 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of something a little bit on the different side. Well I'm not really unboxing it, it's here in the boxes here. They've already been unified. But anyway, this is the Aorus X7, which is one of the most interesting gaming notebooks that I've ever had the pleasure of checking out. So let's start with the general specs. It's got a Haswell 4th Gen Core i7 4700HQ, that's a quad core that's clocked at 2.4 GHz nominal, and up to 3.4 GHz with a single core running at maximum boost. It has 16 GB of RAM and is configurable with up to 32 GB of RAM, so it has 4 slots. It has dual GTX 765M 2GB graphics cards and a 17.3 inch LCD display. So that's 1080p, it's 8 ms response time, LED backlit, all that good stuff. For storage it has two 128 GB M-SATA SSDs running in RAID 0 and a 1 TB 5400 RPM drive, so that is a 2.5 inch standard drive. So it's up to 3 storage devices. It uses wireless 802.11ac and it has killer branded gigabit onboard LAN, there we go, so that has their prioritization engine and all that good stuff. And then finally it has a 73.26 Watt hour lithium polymer battery. Fascinating Linus you might say, that's an awful lot of specs, but they're not that amazing. Well they are a little bit amazing when you consider that they are crammed into a 22.9 mm thick chassis. So that's only marginally thicker than the P34G that I liked so much, and it's actually quite similar to the GS70 from MSI. It's 2.9 kg, making it lighter than your standard gaming notebook, but not super light due to the sheer size of it and the all aluminum construction. It's got, well I guess we'll do a bit of a port tour here. So on the left hand side it's got the aforementioned gigabit ethernet, HDMI, a first HDMI port, VGA, one USB 3.0 port, and headphone and microphone ports. You've also got a speaker grill here on the left hand side. On the front you've got a whole lot of nothing. Then on the right hand side you find another speaker grill, an SD card reader, two more USB 3.0 ports for a total of three, another HDMI out, and display port out. So that's kind of cool. Moving around to the back we catch a glimpse of one ventilation hole. We've got another ventilation hole, two more USB 2.0 ports, power in, and that pretty much rounds it out. On the top and the bottom you will as normal on a notebook not find a whole lot of I.O. Now the speakers, they're using Auris, I don't even know how to pronounce it, Auris Plus branding. So there are two 2 watt speakers in the front and then there are actually two woofers on the bottom. It in practice sounds much better than most notebooks, but of course here are the speaker ports on the bottom. They're not going to blow your socks off or eliminate the need for a proper desktop speaker system by any stretch of the imagination. And in fact there's one thing that I would have liked to see changed in the audio implementation and that's maybe put the speakers up here instead so that they're somewhat pointed at my ears. I found that if I had my head like on the same plane as the bottom of the notebook that was where the best listening experience could be had. The touchpad is a little bit unique so we can make our way to the inside here and that is that it is a glass touchpad. It is completely smooth which actually would have bothered me not that long ago. I'm used to it now because of smartphones and I think I'd still prefer a frosted glass touchpad, but it tracks well and that's the most important thing and it doesn't actually bother me. It's a bit of a fingerprint magnet but not as bad as I necessarily would have thought. The keyboard is automatically backlit although you can manually override it with function space so you can have off 50% or 100% and it is a chiclet keyboard which is not necessarily my favorite. But as far as chiclet keyboards go, it's about as good as it gets. There is absolutely no flex to the entire keyboard area at all. Again, due to the metal construction of the notebook. So in spite of its size, really really impressed there. It's also got some other cool features so your full complement of keys including properly laid out arrow keys, a full number pad, all the function hotkeys that you could possibly want and finally, programmable macro keys. So there's a color coded G up at the top here and you can use the included utility to program any number of different functionalities to each of the five keys and then you have five different profiles for all of the five keys combined for a total of 25 functions. Not least but definitely last is the fact that the keyboard also supports anti-ghosting so you're not going to have any accidental random triggering of random keys even in a gaming scenario. Oh actually no, the true last thing is that it does have a Windows key lock but that's actually done in software as opposed to being done in hardware which is a little bit of an unusual thing for me to see. Now of course you go okay well it's super slim, it's an SLI gaming notebook but come on Linus, what are the temperatures like? Honestly I am incredibly impressed. At idle we weren't able to measure temperatures that were above normal skin temperature. The thing barely felt warm to the touch. Only around 22 degrees max and it was actually quite quiet. I mean there, my mic is here, the exhaust fan is right here, it's very very quiet at idle. Under load, yeah the fans do start to ramp up a little bit. You can actually control them manually, you can set it up to go okay well no I want 40% fan speed max and there's a couple different things you can do in the software. But under load it did get a little bit louder but what it didn't get was much warmer. Even though this room is only about 18 degrees so it is a little bit on the cold side it is still very impressive to see a dual graphics card gaming notebook deliver temperatures under 27 degrees even directly above where the GPU heat pipes are and that is partly due, well probably entirely due to their unique cooling setup on this thing. So there are two fans here and here at the back you can actually see the intake grills here and then rather than having restrictive exhausts like you would find on most notebooks there are two full sets of exhausts for each of the fans and you can feel the heat really coming out of them. The fans are very effectively cooling it to the point where it doesn't get noticeably warm and this was the hottest spot I could find up here. On the keyboard itself especially towards the bottom it's just barely warm to the touch so that's really really impressive and probably the coolest thing about this notebook so to speak. Alright so who's the competition for a product like this? I'm going to fire up Crysis actually maybe I'll give you guys some idea of what it sounds like under load here. So we'll go ahead and there you go can it run Crysis? Yes absolutely that is maxed out Crysis at 1080p running at about 75 frames per second in a fairly non demanding environment but don't worry that will give you a very playable experience. And that is of course those speakers that are quite loud. There you go anyway so who's the competition for a gaming notebook like this? The obvious ones are going to be the Razer Blade Pro and the MSI GS70. Now the Blade Pro has an offset touchpad that drove me absolutely crazy and regardless of how awesome the display on it might be that is a deal breaker for me. The GS70 is a much more interesting option to me personally and is actually quite comparable to this one. It offers similar storage options, fewer memory slots however only two memory slots but it is in a slightly slimmer form factor. The big difference between the Aorus and the GS70 is on the GPU side. This guy contains two GTX 765 2Gig graphics cards whereas the GS70 contains only one. So I would go as far as to say based on the ID of this overall that is to say the industrial design and the performance. I haven't seen pricing yet though so guys you can check out the link and once this thing is actually available somewhere that will be live. I would say if you're looking for the ultimate thin and relatively light gaming or workstation notebook for maximum bragging rights this actually might just be it. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview of the Aorus X7. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment and let us know how you feel about thin and light gaming notebooks versus regular gaming notebooks which tend to be very brick like in their overall form factor. In fact I have one here that I can just grab and hold up for comparison. I mean here's a more classic gaming notebook side by side with the Aorus X7. Would you consider a gaming notebook if they were all slim like this? Would love to know your thoughts. And as always guys don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.