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.

Unsurprisingly, processor performance is excellent. The quad-core, 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710MQ is a proven success and enduringly popular with performance laptop builders, providing near-desktop levels of performance for every laptop we test it in. This were not different with the P15F where, with 8GB of RAM, it managed an overall score of 89 in our multimedia benchmarks. Multitasking was particularly strong; it scored 98 in this test, just two points off our reference Core i5 desktop machine. This laptop will race through simple Windows tasks and browsing the web, and is no slouch when editing videos and photos, either.

Fan noise isn't too big an issue; while whooshing sounds were certainly audible, we wouldn't call them intrusive. Nonetheless, if you want quality audio you should invest in a set of desktop speakers or headphones because the ones built into the chassis are typically average for a laptop, lacking depth and volume.

Graphics performance comes from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 850M, which is a cheap mid-range chip that can hold its own in some modern games. In our Dirt Showdown benchmark at Ultra settings and Full HD resolution it was able to output an average frame rate of 41.7fps. Dirt Showdown is a few years old but there are plenty of visual effects that challenge modern graphics cards. The much trickier Crysis 3 proved to be a bigger challenge, with an average frame rate at High settings and 4x anti aliasing yielding a jerky 19fps. Dropping anti aliasing to 1x or 0x, lowering texture details to Low improved things to a more playable 37.5fps. If you have trouble running some titles from 2014 and 2015 on this machine, dropping the resolution to 1,600x900 will also help significantly. Modern games aren't out of the reach of this laptop, but you'll need to tweak them to make them playable.

The Gigabyte P15 is a good-looking 15.6 laptop that's also very powerful, but it’s currently too expensive compared to its competition. At the moment, the Scan 3XS Graphite LG156, which has a more powerful graphics card is the best choice.