The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop
by Brett Howse on April 23, 2015 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
The P35X comes with a 75 Wh battery, which is fairly large by today’s standards. However there is a lot of performance under the keyboard, so battery life is always going to be the trade-off on a system like this. I think people that buy these systems generally expect that they will likely need to be plugged in for most tasks, but if you ever do need some mobility, it should be there.
To test battery life, we have two tests. The first is just a browsing test, and the heavier test ramps up the number of pages loaded, adds a movie, and has a 1 MB/s file download running for the duration. As always, we standardize our battery life tests with a display brightness of 200 nits so as not to penalize devices like the P35X which have a very bright display.
The P35X is not going to set any records for battery life, but for a gaming system, almost five hours is fairly respectable. It is almost an hour behind the Razer Blade in this test despite the larger battery in the P35X, but it does well compared to the other gaming systems in our database.
Once again the P35X falls victim to the impressive battery life of the Razer Blade, but it does hold its own when compared to the rest of the gaming notebook competition. While I would not go so far as to say the P35X has good battery life, for what it is, it is reasonable. But clearly Razer has put more work into a more efficient platform overall. We can check that out by removing the battery size from the equation in our normalized graphs.
The normalized graphs show the extent of Razer’s power optimizations, because even with a higher resolution display and smaller battery, it has better battery life than the other gaming systems. But putting that one device aside, the P35X does well against the other competition. They could do better though, and this is one of the things where having multiple drives in RAID can really hurt.
Charge Time
The other aspect to mobility is charge time. Gigabyte includes a rather large 180 watt power adapter, but of course much of that is to power the system when it is operating at maximum. Although more of the adapter could be routed to the battery, there needs to be enough available to keep the device running at maximum power.
At 170 minutes, the P35X is certainly not the fastest device to charge, but considering the larger than average battery it is not too bad.
95% charge takes about two hours, and the last 5% takes almost another full hour. If you were on the go, 50% charge is less than an hour, which is not too bad.
Overall, the P35X can be a mobile device, but as compared to other mobile devices of 2015, it is far from ideal. For these types of systems, I think the target market really is looking for portable rather than mobile, and the P35X is more portable than most gaming systems around. It does like to stay close to an electrical outlet, but for gaming, that is almost a necessity anyway despite the efforts to reduce the power consumption of GPUs.
Wi-Fi
Gigabyte has opted for the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 wireless adapter, which is very familiar at this point. It offers a maximum connection speed of 866 Mbps from its 2x2:2 802.11ac capabilities. It has been a strong performer in the past, and while not the outright fastest 802.11ac adapter around, it still offers good performance.
400 Mbps seems to be about the average for this adapter, and the Gigabyte hits that. Speeds are good, and while some devices are faster, there is little to complain about 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.