Hi.
So I got an Aero 14 two weeks ago. Despite advertising that it comes in 3 colours and with 2 choices for the graphic card (either 965M or 970M); in Australia you're allowed to choose the colour so long that it's black, same for the graphic cards: only 965M available: that was a bit unfortunate.
Nice laptop really, nice screen. Very quiet and awesome battery life (got over 6 hours of normal use, which for my type of usage is exceptional for a laptop this size.)
Too bad it didn't come with Thunderbolt 3, surely it wouldn't have been too hard to integrate.
Another disappointment is that the audio jack doesn't support microphone input, it's output only so I can no longer use my conference headset.
The power adapter, while on the smallish size for its output (150W) is still much bigger than the one coming with the Blade.
The SSD it came with is a Transcend 256GB SSD which is already showing as discontinued on the manufacturer web site. Performance is poor for a SSD that size, despite being a PCIe SSD, its performance is no better than a SATA one (420MB/s read and about 280MB writes). Providing such SSD in 2016 is rather poor.
There are however two problems that make me consider on weither I should just return it.
1- The keyboard.
The keyboard has a nice touch and feel. Travel is similar to the Apple Macbook Pro one, though requiring slightly more pressure.
One fundamental problem, is that you have to be careful on how you press the key, and more importantly *where* you press the key as it often will not register despite "clicking" and giving tactile feedback that you've pressed it.
The issue is obvious with the larger keys such as space and shift (right shift being worse). If you press them on the side, they will just not register. You find yourself constantly having to go back and adding the spaces and uppercase keys that got missed as a result.
The worse key interestingly is the Del key. Unless you press the Del key firmly in its center, it will typically not register.
If you hit the Del key in its side, it will typically not register. I'd say that the missing rate is about 80%
The way I typically position my hands over the keyboard is like / \
with my thumbs hovering over the space bar. So my left thumb is right over the top left corner of the space key and my right thumb is over the top right corner.
More often than not, while you 'feel" like you've pressed the key, it actually doesn't register.
Frustrating to no end.
Has anyone else every experience such poor keyboard design with gigabyte notebook (mind you this is my first gigabyte laptop ever). I've never had such problems with a laptop before, with the exception of a Sony Vaio Z where the issue with the space key was quite pronounced (though at the time, this was rather a known issue, with plenty of guides on how to fix it by using bluetack stuck under the key)
The 2nd issue is how poor the trackpad is. An Elan one. often the mouse jumps all over the place or registering a press as a right click even when you're far away from the trackpad bottom right corner.
Worse, rather regularly, when windows goes to sleep when it resumes the trackpad (and sometimes the keyboard) is no longer functional. Rebooting won't fix it. You must fully power off the notebook and start it again.
When the keyboard stops working, it's not just in Windows. Even in the BIOS setup it won't do anything anymore.
Yesterday I installed Windows Dev, hoping it would fix things. Oh boy, it's now worse. When the laptop goes to hibernation, when it resumes the keyboard and trackpad no longer works 100% of the time.
When I contacted Gigabyte to notify them of the trackpad issue, telling them my BIOS version, trackpad version number etc.. Their answer was to make sure I had the latest drivers (doh, I had told them already I had the latest) and that I wasn't using 3rd party RAM...
How useful !
Would love to hear feedback from other Aero 14 users, or other gigabyte users for that matter.
