Taking the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 (2025) out of its box, you immediately know this is not a gaming notebook you’d want to lug around too much. Okay, the 2.5kg weight means it’s portable but it’s probably pretty hefty to carry across campus or through an airport.
The reason for this bulk, however, is in the performance it packs in. If you want top-notch gaming in a portable PC, the Gigabyte machine will make you happy by running demanding games smoothly for a good few years to come.
Our review unit packs in an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX chip, 32GB of DDR5 memory and 1TB of storage on a Gen 4 NVMe solid state drive. Notably, the HX is the high-performance version of Intel’s notebook PC chips, which are made for speed rather than battery life.
Perhaps more importantly, the Gigabyte notebook sports an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 laptop graphics processor to deliver gaming eye candy on the 16-inch OLED screen.
Speaking of that, it’s also a zippy display with 240Hz refresh rate running at a handy QHD (2,560 x 1,600) resolution that makes things sharp yet manageable in terms of frame rates. Fast for a competitive gamers but also a nice balance between a demanding 4K resolution and a low 1080p.
The design of the Aorus Master 16 isn’t eye-catching or fancy though it is neat enough to avoid being clunky and unwieldy like fat gaming laptops of old.
Yes, there’s bling bling RGB lights not just on the keyboard but also under the screen and the chassis, but they aren’t that bad. Even for someone like me, who’s not crazy about RGB, I think they just about do enough to avoid being annoying.
So, how does the gaming notebook perform? I fired up a few games to test out the GeForce RTX 5080 graphics processing unit (GPU) that does most of the heavy lifting in games.
In the popular first-person shooter Doom: The Dark Ages, which uses the unique id Tech 8 game engine, the Gigabyte notebook shows excellent image quality, when every feature is turned on. It has the performance to match too.
I set the game’s graphics to Ultra Nightmare throughout and also fired up path tracing, which makes light sources in a game world a lot more realistic but sucks up computing power like nothing before. This is where the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU in the Gigabyte notebook shines.
I got into a boss fight on the Village of Khalim level, where dozens of demons and a huge boss come towards you in waves. Here, the Intel CPU and the Nvidia GPU both are more than equipped to run the game smoothly on a 1440p display.
In the framerate counter on-screen, I could get more than 110 frames per second (fps) if I set Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) Frame Generation to 4x. This is clearly more than the 60 fps most find playable for smooth gameplay.
Of course, when I turn off the DLSS “cheat”, which uses AI to generate additional frames for every one that the GPU generates on its own, the framerate goes down to between 30-plus and 50.
The game is still playable but the framerates plummet. I’d go with DLSS Frame Generation, which Nvidia’s top-end GPUs can push to 4x, since I don’t detect any significant visual artifacts in the generated frames.
I also fired up another first-person shooter in Cyberpunk 2077. To test things out to the max, I set path tracing to Ultra, which would cripple most PCs.
Here, the game’s built-in benchmark returned framerates of more than 112. This is again with Nvidia’s DLSS Multi Frame Generation set to 4x, which helps push the performance up even though I’m maxing out the eye candy.
Cruising in the open-world dystopian Night City in the game was such a delight, with the city lights bouncing off the shiny surface of my stolen car. It’s great to see such a rich world appearing so realistic, thanks in part to the OLED screen’s excellent contrast and pin-sharp images with its high refresh rate.
Of course, turning off frame generation and resolution scaling – those Nvidia tools used in so much of today’s games to augment a GPU’s raw power – means the game runs much slower. I would keep them on.
I also tested the Gigabyte notebook with 3DMark, a synthetic benchmark which simulates real games. Here, the Aorus Master 16 scored 19,644 for the Time Spy subtest. A typical thin and light laptop with integrated graphics scores only about 4,000-plus here.
What about everyday productivity? The Gigabyte gaming PC makes short work of simple tasks like videoconferencing and spreadsheets. In the PCMark test, it scored 8,358. This is higher than an MSI laptop I tested recently that doesn’t have the powerful Nvidia GPU.
I also ran the Geekbench 6 test, which measures the CPU performance in everyday tasks. In this case, the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX did well, scoring 2,895 for single-core performance and 17,952 for multi-core performance. Again, this is an improvement on the MSI machine with an Intel Core Ultra 200H chip that tries to balance power and battery life.
Just for fun, I also checked out the laptop would do with AI tasks. In the Geekbench AI batch of tests that measure performance in AI jobs like image recognition, the Gigabyte machine’s Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU came back with 5,720 (single-precision score), 2,135 (half precision score) and 9,541 (quantised score), when using the ONNX AI framework.
This is significantly higher than the same MSI laptop I had tested previously, which also sports an Intel CPU, but the slower Core Ultra 7 285H.
With the Openvino AI framework that favours Intel chips more, the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 did better, scoring 6,622 (single precision), 6,079 (half precision) and 15,087 (quantised) with the Intel CPU.
Running the AI tasks on the Intel Core Ultra 9 chip’s built-in neural processing unit (NPU), which is targeted at AI workloads, the Gigabyte machine returned scores of 6,572, 10,929 and 15,406. Clearly, the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is no slouch when it comes to AI workloads.
It does live up to the promise of its spiffy hardware specifications. In both gaming and everyday work, including AI, it performs as you’d expect of a PC sporting some of the fastest hardware.
To be sure, there is no escaping physics. The hotter running chips mean that the notebook’s fans can be pretty loud when they spin up. I don’t blame them because when you have the powerful of a GeForce RTX 5080 in there, you have a lot of heat to be pushed out.
Yes, the laptop comes with Dolby Atmos surround effects on the stereo speakers, but I think a pair of noise cancelling earphones might be good for when you fire up a game to play. That’s typically when the fans get the loudest.
Other than that, the Gigabyte machine is competent, if not flashy. The keyboard has keys that are well spaced out and offer decent key travel so it’s pretty comfortable to type on. The touchpad is large, given the real estate that a 16-inch laptop can afford.
What I also like is the full complement of ports on the Gigabyte machine. Since space isn’t an issue on the chassis, you’d find a full array of expansion ports that let you plug in your phone or flash drive via USB or a monitor via HDMI.
A full-sized 1Gbps network port means you can hook up to your fibre broadband service without worrying about Wi-Fi coverage (assuming you have your home wired up). A pity that Gigabyte hasn’t thrown in faster 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps connectivity here.
To keep everything running, the Aorus Master 16 has a 99Wh power pack in the chassis. I don’t expect you to be gaming much without the hefty power brick plugged in because this is a machine made more for the desk than carrying around.
Finally, the price. At S$5,499, this is not cheap at all. Then again, a GeForce RTX 5080 for a desktop PC alone pushes close to S$2,000. Don’t forget the Aorus Master 16 has a powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and an impressive OLED screen as well.
If you’re looking for a gaming PC offering some of the best graphics around and prefer a laptop over a desktop, then the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is worth checking out. That’s, of course, if you have more than S$5,000 to spare for today’s crazy-priced gaming GPUs.
