Gigabyte P15F review

Gigabyte’s P15F 15.6in laptop is a reasonably portable desktop replacement laptop with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor and a midrange graphics card for gaming and graphics work.

While Gigabyte has used a standard Clevo chassis, it has at least had it customised and improved. On other laptops we’ve seen that use this case have had rather cheap, plastic lids; Gigabyte has used a good-looking soft-touch matt black plastic that feels much more pleasant and also looks more stylish thanks to gently tapering edges. This material does show some greasy marks, although it’s not as bad as some other laptop lids. The palm rest is made of a different matt black plastic that doesn’t pick up grease quite so easily.

Sadly, Gigabyte hasn’t done anything to address the quality of the keyboard. Its keys are spongy and don’t have much travel to them, so they’re not particularly pleasant to use and typing becomes tiresome after long periods.

With such a big chassis, there’s plenty of room of ports: there’s a DVD drive, two USB ports (one USB3) and two 3.5mm audio jacks on the right, while the left side has a VGA port, HDMI connector, eSATA (doubling up as USB3) and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

A 1TB hybrid hard disk is included, which gives an 8GB high-performance solid-state storage cache for faster boot times and loading times of your most frequently used applications. You don’t get an SSD, though, which is a shame, as we’ve seen other laptops at this price with one.

Gigabyte’s screen isn’t very good, and we’ve seen better choices in this chassis. While our colour calibrator showed its overall accuracy was reasonable at 78.9%, colours appear cold and a little washed out. This isn’t helped by poor contrast levels of just 256:1 and very poor viewing angles, which make the overall viewing experience pretty disappointing. Games and movies simply won’t look that good on this laptop, which is what we’d expect buyers of this laptop will spend a fair amount of time doing.