It’s hard to go past a solid mid-range laptop. Sure, it doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the laptop that costs the same as a car, or the allure of a very low-end price tag. But the mid-range is where the magic happens. It’s the Goldilocks of laptops, if you will.
The Gigabyte Gaming A16 CWH laptop is in the middle of the mid-tier gaming laptops. It’s not going to set your world on fire, and there have been some weird choices made that have held it back unnecessarily, but it’ll get the job done while making sure you have a good time.
Table of contents
- First impressions
- Specifications and price
- Benchmarks
- Gaming
- Day-to-day use
- Who is the Gigabyte Gaming A16 CWH laptop for?
First impressions
The first thing that struck me was how light this laptop is. I’m used to 16-inch gaming laptops being something you could kill someone with, but this appears to be a laptop designed to be carried around without destroying your spine. At 2.2kg, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as intense as my usual 2023 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, and I appreciated that.
Set up was pretty much exactly what you’d expect. I got out the charger and set it up as I would any Windows laptop: logging into my accounts and then waiting 1,000 years for updates to complete. Overall, a very uneventful setup.
Gigabyte Gaming A16 specifications and price
| Price | $1,999 (for the CWH spec via Centre Com) |
| Warranty | Two years in addition to your Australian consumer law rights |
| Official website | Gigabyte Australia |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-13620H |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR7 |
| RAM | 16GB DDR5 5200MHz |
| Storage | 1TB PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 slot |
| Ports | 1x DC-in 1x RJ-45 1x HDMI 2.1 2x Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 1 1x Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 1 1x Type-A USB 2.0 Gen 1 (DisplayPort 1.4 and Power Delivery 3.0 support) 1 x 3.5mm audio jack |
| Wireless connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 |
| Battery | Li-ion 76Wh – estimated battery life 14 hours |
There are a few interesting things to call out here. The first is the battery life of “up to” 14 hours. You will probably not actually ever get 14 hours, but you will get more hours than most gaming laptops, depending on what you’re doing. I’m quite impressed by the battery life. The second is that this is one of the cheapest laptops I could find in stores in Australia with an RTX 5070 laptop GPU.
What’s weird is the 85W for the total graphics power (TGP), because that is not enough to get the most out of an RTX 5070. Why put an RTX 5070 in there and then hobble it? It’s an odd choice and not one I would have made. It means that the graphics won’t perform as well as a 5070 in a different laptop with more TGP.
Benchmarks
| Geekbench 6 single-core | Geekbench 6 multi-core | Geekbench 6 OpenCL score | 3D Mark Steel Nomad | |
| Gigabyte Gaming A16 CWH | 2,357 | 10,532 | 110,320 | 2,552 |
These are quite respectable numbers for this price range. Looking at the Geekbench browser numbers, you could get a little extra power out of the AMD version of the A16 (which also sells for the same price) on single-core performance, but it’s not as powerful on multi-core scores.
Some similarly priced laptops in other markets can get you a little more power, due to a higher TGP. Still, it’s decent for a laptop you can get for less than $2,000.
Gaming
If you have bought a gaming laptop, chances are you want to play games. My experience was largely positive, with a few caveats.
On a less demanding game like Fortnite, I could put the game on max graphics settings and then play with a decent 120-144fps. Trying to push it beyond that frame rate was possible; I could hit 200fps on occasion, but it turned the graphics into a pixelated soup, which was deeply unpleasant. The FHD IPS screen isn’t capable of displaying much more than 144fps anyway, so there’s no point in pushing it.
I did get the occasional screen tear and some irritating lag.
But Forza Horizon 6, Ball X Pit and Fortnite looked excellent, even if there were times I was afraid the laptop would fly away with the fans spinning that fast and loud.
Unfortunately, gaming without headphones isn’t an option. The built-in speakers just do not go loud enough to counter the loud fans. The speakers also sounded bad, had terrible clarity, and the bass was so muddy that it was almost better to play on mute than with them on.
It’s a good IPS screen, though. Decent range of colours and excellent FHD definition. You wouldn’t want it for colour grading or graphic design or to use in bright sunlight (it doesn’t get very bright), but Gigabyte has made reasonable concessions to keep the cost lower.
Day-to-day use
This is a laptop that isn’t dripping in ‘I’m a gamer and don’t get hugged enough’ edgy aesthetics and RGB lighting. The keyboard lights up, because of course it does, but this is a laptop that wouldn’t look out of place in a boardroom or university. The lack of power to the graphics card is a crime for gaming, but not the end of the world for running architectural software or doing things with AI. It means that this is a laptop for people with well-rounded interests, which isn’t a bad thing.
The typing experience on it is excellent. I really like the feel of the keyboard. The trackpad is a little unwieldy, and I found myself wanting to use a separate mouse more than I usually do on a laptop, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
What might be a deal-breaker is only having one USB-C port on the laptop. Having three USB-A ports in 2026 is nice (even if one of them is only USB 2.0), but only one USB-C? In this port economy? That’s a really weird call.
Who is the Gigabyte Gaming A16 (CWH) laptop for?
This is a solid mid-range laptop for someone who wants to be able to play games when they choose, but doesn’t live and breathe games. It’s also a solid choice for people who do graphically intensive tasks and need the specs of a gaming laptop, without wanting the aesthetics of one.
Looking around Centre Com and JB Hi-Fi, I couldn’t find another gaming laptop with an RTX 5070 card in the same price bracket at all (aside from the AMD version of the same laptop). So, if you want a gaming laptop with a 5070 card, and don’t want to spend well over $2,500, this is the best (and only) option at the moment.
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