Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 review: powerful graphics, LOUD FANS

The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is a gaming laptop, and it sure looks like one. It’s an inch thick, weighs 5.5 pounds, and is awash in RGB lighting, stylized text, and curved plastic.

This Aorus Master offers powerful hardware and a lovely high-res, high-refresh OLED display. It’s the first of several laptops we’re reviewing with the GeForce RTX 5080, Nvidia’s second-fastest laptop graphics card of this generation. At $3,100, it’s actually a few hundred dollars less than similarly powerful models from Razer, Lenovo, and Asus, and over a thousand dollars less than laptops with the RTX 5090, Nvidia’s fastest GPU.

But in exchange for being a little cheaper than its direct competitors, the Aorus Master feels a little cheap, and its built-in software includes a useless AI chatbot but no custom fan controls. And those fans get loud.

Like the Razer Blade 16, the Aorus Master 16 comes with a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 OLED display. The Aorus’s panel isn’t quite as accurate as the Blade’s — with slightly lower color reproduction — but it’s just as bright and about as pleasing to the eye in regular use. It’s got punchy colors that aren’t oversaturated, and its 2.5K resolution and maximum 240Hz refresh rate enable games, websites, and videos to look sharp and smooth.

By contrast, the plastic screen bezel is a bit ugly, and the Aorus Master as a whole isn’t much of a looker. Its plasticky build feels dated and a little low-rentcheap compared to the more grown-up-looking Lenovo Legion Pro 7i or the all-out RGB bombast of Asus’ ROG Strix Scar, with its wraparound light bar and animated LED matrix on the lid. The lid of the Aorus opens easily with one hand, but the screen can wobble. And the diagonal-line designs in its vents and branding across its trackpad look cheesy. It has “Team up. Fight on” written on the lid for some reason, and it even projects the Aorus wordmark below the rear exhaust fans, which is as gauche here as it is on the doors of luxury cars.

While I’ll poke fun at the Aorus’ tryhard design, Gigabyte gets credit for focusing on what counts: the screen, GPU, CPU, ports, and even user-upgradeable RAM and storage. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, with good tactile feedback. The keyboard has a 1.7mm key travel and the trackpad, while a little loud, easily clicks even near its top hinge.

The 1080p webcam, built-in mics, and speakers aren’t anything special, but you’ll get through video calls looking and sounding fine in most lighting. The speakers sound decently full for music, but dialog is flat. It can be slightly difficult to clearly hear spoken lines in games against loud music and sound effects, especially since you’ll also be competing with the Aorus’ fans.

Fan noise is my biggest hangup with the laptop. In graphically intensive games like Monster Hunter Wilds or Lushfoil Photography Sim it’s loud and irritating enough that you find yourself cranking the game volume or reaching for a pair of headphones.

My wife is used to hearing the fans of gaming laptops in our shared home office, but at one point the Aorus made her turn to me and say, “What the hell is going on over there?”

I was playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on a 4K external monitor, and the fans were audible even in the next room, especially during initial shader compiling. At peak rpm, they sound like someone running a small vacuum cleaner across the room. The fans on the Razer Blade 16 and ROG Strix Scar 16 are noticeably quieter and less annoying.

And unlike Razer Synapse or Asus Armoury Crate, Gigabyte’s GiMate software doesn’t let you tweak the fan curves, only choose between four presets. Switching the laptop from game mode to balanced, and the fans from performance to normal can cut the noise a bit with minimal sacrifice to framerates. Though, even in this mode, the fans can still go loud when necessary. And turbo mode is solely for masochists; it pegs the fans at 100 percent the whole time.

GiMate’s other features are sparse, limited in scope, and worse than native solutions within Windows 11 and Nvidia’s GPU settings. Its operating modes are just shortcuts to Windows power settings. In some cases, GiMate simply opens Microsoft Copilot or Nvidia’s Control Panel and Broadcast App. But its interactions with other apps get even weirder when you unplug the charger and GiMate prompts you to switch to integrated graphics and kill apps it says are using the discrete GPU. This MUX switch functionality is already handled by Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus, so I’m not sure why Gigabyte brute forces it this way.

The GiMate AI chatbot, another misfire, allegedly helps you optimize your laptop. I asked it to tell me the difference between Game Mode and Balanced, and it just enabled Game Mode. You can ask it to do basics like toggle Wi-Fi on or off, but it takes much longer than doing it yourself. That could be useful for someone unfamiliar with computers, but this is a gaming machine.

Bad software and noisy fans aside, the Aorus Master 16 is mostly a good performer. Its 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, RTX 5080 GPU, and 32GB of RAM easily handle multitasking across various productivity apps, though it can’t last more than six hours on charge, even using power saving mode. It did okay with some hefty photo editing, but on two occasions on battery power Lightroom Classic slowed to the point where I had to close and restart it — not ideal when you need to edit quickly.

In gaming performance, the Aorus Master is right in line with an Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 using the same CPU and GPU for $200 more. The Aorus Master is usually on par or a frame or two better in 4K and 2.5K benchmark tests of Black Myth: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077. And like the Asus, that puts the Gigabyte within reach of the flagship RTX 5090 in the $4,500 Razer Blade 16. In our tests, the 5090 bested it by an average of just 3.5 fps without frame generation, and by up to 10 fps with frame generation. Those are pretty minimal differences, making the mobile 5080 a much better value — at least, compared to the Blade 16’s power-limited 5090. We haven’t yet tested a laptop with an uncapped 5090.

I averaged 143 fps in Oblivion Remastered on a 4K display with high settings and frame generation turned on in the game’s prologue. Turning off frame gen dropped it to an average of 99 fps. When I switched to ultra settings in the open world I saw an average of 50 fps without frame gen and 77 with. The one thing I couldn’t turn off was the incessant fan noise.

If you always play with headphones on, you can mitigate the Gigabyte’s biggest issue. But while the Aorus Master 16 is one of the cheapest 5080 laptops, there are plenty of interesting competitors for just a little more. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16, for example, looks cooler and has quieter fans; the HP Omen Max and Lenovo Legion Pro 7i both have OLED screens like the Gigabyte. I think I still prefer the Gigabyte’s OLED to the Asus’ Mini LED, but I need to spend more time with the Asus before making that call. I’ll also be testing the Lenovo and HP; their OLED screens could make them closer competitors to the Gigabyte.

There’s a lot to like in the Aorus Master 16, but it’s not as easy to love. Its powerful hardware and brilliant OLED display are a treat to game on, but the lackluster GiMate software, basic build quality, and at times maddening fan noise feels like someone knocking the ice cream cone from your hand right after you get it.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge