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.