The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop

Final 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.