The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop
by Brett Howse on April 23, 2015 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Gigabyte has made a great step into this arena with the P35X v3. For those that need maximum performance in a portable device, the P35X comes out well, with quite a bit of compute packed into the thin body. You get a full quad-core i7 processor, along with 16 GB of memory, plenty of storage, and the most powerful single mobile GPU available today in the NVIDIA GTX980M.
The body of the device is nicely made, and the full aluminum lid and body give a nice premium feel to the Gigabyte, without the sometimes excessive adornment that some other gaming devices display. Some work could still be done on the keyboard, which frankly is underwhelming for a device that is this thick. It is certainly usable, but there are a lot better ones available in devices which cost less than this notebook. The trackpad is another spot that could use a bit of work, with it sometimes not always registering taps and double taps. On a device with the room for a generously sized tracking area, you really do want to utilize it, even though I would think most people gaming would opt for a dedicated mouse.
For me the standout feature is the display. Out of the box, colors are good, viewing angles are great, and the native resolution of the panel fits really well into the overall goal for this device. I have said it a few times already, but being able to game at this resolution is really a treat. Visuals are just so sharp, and the GTX980M can generally handle this resolution with most graphical options enabled. It also felt like Panasonic has a great scaler available, even though we do not have any tests to really flesh this out. Running the panel at non-native resolutions still produced much sharper images than I would normally see.
For some, this will be a desktop replacement. For me, I would never need the amount of storage that Gigabyte has made available, but certainly there are going to be people that love the fact that they can put 5 TB of storage into this laptop with two 512 GB SSDs and two 2 TB HDDs. That is a pretty amazing amount of storage in a single 15.6 inch laptop. I am not personally sold on the idea of two small SSDs in RAID 0, especially when a single 256 GB SSD would cost less. It also burns up more of the already limited battery life by having all of these drives, but that may not be as important to the target audience, who really should expect to keep this device plugged in most of the time.
Really the biggest complaint with this laptop is the fan noise. When idling at the desktop, it would be nice if the device could be silent, or at least closer to silent. I think it is expected that it is going to be loud under load, because there is a lot of heat that needs to be removed. But just using the device for basic tasks can cause the fans to ramp up suddenly for almost no apparent reason, and getting them back down again takes a bit of time. When you can remove the massive amounts of heat that are produced from this device when gaming, you would think that idling at the desktop would not be such an issue.
Still, Gigabyte has done a lot of things right to make such a thin gaming laptop with as much performance as they have available, and under load, the P35X delivers impressive results. The cooling system, although loud, does a great job or removing spent heat and keeping the system temperatures in check. Being able to manually adjust the fan speeds is also a great feature that should be standard on all gaming laptops. You get a ton of ports, lots of expansion, real memory slots, and a lot of the things that have been going away on many devices these days. Although this is not a device for everyone, for those looking for a powerful but thin gaming laptop that is relatively light, the Gigabyte P35X v3 deserves some consideration.
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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.