Avell A72 HYB: An advanced notebook for professionals and demanding gamers | analysis

In May 2022Avell launched its new line of laptops in the national market designed for professionals and gamers who want high performance. One of them is the A72 HYB.

The notebook swiped through our workbench and now we tell you everything you can expect from it, in this full review.

While we’re talking about Avell’s new Pro line here, the design is aimed more at this audience than gamers. Here we see a compact structure for the screen size, as well as a more sedate look. It is 1.9 cm thick and weighs 1.7 kg.

The chassis is made entirely of metal in a magnesium alloy, which is responsible for making it very light. The laptop comes in silver in a matte finish, which makes it look very elegant and gorgeous to the viewer.

It comes with an ABNT2 standard backlit keyboard, with RGB LEDs. Here we already have an element that most players love. The lights are fully customizable in the Avell Custom Control app, where you can choose the color transition, which shades will appear or if you just want to leave a static option.

The device still has a strip on the front as well with RGB lights, to bring more attention to the details that have been thought of in its design. The touchpad, on the other hand, has a nice area and glides with good accuracy at the fingertips. Its buttons are embedded in the touch-sensitive area, to maximize space usage.

In terms of cooling, the A72 has two highly efficient coolers, one for the CPU and one for the GPU. The machine has good heat control and will only overheat in the central part if you are doing a more demanding job. When this happens, the fans are automatically activated, depending on the chosen performance mode.

In terms of connectivity, the laptop already comes with 6th generation Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in version 5.2. On the right side there are two USB 3.1 ports and a memory card reader. On the left is another USB, as well as the microphone input and headphone output. At the back, there are the source input, HDMI port, cable internet input, and a USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt technology.

In the box, in addition to the laptop itself, you will find only the power supply, power cable and user manual.

Moving on to the multimedia section, here we have a 15.6-inch WVA LCD screen. This means that it will not let you down in its very wide field of view. The panel is still anti-reflective, which does not allow it to turn into a mirror, if it is against the light.

Resolution Quad HD, with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. The refresh rate reaches a total of 240Hz, to provide great flexibility, both in professional and in gaming requirements.

The 300 nits brightness satisfies even those who want very high brightness, but it may not be as accurate for those who prefer a lower setting. Colors cover 100% accuracy of the sRGB standard. We noticed more subtle tonal calibration here, but we were expecting deeper blacks. Anyway, what we have is more than satisfactory.

The bezels around the board are very thin, which helps extend the forward enjoyment. Also, the top is where the Full HD webcam is located. This camera has above-average results, but it lacks greater customization for shots.

It has an audio system consisting of two stereo speakers. Each is located on one side of the notebook at the bottom. We found great power and a great balance between bass, mid, and treble, without having to rely on an equalizer. But if you prefer, Dolby Atmos can make the experience more immersive.

Seventy-two HYBs come equipped with a twelfth generation Intel Core i7 H-series processor. It is accompanied by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti GPU, with 8GB of dedicated memory.

This drive we tested has 16GB of RAM, with support for up to 64GB. Plus, there’s a 512GB M.2 SSD, with an extra slot in case you want to expand your storage.

As this is a machine meant for advanced professional use and challenging gaming, the original space ends up being insufficient to meet all you need. Therefore, it may be necessary to take advantage of the additional slot in a short time of use.

The problem is that there is no easier unlock for this task. You will need to open the entire base to place the additional SSD.

If there’s one point this laptop doesn’t disappoint, it’s performance. The device has a button next to the power switch to switch between office, gaming, and turbo mode.

When you change the configuration, it increases the speed of the processor, to give the maximum possible performance and to make the coolers more powerful, which will also increase their noise.

And we’ve seen that it really does make a difference in standards. An example is 3DMark, which had less than 5,000 points in normal mode, but when you put it in the turbo option, the score exceeds 10,000. In PCMark, it scored around 7,000 points, which highlights the scores in digital content creation, which is something that requires more hardware.

We also ran Geekbench in turbo mode and saw it hit roughly 12,000 multi-core points, twice that when benchmarked without overclocking.

In video editing, we tested exporting a 4K media file for approximately four minutes, at a bit rate of 40MB/s. Here we didn’t feel much difference between the settings, and we had over an hour of uptime in both cases.

Although the HYB line is focused on professional use, many items also depend on the player’s audience, from the aforementioned RGB LEDs to overclocking modes. That’s why we tested a list of games of different genres to see how the A72 performs in these situations.

We have noticed that the hardware boost allows you to run all the games in Full HD Quad HD without any issues. We started with Street Fighter V. Since it’s limited to 60fps, it will always lock to a max. The good thing is that you can take the opportunity to leave all visible resources at the maximum, without worrying about possible drops in frames per second.

Moving on to the base Fall Guys Battle Royale, we always have rates of over 160 FPS with great graphics quality and without affecting the number of players online at the same time.

In CS:GO, the experience was even better. The frames per second were above 200 most of the time, which means an ideal environment to enjoy first-person shooting at its best.

In God of War, we had oscillations between 80 and 120 frames per second. But the main thing here is Ray Tracing technology, which is supported by the GPU of this device, which makes the scenarios more realistic.

Light and shadow technology can also be beautifully exploited in DOOM Eternal graphics. This feature allows you to significantly increase the player’s immersion in the already hectic environment it presents, not to mention that it always stays at 120 frames per second.

In games where the framing is not an issue, such as Rocket League and Minecraft Dungeons, the biggest difference we see is in the build quality of the game. You can apply everything that the game offers for the graphics, for a more beautiful experience, whether in offline adventure or online matches.

Finally, the only title we had a hard time pulling off was in NBA 2K21. It only ran in HD quality and crashed whenever we tried to switch to a higher resolution. A problem that seems to have more to do with the game itself than with the device.

The battery isn’t usually the strong point of high-performance laptops, and here it’s no different than the four-cell one on this model. To see how much it yields in practice, we ran two tests on the Avell A72.

The first was only while playing a live game, in Full HD. In this test, the laptop took exactly one hour to fully discharge.

The other consists of simulating a working day, with alternative access to navigation, text production and communication software. At this second, the autonomy was 3 hours and 50 minutes, and the time was still considered low, but we expected something higher.

When we start charging, how will the 230W charger behave? Again, we don’t see the perfect result. The laptop took about two and a half hours to complete the process. A great time for the independence it offers.

Will this notebook be perfect for even the most demanding users? Well, we clearly saw more qualities than flaws in her. Avell A72 offers a discreet, compact and light design for the screen size, as well as the presence of additional elements such as RGB lights on the keyboard and in the front of the body.

In the multimedia department, it also has a high-quality screen with a great viewing angle, as well as a powerful audio system that balances the different frequencies.

In terms of performance, we see a more modest situation, for basic actions that are done well, as well as other alternatives that offer significant performance gains, both in heavy tasks and in demanding games.

But not everything is rosy here. The battery is perhaps the biggest weakness of this device. It results in very little time, even when used to work on moderate tasks, and takes a long time to reach 100%.

Storage space can also be larger for his suggestion and can make you count on buying another SSD to occupy the second slot, if you don’t have an external option to store your files.

Is it worth it?

This Avell laptop has hit the market with a suggested starting price of R$14,299. This means that in order to have all this power, you will need to pay a lot of money. In any case, the device responds well to meet everything you need.

If you want something with a bigger battery and more design for gamers, you can opt for the Dell G15-5515, the machine with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and RTX 3060, not far from Avell. If you want to save a bit more and keep it with an Intel CPU, you can opt for the Acer Predator Helios 300.

Is this machine a good choice in your domestic market? What is your assessment of all the features it offers? You can tell us everything in the space below.