The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop

Display

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.