Gigabyte P35K review

Gigabyte impressed us with gaming laptops such as the super powerful Gigabyte P34G and the Ultrabook-class Gigabyte U2442F, but the P35K could be the best gaming laptop yet. This 15.6in laptop has a beautifully slim chassis that stands just 21mm tall when closed, and the P35K is surprisingly portable for a gaming laptop. It does, however, weigh a relatively hefty 2.2kg.

There’s some powerful hardware tucked inside the P35K as well, such as a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M graphics processor. The GTX 765M is one of the most capable graphics chips we’ve seen, and other laptops with the GTX 765M installed have regularly produced an average frame rates of at least 70fps in our Dirt Showdown laptop test, but the P35K produced some of the best frame rates we’ve ever seen. At a resolution of 1,280×720 with graphics quality set to High, the P35K produced the blindingly good average frame rate of 103.2fps in our Dirt Showdown benchmark.

Of course, the screen will only ever show 60fps due to its 60Hz refresh rate, but with so much power at its disposal you’ll have no trouble playing many games in Full HD. The P35K produced a stunning average frame rate of 73.1fps in Dirt Showdown at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and graphics quality set to High.

To properly stress the P35K we ran our much more challenging Crysis 3 benchmark at a 1,920×1,080 resolution on High quality with x4 anti-aliasing. Here, the P35K produced a more modest 22.3fps, but achieved a much more playable 29.8fps when we set graphics quality to Low. This is hugely impressive for a gaming laptop, and is even a few frames ahead of the Chillblast Defiant Mini.

The P35K’s 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor endows it with desktop-grade processing power, as it can increase its clock speed to a huge 3.4GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it scored a huge 95 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, putting it just five points behind our reference Core i5-3570K desktop processor. This is twice as fast as a typical Core i7-based Ultrabook, so you can be sure the P35K will handle any program you throw at it.

The P35K isn’t just a great gaming laptop, though; you’ll enjoy using the P35K for any computing task. You’ll have to put up with the P35K’s rather noisy fans, but its keyboard and large wrist rest make typing a very comfortable experience. The keys gave a great level of tactile feedback and there’s a numeric keypad too. Just remember to keep your fingers away from the speakers and power button, though, as these became hot after long periods of gaming.

Sadly, we weren’t keen on the touchpad, as it didn’t depress far enough when clicked on files and icons. The touchpad’s large, smooth surface made it good for performing Windows 8 shortcuts and multitouch gestures, but we would have preferred separate buttons along the bottom of the touchpad instead of having buttons integrated into the touchpad. This would’ve made it easier to navigate the Windows desktop.

Happily, though, the P35K’s large 15.6in IPS display looked great. Our colour calibrator showed it was only displaying 67.1 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is disappointing, but we didn’t particularly notice the screen looking washed out during our subjective image tests. Our solid reds, greens and blues all looked bright and rich on the matt screen, and blacks were deep.

Our high contrast images also looked good, but the screen’s deep blacks tended to obscure finer shadow detail in some of our night shots. This is a shame, because its contrast ratio of 900:1 is much higher than average. With no way to improve the contrast, this became particularly problematic in dimly lit game environments where it was difficult to see where we were going. We lost a lot of detail in the dark swamps of Crysis 3, for instance, so this lack of detail may be a turn off for serious FPS fans.

The P35K has a great range of ports. There are four USB ports, two of which are USB3, VGA and HDMI video outputs, a headphone jack that doubles up as an S/PDIF optical audio output, a microphone jack, an SD card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a DVD optical drive that’s located on the front of the laptop. Some models also come with a mini DisplayPort, but this was blocked off on our review sample.

Battery life was also surprisingly good for a gaming laptop, as the P35K lasted 5 hours and 20 minutes in our light use test. Playing games will drain the battery much quicker, of course, but this is a good hour longer than most gaming laptops, enhancing its portability when you want to take it with you on the go.

With its powerful components and excellent keyboard, there’s no denying that the Gigabyte P35K is one of the most capable gaming laptops currently available. It’s a shame the screen doesn’t have slightly better contrast, but it outperforms its closest rivals, such as the MSI GE60 and Scan 3XS Graphite LG155, for graphics performance. At £1,130, it’s not quite as good value as the 13.3in Chillblast Defiant Mini, but if you want a large, portable gaming laptop, the P35K is a great buy.