. At seven pounds, however, it's hard to call the X7 light, but the slimmer profile does at least offer a little more portability than some of the behemoths we've had roll through our office lately. We'll start our physical tour with the top, which features a plain black finish, except for the Aorus logo, which lights up when you open the lid. The bottom is fairly understated as well, with not much going on except for rubber feet and some ventilation slots. Things get more interesting when we move around to the sides, though, with the right side featuring both HDMI 2.0 and a mini display port for flexibility if you're attaching additional displays, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a more standard USB 3.0 port, and an SD card reader that connects via PCI Express. The HDMI 2.0 support is especially nice if you want 4K at 60 Hertz and can't use a display port cable. Moving to the left side, we see a Kensington lock slot, Killer Gigabit LAN port, a second HDMI port that allows you to support two external monitors in NVIDIA surround, a VGA port for older displays, another USB 3.0 port, and jacks for your microphone and headphones. The back features one last USB 3.0 port and a DC input for the included power brick, as well as some additional ventilation for all the goodies inside. When you open the lid, you'll see a 17.3 inch 1080p 75 Hertz IPS display with G-Sync support, a webcam, which we're filming this on right now, a pair of unremarkable sounding speakers directly below the screen, and a backlit Aorus logo power button. The keyboard is backlit with adjustable brightness white lights that can be turned off completely if you so desire, and features 30 key rollover. The keys themselves are pretty standard for chiclet keys, and you also get a set of programmable macro keys on the far left-hand side. The touchpad is quite glossy compared to the rest of the chassis and features a nice Aorus logo. There's also tactile bumps on the bottom bit, which make identifying the clicking area quite a bit easier, which I liked. What I didn't care for though was how the touchpad felt a tad too grippy to my finger, which got caught on it a couple times when I was trying to scroll. It just feels kind of weird. Under the hood, you get an unlocked Skylake Core i7-6820HK processor, 32 gigs of DDR4 memory that's upgradable to 64, two Nvidia GTX 970M GPUs in SLI, giving you both the benefits and issues that come with that, 500 gigabytes of NVMe solid-state storage on two drives in RAID 0, an additional 1 terabyte mechanical hard drive, and Bluetooth with wireless AC adapters. The battery is lithium polymer that's inside a softer package that you can't access from the exterior, so it's not the easiest thing to replace. Interestingly, there's also a dedicated hardware encoder for AverMedia that is supposed to take the load off of your CPU and GPU while streaming, so you won't lose as much performance. Getting into testing, we started out by running through Cinebench, Crysis 3, and Tomb Raider, putting up the X7 against our Sega NP9870U2G, which you can check out in more detail up here, or 02? I don't know. We were interested to see how a couple of 970Ms in SLI would do against a fully-fledged desktop 980, and the answer is pretty well. The X7 beat out the Sega in both Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider by small margins, and scored well above the 75 Hertz frame rate of our screen, even with the settings cranked way up, which is definitely ideal. Cinebench was a different story, as this is a more CPU-bound benchmark, and it saw the Sega win by about 24% with its desktop-class Skylake i7, but the X7 managed a still very respectable 704 points. We were also able to get a stable overclock of 4.0 GHz on our CPU, and a plus 100 MHz offset on our two GPUs without playing with any voltages. Although the system ran a bit warm on our Skybox load test at stock, with both the CPU and GPU getting up to 84 degrees, overclocking only heated things up by about one or two degrees. Regardless of whether or not we overclocked, though, the fans were very loud during gaming. You might want to use a pair of headphones, specifically noise-canceling headphones, if you want to game on this thing. So what's our conclusion? Considering it beat out our desktop-class GTX 980-based Sega, and is going to cost less when it comes out in mid-March, the value proposition looks pretty darn good, especially when you consider the additional bells and whistles, like USB 3.1 Type-C, HDMI 2.0 support, G-Sync, the hardware encoder, and I believe the Sega doesn't have an NVMe drive. At between $2,400 and $2,700, depending on the configuration, the X7 Pro V5 could be a pretty compelling option. Thanks for watching, guys. 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