By Nick Evanson

Copyright pcgamer

Skip to main content

Close main menu

THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES

View Profile

Search PC Gamer

PC Gaming Show

Movies & TV

Affiliate links

Meet the team

Community guidelines

About PC Gamer

PC Gamer Magazine Subscription

Why subscribe?

Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming mag
Try a single issue or save on a subscription
Issues delivered straight to your door or device

From£35.99Subscribe now

Borderlands 4
Essential Hardware

Battlefield 6

Don’t miss these

Gaming Laptops
Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop

Gaming Laptops
Best 14-inch gaming laptop in 2025: The top compact gaming laptops I’ve held in these hands

Gaming Laptops
Alienware 16 Area-51 review

Best cheap gaming PC deals

Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most

Graphics Cards
Cheap graphics card deals this week

Best gaming PCs in 2025: these are the rigs and brands I recommend today

Handheld Gaming PCs
Best handheld gaming PC in 2025: my recommendations for the best portable powerhouses

Graphics Cards
Best graphics cards in 2025: I’ve tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today’s top cards

Gaming Monitors
Best gaming monitors in 2025: the pixel-perfect panels I’d buy myself

Controllers
Best PC controllers in 2025: the pads I recommend for PC gamers

Gaming Laptops
Acer Predator Helios 18 AI gaming laptop review

Gaming Laptops
My bank account isn’t exactly overflowing at the moment, so here’s the gaming laptop I’d buy with my own money this Prime Day

Gaming Laptops
Best cheap gaming laptop deals

Gaming Laptops
Asus TUF A14 (2025) gaming laptop review

Gaming Laptops

Preferred Partner

You can save $100s on either of these RTX 5060 or RTX 5070 gaming laptops, but which to pick? Actually, the answer’s pretty easy if you ask me

Nick Evanson

18 September 2025

The answer to the conundrum lies in the screen.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Gigabyte)

One of the good things about gaming laptops is that the market is very competitive, with multiple manufacturers all fighting for your wallet. However, that can make choosing a new one quite a challenging, as there are so many options to pick.

Well, worry no more, because I’ve found two 16-inch gaming laptops from Gigabyte that are well specced and look super sleek. The only problem is that they’re practically identical, apart from the GPUs—one sports a GeForce RTX 5060, whereas the more expensive one is home to an RTX 5070.
Solving this puzzle is actually quite easy. All you need to do is take a look at the laptop’s screen.

Quick shopping links

Gigabyte Aero X16 RTX 5060: $1,200 at Best Buy
Gigabyte Aero X16 RTX 5070: $1,350 at Best Buy

Save $300Gigabyte Aero X16 RTX 5060: was $1,499.99 now $1,199.99 at Best Buy
While this isn’t the cheapest RTX 5060 laptop you could find, you’re getting a whole lot of hardware for the money. You get a zippy Zen 5 processor, a nice big screen, and plenty of RAM and storage. All in a sleek and silky chassis.

Key specs: RTX 5060 | Ryzen AI 7 350 | 16-inch | 1600p | 165 Hz | 32 GB DDR5 | 1 TB SSD

Gigabyte’s newest member of its Aero X range, the X16, is a sleek and well-specified gaming laptop. Starting at the head of the hardware list, you get an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor, which is a Zen 5-powered chip with eight cores, 16 threads, and a 5 GHz boost clock. As it only has a quarter of the amount of L3 cache as its desktop cousin, the Ryzen 7 9700X, it’s not quite as potent, but it’s more than fine for a little laptop.

Better yet, it’s paired with 32 GB of DDR5 (the speed is unspecified, but it seems that Gigabyte typically fits DDR5-5600) and a 1 TB SSD, with one further PCIe 4.0 2x M.2 slot for an additional drive. That’s a nice baseline of RAM and storage, and considerably more expensive laptops often don’t provide more.
The main thing to take note of here—and if you do pick up this laptop, it’ll be hard to avoid it—is the display panel. Hoving into view at 16 inches in size, the IPS panel boasts a 2560 x 1600 resolution, a 165 Hz refresh rate, and a typical brightness of 400 nits. That’ll be lovely to look at, though all those pixels might be a bit taxing for the little RTX 5060 GPU.
Fortunately, you can just enable DLSS 4 upscaling, as well as Multi Frame Generation if the game supports it, to get around that problem. Or, you can just scroll a little further and check out the other Aero X16 laptop on offer.

Save $300Gigabyte Aero X16 RTX 5070: was $1,649.99 now $1,349.99 at Best Buy
The RTX 5070 version of Gigabyte’s Aero X16 has exactly the same hardware as the 5060 one above. However, the more GPU is a better match for the 1600p screen, so this is really the one to pick out of the two.

Key specs: RTX 5070 | Ryzen AI 7 350 | 16-inch | 1600p | 165 Hz | 32 GB DDR5 | 1 TB SSD

This Aero X16 gaming laptop is exactly the same as the other one, except for a single change. It houses an RTX 5070 GPU, which has 38% more shaders than the RTX 5060. While it still has the same 8 GB of GDDR7 VRAM, those extra CUDA cores make it a far better match for the 1600p screen.
So much so that you’ll probably find that you won’t need to use DLSS 4 upscaling in a lot of games (though you really should, as it produces better anti-aliasing, as well as more performance), or you’ll be able to play your favorite games at higher quality settings.
Given that the RTX 5070 version of the Gigabyte Aero X16 is just 13% more expensive than the 5060 one, it’s an easy choice between the two. Sure, $150 isn’t to be dismissed lightly, but I do think the extra cash will be worth it in the long run. After all, games aren’t getting any easier to run on today’s gaming PCs, are they?

👉Check out all the best gaming laptop deals here👈

Best gaming laptop 2025All our current recommendations

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

👉Check out our full guide👈

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

Nick Evanson

Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn’t these days?

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.

My bank account isn’t exactly overflowing at the moment, so here’s the gaming laptop I’d buy with my own money this Prime Day

Best cheap gaming laptop deals

Asus TUF A14 (2025) gaming laptop review

Best 14-inch gaming laptop in 2025: The top compact gaming laptops I’ve held in these hands

Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop

Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 AI gaming laptop review

Latest in Gaming Laptops

Asus ROG says it is ‘actively investigating’ gaming laptop stuttering issues after a user apparently identified a ‘cascade of firmware design failures’

I now know what my life has been missing and it’s a set of rotary encoders sunk straight into the top of a mechanical-keebed Framework laptop, for some reason

Medion Erazer Scout 15 E1 gaming laptop review

Acer Predator Helios 18 AI gaming laptop review

Acer shows off the very first Intel Panther Lake laptop with what’s claimed to be the world’s biggest haptic touchpad

This Kickstarter-backed battery maker claims you can smash a nail through its solid-state USB-C pack and it will still work

Latest in News

Borderlands 4 performance patch out now with PC ‘our top priority’

A casting call for the Mass Effect TV show is out there, and if you’re ‘A young Colin Farrell-type male’, then do I have great news for you

Microsoft’s Paint now lets you save projects as layered files in the latest Insider build, as part of its continued efforts to make the default image editor great again

If you’re wondering what those newly announced Intel-Nvidia PC chips might look like, there’s already an Nvidia ‘Superchip’ that could provide the answers

Casio has unleashed its AI Tribble with ’emotions like a living creature’ on the US and UK, complete with a Mogwai-like warning that you can’t get it too hot, too cold, or too wet

Congress calls Gabe Newell, Twitch and Discord CEOs to testify in wake of Charlie Kirk shooting

HARDWARE BUYING GUIDES
LATEST GAME REVIEWS

Best SSD for gaming in 2025: the fastest and the best value solid state drives to perk up your PC

Best Hall effect keyboards in 2025: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming

Best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming in 2025: the only Gen 5 drives I will allow in my PC

Best graphics cards in 2025: I’ve tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today’s top cards

Best gaming chair in 2025: I’ve tested a ton of gaming chairs and these are the seats I’d suggest for any PC gamer

Dying Light: The Beast review – A step down from zombie-stomping greatness

OcUK Gaming Mach 5R review

Razer Kraken Kitty V3 Pro headset review

Borderlands 4 review: A slice of looter-shooter heaven trapped in UI hell

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor review – Vampire Survivors is no longer the king of the genre

PC Gamer is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

Contact Future’s experts

Terms and conditions

Privacy policy

Cookies policy

Advertise with us

Accessibility Statement

Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury,

BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait…