The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop
by Brett Howse on April 23, 2015 8:00 AM ESTDisplay
The P35X is offered with a 1920x1080 resolution as standard, and the optional upgrade is a 2880x1620 Panasonic unit, which is what is installed in this review unit. As an IPS display, it offers great viewing angles, and the 8 bit color and full RGB stripe help with color. Gigabyte has gone with an anti-glare coating on this device, which seems to be popular in this segment.
In the above image, you can clearly see the anti-glare coating which gives a bit of a muddied look to the individual pixels. At 194 pixels per inch (PPI), the P35X offers a great compromise between the really high PPI devices like the Razer Blade, and the 141 PPI of the 1080p panel offered in the base model. As a gaming system, being able to run games at the native resolution of the panel is certainly a good thing. On the desktop, Windows automatically chooses 200% scaling for this panel, but it is pretty easy to use it at 150% as well. Those with even better eyes can likely go as low as 125%, opening up quite a bit of desktop real estate.
To measure the output of the display, we turn to SpectralCal’s CalMAN 5 software with a custom workflow, and to measure brightness and contrast ratios, the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter is used. Testing color accuracy of the display is done with the X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer. As with our battery life testing, we do our testing at 200 cd/m².
Brightness of the P35X is excellent, coming in at almost 400 nits. With the combination of such a bright display and the anti-glare coating, there is almost no scenario where you will struggle seeing the display. Black levels are not class leading, but overall contrast ratio is still a very respectable 1137:1.
Grayscale is also quite good out of the box, with the P35X just over the ideal target of 3.0. There are only a handful of devices which have outscored it out of the box.
Saturations are also quite good out of the box, but blue and magenta is oversaturated when targeting the sRGB colorspace. At 100% saturation, all of the colors except cyan and yellow are close to dE of 6. So even though the overall average is quite good, it is not perfect or linear in the error levels.
Gretag MacBeth is a more comprehensive test, and the dE falls to almost 4. Still, for an uncalibrated result, the P35X is one of the more accurate displays we have seen, although it is still some ways off the most accurate ones such as the Razer Blade’s IGZO panel.
Calibrated
Calibration really helps out on the grayscale results, bringing them under 1.0, and a smaller boost is seen in all of the other scores as well.
The Panasonic display in the P35X is very good, and out of the box scores are of the sort that most people will be perfectly fine with it. It is a full 8-bit panel, and has good color reproduction out of the box. The resolution is great too, with sharp text and images, but as a gaming system I think the compromise of high resolution versus gaming performance should favor gaming performance, and the P35X has delivered here.
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Hubb1e - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
If you like the idea of this laptop but are not sold on the total execution, the Clevo p650se should be on your radar. It has a thin design that is only a little larger than the Gigabyte but lacks the optical drive and adds more cooling performance. Build quality is comparable and quite good. I just got a Clevo p650se (from Sager np8651) with the 970m and it is decently portable for a gaming laptop with a top tier GPU. At idle it is almost completely silent with only a very slight hum from the CPU fan. The 2nd HD spinning is noisier than the fan in my Clevo and that turns off after a minute of use anyways. As an early member of SilentPCReview.com idle noise was important to me. Less important to me was load noise and this Clevo exceeded my expectations with only a mild hum from the exhaust (vsync is on reducing load). I can game easily without headphones on and don't notice the noise at all once in the game. As a Clevo notebook you can get it from several vendors which opens up displays from bad TN 1080p panels to full 4k IPS displays. I opted for the Sager which came stock with a pretty good 1080p IPS panel. Mine has some light bleed in the lower left corner, but is otherwise one of the best displays I've used on a Windows laptop. I wanted this Gigabyte in this review but after reading other reviews on it I decided I didn't want a noisy laptop. My Clevo has been great and I recommend it. Hopefully Anandtech can get their hands on one.Dr_Orgo - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
I have this laptops little brother, the Gigabyte P34G-V1. I've been quite happy with it. Howerver, these thin and light gaming notebooks aren't for everyone. I was looking for a work laptop that was small enough to bike to work with, but powerful enough to run modern games at 1920x1080 with good settings. I already have a gaming desktop that I use as my primary machine. I wanted a laptop to play co-op pc games with my wife at good enough quality. It serves that purpose quite well.Darkstone - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
Are you really sure you've interpreted the cooling/frequency graph correctly? From the way i see it, the CPU is throtteling at 800mhz. 30 seconds into the test.This can mean 2 things, either the benchmark does not utilize the CPU beyond a very basis level, or the system is really throttling. In either case, the benchmark is completely unrepresentative.
I suggest running prime95 on a low priority alongside any game, carefully monitor the TDP of the CPU and the clock speeds of the GPU. The temperature can be, imo, mostly ignored. The clock speeds of the cpu can be completely ignored.
Brett Howse - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
The CPU Load is only 30%, so the CPU clocks down to keep temps down.Jon Tseng - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop"Slim" and "GTX980M" - two words I never thought I'd see in the same sentence! :-p
bennyg - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
Slim, powerful, cool, quiet, reasonably priced. Pick a maximum of three.BMNify - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
Excellent Slim gaming laptop, cheaper and better than Razer Blade too, And not to forget the most important point: Gigabyte actually sells their laptops worldwide whereas Razer is USA only !! Can't take any laptop manufacturer seriously who sells only in one country.meacupla - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link
Well, razer does sell to Canada, but with expensive shipping + duties.I'm sure razer could prepay duties, like newegg does, but nope.
erple2 - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
I've been waiting a bit for this review. It looked like it checked all of the right boxes, and could be the replacement for my aging Envy 15t, at least as a portable gaming computer. I was hoping for better battery life than what this gives (just under 5 hours seems low), and a better keyboard. The trackpad on my Envy 15 is pretty bad (then again, every non-macbook pro trackpad has been pretty terrible IMO), but the keyboard is reasonable. It's battery life is terrible though at a whopping 90 minutes at idle on the desktop.Anyway, I wish they'd just get rid of the space the DVD drive takes up, and shrink the chassis more. Also, the more I use laptops, the less I like a number pad. I'd rather connect it up to a KVM switch if I really needed a number pad.
I dunno, it still looks like a pretty solid laptop, and isn't horribly angled like the kiddie laptops that have similar internals.
milkod2001 - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
i wonder if it would help dramatically with noise/thermal issues if they have implemented different notebook design approach: Starting from front very thin(2-3 mm) continuing to thick(up to 25mm).This way there would be enough space at the rear to implement better/bigger cooling system.
Plus it would be better for typing as laptop keyboard would face up the same way as any external keyboard.
Aslo trackpad completely removed for navigation only touch screen or external mice would be used.
Keyboard moved to front, made bigger for better typing experience and at the position where keyboard currently is now to have bigger speakers +small sub.