I suppose one thing that might soften the blow of the dreaded return to school that a portion of gamers are soon to face, is a gaming laptop—sorry, I mean a 'study' laptop, wink wink, nudge nudge. On this front, Gigabyte has things pretty well covered with an RTX 5060 Gigabyte Aero X16 for $1,100 at Best Buy and an RTX 5070 version for $1,300 at Best Buy.
These are as cheap as you'll likely find any RTX 5060 or RTX 5070 laptops on the market right now, and after scanning those GPUs and price tags, you'll also notice that the rest of the machine is pretty well specced-out, too.
Don't expect either of these laptops to replace your high-powered productivity desktop rig, but for gaming and some light work—school work, for instance—the Aero X16 should do well. And whether it's the RTX 5060 or RTX 5070 version, you should be in good stead for gaming in modern titles, though of course you'll fare a little better with the latter.
Quick links
- Gigabyte Aero X16 | RTX 5060 | $1,100 @ Best Buy (save $400)
- Gigabyte Aero X16 | RTX 5070 | $1,300 @ Best Buy (save $350)
RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 gaming laptops
I'm in the somewhat privileged position of having recently spent a lot of time using a gaming laptop with the same specs as this Gigabyte one. The Asus TUF A14 I tested had the same Ryzen AI 7 350 APU, 32 GB of memory, an RTX 5060 mobile GPU, and even a 165 Hz 1600p IPS screen.
Admittedly I can't just port over the 89% rating I gave that laptop to this one, given it wasn't just based on the specs sheet, but what I can say is that I found that internal component combination to be perfectly well-suited to modern gaming, even though the RTX 5060 is an entry-level GPU. The only caveat to this is that we don't know the TGP of the Gigabyte laptop's RTX 5060, and it could perform a bit worse than the TUF A14 if that's capped pretty low.
That possibility aside, though, the RTX 5060 and Ryzen AI 7 350 combo is great for gaming, in no small part thanks to Multi Frame Gen. When that little piece of sorcery works, I found it to be really worth it. So much so that I ditched my RTX 3060 Ti gaming PC for the RTX 5060 laptop entirely while grinding out sharpshooter headshots in Killing Floor 3, a new UE5 game.
The eight-core Ryzen AI 7 350 is less powerful than some other processors you might find in budget and mid-range gaming laptops, but unless you're doing some CPU-intensive tasks like encrypting, it shouldn't be an issue. It's perfectly fine for everyday tasks, and for gaming, plus you save on battery life by using that iGPU.
For a back to school kind of deal, I can't think of a better budget laptop specification. That 1 TB of storage will have to be managed sensibly, but for your average files and folders and a handful games it'll be enough.
There's little to say about this version other than that it has a more powerful GPU. Again bearing in mind the unknown TGP caveat, we can say that this laptop will probably perform 20-50% better than the RTX 5060 one in most games. That's going not just by the increase in CUDA Cores from 3,328 to 4,608, but also by our own testing comparing the TUF A14 to RTX 5070 gaming laptops such as the Razer Blade 14.
While both laptops should offer very playable frame rates in games with Multi Frame Gen support—and with latency that isn't half bad, either, if your starting frame rate is high enough—you'll get a noticeably better experience with this laptop in demanding games where frame gen isn't a good option. It'll certainly make better use of that 165 Hz frame rate in more games.
Apart from that, though, we're dealing with the same underlying laptop. Which, as I said, offers some pretty great specs for the price. I suppose now it's just a question of how you can convince people it's for studying rather than anything else. You're on your own with that one, I'm afraid.
1. Best overall:
Razer Blade 16 (2025)
2. Best budget:
Gigabyte G6X
3. Best 14-inch:
Razer Blade 14 (2025)
4. Best mid-range:
MSI Vector 16 HX AI
5. Best high-performance:
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10
6. Best 17-inch:
Gigabyte Aorus 17X
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