The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is my first taste of the RTX 5080 mobile GPU, and while this might not end up being my favourite gaming laptop of this generation, the Nvidia graphics chip might well be. The GPU itself is capable of delivering the same sort of gaming performance that we've seen from the RTX 5090 in the excellent Razer Blade 16, though it does have to push its graphics silicon hard to get there.
And that means the actual experience of using the laptop isn't quite such a pleasant one, that and the design of the Aorus Master 16 makes it feel like a very old notebook. It may have a glorious OLED screen, a powerful Intel Arrow Lake CPU, and possibly the best mobile GPU of this gen, but it's a chonky thing that's very reminiscent of the laptop designs from a decade ago. The construction is largely aluminium, but oh boy does that lid scratch super easily.
