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Gigabyte P57W notebook review – Gaming on High

Once you’ve been away from your gaming PC for a while you start to understand the temptation of a gaming notebook.

Sadly, gaming-grade notebooks often have to make sacrifices to performance that desktop PCs don’t have to largely because of how hot they can get and the throttling of performance to keep those temperatures down.

To their credit, manufacturers are getting better at striking a balance between performance and keeping those pesky temperatures down at the same time. One such notebook that we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing this balance in is Gigabyte’s P57W.

While you may not be playing games at the bleeding edge of what is possible, the P57W offers rock-solid gaming performance, a great display and, interestingly, expandable storage options.

Game Key

Before we start talking  about all of that though, the first point of call when we receive a notebook for review is to test how hot the keyboard area becomes while running benchmarks. We say this because that is (obviously) where the components are hidden and the longer they run, the sweatier your palms become.

In the case of the P57W however, the notebook manages to deal with temperatures quite well. There is still obviously heat coming from the innards of the notebook but it was bearable enough for us to get a good hour and half of gaming out of.

While we’re at the keyboard the fully-lit, full size keyboard is actually quite nice to type on: the keys are chunky and the key presses don’t feel like you’re pressing thin air. The keyboard also features 30-key rollover, so you can press up to 30 keys at the same time and the P57W will register each one.

P57 Keyboard

This means that you can set up your own Macro key combinations with as many keys as you can press, which is especially useful for games like Dota 2, and Diablo III.

Switching is easy

Our points of contention aside, let’s dive into the P57W’s biggest selling point, expandable storage. So Gigabyte understands that the need for an optical drive is slowing down to a steady crawl but it still includes an optical disk drive (ODD) in the P57W? Confusing?

Perhaps, but what Gigabyte also allows you to do is remove the ODD completely and replace it with a 2.5inch hard or solid state drive, or nothing at all and help you save some weight.

P57 Outside II

Switching the ODD out is as simple as a button press, and the “cage” for your new storage drive is included with the P57W.

The cage is made of a rugged plastic and has anchor points that fit into the points your HDD screws would screw into. Inserting the drive into the bay is simple, and thanks to the use of plain old SATA power and data connections, no arcane knowledge is needed to do the upgrade yourself.

Performance without heat

As we mentioned previously gaming notebooks often have to tone down performance to keep thermal temperatures down. The P57W does this to some extent but, Gigabyte has a boat load of fans fitted into this notebook.

Using the Smart Manager to ramp up the fans up to 100% will make this immediately evident. The strange thing though, is that while we were gaming and even running our benchmarks the fans never sounded as violent as they did at 100%; in fact, the highest the fans ever spun up to was 60% of their full speed and that was in the middle of the Witcher 3, during a boss fight.

The surprises continue with the NVIDIA GTX 970M with 3GB of GDDR5, which performs better than expected with only 3GB of video memory, which is less than the GTX970Ms found in the P57W’s more expensive brethren. Our experience while gaming was enjoyable; while we struggled to push games to the 60 frame per second sweet spot on Ultra in most games, at Full HD resolution we managed to get everything running with settings on High at 60fps with little to no hiccups.

Yes, it’s slightly disappointing that the P57W struggles to push out 60fps at Ultra settings on every game, but it’s an entirely acceptable sacrifice at this price point considering the hardware under the hood.

Power player

Running the P57W on the power of its battery alone is not recommended for gaming. This is a fact that we have come to terms with over time because quite frankly asking a CPU, GPU, cooling system, RAM, peripherals and display to run off of a 75Wh battery for more than an hour is a tough ask.

However, using the P57W to do a bit of web surfing, document editing and even using Photoshop will net you roughly nine hours of use with the screen at full brightness and the Wifi on.

P57_P002

As we mentioned trying to game on battery is not recommended but it is possible if you are prepared to deal with being locked to 30 frames per second, image tearing, input lag and a general lack of performance for about an hour before the battery goes below 50% and starts throttling performance even further so that power can be sipped sparingly.

The conclusion

You aren’t going to get extreme performance out of the P57W, but you’ll definitely get some rock-solid 1080p gaming done at “High” detail levels which is brilliant at this price. For the content creator on the move and gamers looking for a GTX970M-equipped, Skylake-powered notebook, Gigabyte’s P57W is a good choice.

[su_box title=”Specs” box_color=”#f37021″]

Price R27 499
Display 17.3″ Full HD 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD
Storage 1 TB 7 200 RPM HDD (SSD optional, supports Gigabyte’s “3-Storage System”)
CPU Intel Core i7-6700HQ
GPU  Intel® HD Graphics 530 + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3GB
OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Camera HD Webcam
Memory 8GB DDR4-2133 (max 32GB)
Networking 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet | 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN | Bluetooth V4.0
Dimensions 421 x 290 x 24.9 (mm)
Weight 2.9kg
Other: SD Card Reader, Kensington lock, DVD drive

[/su_box]

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