The appeal of Gigabyte's gaming laptops is that they get you
the same sort of specs as an Alienware machine, but with much less bulk and
none of the juvenile look. They're gaming laptops for grown-ups, if you will.
It's the scaling down of dimensions that we really value, but we'll leave the
style judgements to your own eyeballs. Here's our Gigabyte P35X v5 review.
One of the issues with the smaller dimensions (compared to
other 15.6in gaming laptops) is that the fans are fairly noisy - probably
because they have to be smaller to fit. Plus, elements like the keyboard and
trackpad aren’t as good as those of lumbering laptop beasts like the Asus' RoG
G752 and the Alienware 15.
Price
The Gigabyte P35
v5 may not look anywhere near as fancy as an Ultrabook, but it is a fairly
expensive machine. Specs start in Nvidia GeForce GTX9 70M GPU territory at
£1399, and head up to £1800 when you opt for the GTX 980M card.
If you're getting
confused by Gigabyte's naming convention, it boils down to that P35W models use
the GTX 970M GPU, while G35X feature the 'ultimate' GTX 980M. Case closed?
To muddy things
further, the exact model we're reviewing is the top-end Gigabyte P35X v5, but
doesn't have the optional 4K display - one of the big 'innovations' in gaming
laptops of 2016. Most top-tier gaming models now offer a 4K display option, but
our review unit has a 1080p screen.
Design
The Gigabyte P35
v5 design is not going to get too many people excited. It's a bland all-black
shell that even gets rid of the macro button column of the 17-inch P37X, the
one dead giveaway that this is a gaming laptop.
On the positive
side, this means you can take the Gigabyte P35X v5 anywhere without attracting
too much attention. Especially if you look more like a middle manager than a
student.
From pictures you
could believe the Gigabyte P35X v5 is an all-plastic design, but the lid and
keyboard surround are all metal-coated to give that cool, expensive touch
aluminium provides so well. Let's not overstate things, though. While the
minimal design approach of this machine has some appeal, it has none of the specific
style of the more bolder, brasher machines. We particularly dislike the thick
bezels around the screen which make it look dated rather than modern.
A gaming laptop
with a genuinely nice, sober look is the Dell XPS 15, although maxing-out with
the GTX 960M it can't touch the Gigabyte P35X v5 for performance. As Dell owns
Alienware, it can't let the XPS series get too powerful.
While the look
only gets a vague grunt of approval, the Gigabyte P35X v5's dimensions are far
more useful. At 2.3kg and 20mm thick, it's a lot thinner and lighter than the
majority of laptops with GPUs this capable.
We've been using
the P35X as a portable work laptop, and while it won't do the job as an
everyday roving machine (it's just too heavy), for occasional portable work it's
among the best gaming machines around. The real surprise is that battery life
supports this too.
Battery life
The Gigabyte P35X
v5 seems to have the same-size battery cell as the 17-inch version, and with
very light 'work' use it lasts for a seriously impressive 6.5-7 hours. This was
a real-life test, though, using the laptop primarily for writing with the backlight
at around 20 percent. This is all that's needed in dingier pubs or cafes.
Stamina falls
much closer to expected levels when you ask the Gigabyte P35X v5 to do much
more. In the PC Mark 8 battery benchmark it lasts just 3 hours 31 minutes,
suggesting the GTX 980M GPU was kicking in at certain points. Ultra-light use
shows how scalable the latest generation of Intel Skylake CPUs is, though.
Impressive stuff.
Upping the brightness to 120cd/m and playing a video on
loop, the Gigabyte P35X v5 lasts five hours 25 minutes. Again, this is a
reasonably good result for a gaming laptop, although we’re seeing generational
improvements across the board this year, thanks to the upgrade to Intel Skylake
CPUs.
In summary, you’ll get around 5-5.5 hours of light use with
decent screen brightness, a bit over six hours with it set low.
Connectivity
Around the
Gigabyte P35X v5's sides you get a very good array of connections, with far
more video connectors than you'd see in a more style-driven laptop. There are
HDMI, VGA and Mini DisplayPort connectors, and the HDMI is a 2.0 socket,
enabling 60 frames per second rates at 4K.
As well as these
you get three USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port (a new addition this year), an SD
card slot and Gigabit Ethernet. Plus separate 3.5mm jacks for mic and
headphones. Pretty much everything you could ask for, then.
Keboard and
Trackpad
One of the first
weaker points of the P35X v5 is the keyboard/touchpad combo. Each is fine, but
nothing more. The key action is shallow and 'one note', and was a very obvious
downgrade coming from using the Dell XPS 15 recently.
With chunkier
gaming machines like the Alienware 15 and Asus RoG G552 you get much deeper,
smoother key response. For such an expensive machine, there's a slight hint of
a flimsy feel to the keyboard at first. As with so many keyboards, though,
you'll get used to it.
After a couple of
days I went from disliking it to deciding I could live with it just fine.
However, it doesn't deserve too much more than a shrug.
The trackpad
finds itself in a similar situation. While it's a quality build, with a lovely
smooth surface of the perfect friction level, the button action ends on a
stodgy note after the click. And its position means you need to bring your
right hand right up close to your left to comfortably reach the left button.
As the laptop has
a NUM pad, the actual layout of the touchpad relative to the display is much
closer to that of a 13-inch laptop, and neither is centrally located relative
to the screen. That's right, the NUM pad causes a comfort issue.
This is a
touchpad that seems designed with the idea it won't be used 24/7 in mind
(you'll use a mouse for gaming, in other words). It's a shame as the surface is
large and the top texture is spot on.
Performance
Max performance
in a small frame is the top priority here, and sure enough the Gigabyte P35X v5
provides it. Our review machine has an Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU, a quad-core
chipset clocked at 2.6GHz, with a turbo boost up to 3.5GHz and 6MB cache.
This is the same
chipset used in most of the Alienware 15 models, and several other key rivals.
As we saw with the surprising low-demand battery stamina, even in this more
juice-happy end of the Intel Core range, efficiency is impressive. This is
likely in part down to the move to a 14nm architecture. Its transistors are
smartphone-grade tiny.
This CPU is
matched with an Nvidia GeForce GTX980M 8GB GPU, currently the most powerful
single laptop card available. As of early 2016 at least, this is the laptop GPU
to desire.
In the 3D Mark
Fire Strike benchmark, it scores 8249 points, which is - no surprise - a
similar score to the Alienware 17 we just tested using the same GPU and CPU. In
PC Mark 8 it scores 3230 points and 10636 in Geekbench 3.
Other specs in
our review model include 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB 7200rpm hard drive and 256GB
SSD. This is a perfect storage setup for many, letting you install a a few
'priority' games and the OS on the SSD while leaving plenty of slower HDD
performance for things that don't need ultra-fast read/write speeds.
To give you an
idea of the performance of these two drives, using CrystalDiskMark we recorded
max 2188MB/s read speed and max 1280MB/s write speed on the SSD. These are
fantastic results, showing Gigabyte is using a fast, recent drive.
The hard drive is
of course a totally different beast, reading at up to 138MB/s and writing at
129MB/s. It's a bog-standard 7200rpm HDD, not one with any sort of fast solid
state cache to speed it up. As the system doesn't really rely on this drive, it
doesn't need one, though.
This is a pretty
terrific laptop for performance. It’ll let you play any game at 1080p with all
the settings maxed-out and still get you good frame rates. With The Witcher 3,
for example, you can happily use the ridiculously GPU-sapping Nvidia Hairworks,
which gets you super-advanced hair physics. Welcome to 2016: it’s kinda weird.
The one slight
sour note is that the Gigabyte P35 v5’s amazing GPU is not new. It was used in
the last generation of P35Xs and, as the king of laptop GPU land, the price on
the thing hasn’t come down even though it has been around for a while. Hardly
stale though, is it? One concession is that it is the 8GB version, although
it’s popping up regularly in top-end gaming laptops this year.
Then there’s how
loud the Gigabyte P35 is. One of the issues with using a relatively petite
frame is that your fans may have to work harder to keep the temperature down.
Virtually all
laptops using this class of CPU need to keep their fans running all the time
during operation, but here they’re fairly obvious. In a quiet room you may find
them distracting, although naturally they’ll be drowned out by ambient noise if
you’re out and about.
The noise scales
up, once again louder than most rivals, as the system is put under increasing
strain. Next to the Alienware 17 we reviewed recently, it’s pretty noisy. This
is certainly one of the main reasons not to consider the Gigabyte P35X. Not
caring about a bit of fan noise is perfectly fine too, though.
From noise to
audio, sitting the Gigabyte P35X next to our usual MacBook Pro 13 workhorse,
its speakers are louder than that machine, and louder than average too. There’s
a good bit of bulk to the sound, without resulting in a muddy or clouded sound
signature.
There is a slight
lack of restraint, though. At full volume, you can hear some mid-range
distortion in fuller tracks. To be clear, we don’t mean outright speaker
crackle, the sound just becomes a little ugly.
Screen
Ending with one
of the most important elements, let’s look at the screen. As with all the main
gaming laptop series this year, the Gigabyte P35 v5 comes with a 4K IPS display
option, and that’s whether you go for the W (GTX 970M GPU) or ‘X’ series (GTX 980M
GPU).
However, we’ve
been checking out the standard 1080p edition. It’s a good display, offering
full sRGB colour gamut coverage, respectable 300cd/m max brightness, fair
contrast and a practical matt finish.
Still, the 1080p version looks good, with very tight calibration
resulting in an average Delta E of just 0.15 (0.86 max). For a pure gaming
machine, 1080p is a perfectly good resolution to stick with, offering the best
balance of graphical fidelity and frame rate, but the 4K screen won’t half make
Windows 10 look nice and sharp.
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