Gigabyte P27 high-performance laptop: Review

High-performance laptops can be a pig-in-a-poke. The Gigabyte P27, though, shouldn't disappoint - except in terms of the quality of its loudspeakers

On many Christmas lists this year - for children young and old - will be gaming laptops. Or, at least, laptops capable of doing more than just surfing the web and running office applications, with screens better than the pokey 14" displays bolted on to the typical office laptop.

The trouble is, at the £1,000 price-point that gaming laptops typically start, the market is full of devices that struggle to live up to their billing, let alone run Bioshock Infinite or Crysis 3 in the full glory expected of such machines.

For example, some are specced up with solid-state disks (SSDs), but lack the capacity to store someone's gaming catalogue. Others - and this is especially common in laptops - will have graphics cards that, while superficially good, are under-powered. And then, if the laptop is purchased over the internet, the buyer may find that while the screen offers 1,920 by 1,080 graphics, the colours are washed out of the viewing angles poor.

Buyers should therefore beware.

One of the devices that will be on many a Christmas list this year will no doubt be the Gigabyte P27, one of the latest models from the Taiwanese company best known for its motherboards - but earning a growing reputation for its high-end laptops.

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The Gigabyte P27 is no slim and sexy MacBook clone - it's got a 17-inch high-resolution screen in its angular, no-nonsense case, and Gigabyte hasn't sought to shoe-horn everything into the slimmest case imaginable. Well, with a 17-inch screen, what's the point?

The first thing that's readily apparent when the P27 is unpacked and plugged in is that it has the robust feel of a genuine high-end machine. It feels solid, as if it were hewn rather than made, and the keyboard, although of a MacBook/chiclet style, is likewise solid and not rattley. The touchpad keys are similarly quiet.

So far so good. The P27 has the reassuring feel of the kind of "mobile workstation" that architects or engineers might use. It is also a pleasure to type with and, rarely, the touchpad does not get in the way of typing, although for touch typists it would perhaps have been better sited 1cm to the left.

The P27 comes in a variety of specs. The device we reviewed sported a mobile Intel Core i7-4700MQ microprocessor running at 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and 8GB of memory. Even better, it sported a 100GB SSD to run the Windows 8 operating system alongside a 1TB conventional hard-disk drive.

This is an excellent combination as it ensures that Windows 8 runs speedily and responsively (no hanging around for the disk-drive to chunder to find a mere drop-down menu), while the user should have sufficient capacity to run AutoCAD, Blender, Revit, Office, Civilisation V, Left for Dead 2 and all the other really useful applications no PC should be without.

It was noticeable, though, that chunky programs like GIMP didn't load up any faster. ie: the SSD isn't also caching frequently accessed files. But this is a minor quibble. In operation, such applications proved fast and responsive, while the laptop remained mercifully silent. Even when the fan did spring into action it did so with only the faintest of whirring - not like on some mobile workstations we have used.

It played high-end games, such as Crysis 2 smoothly, as well as BBC iPlayer and other videos. But while it played the game Orcs Must Die smoothly enough, the opening video sequences proved excessively jerky, which surprised us.

Wi-Fi is also a cut above. Amazingly, it even connected flawlessly (with five bars, no less) to Incisive Media's normally shonky labs Wi-Fi, which is quite an achievement, and the device will starts from sleep in under three seconds - thanks to the in-built SSD and Windows 8.

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Gigabyte P27 high-performance laptop: Review

High-performance laptops can be a pig-in-a-poke. The Gigabyte P27, though, shouldn't disappoint - except in terms of the quality of its loudspeakers

This is where things get a bit trickier. All laptops these days come with Windows 8 built-in, which does have some advantages in terms of boot-up times over Windows 7. However, the touchscreen required to make full use of it would add extra weight to what is already a hefty machine in this day and age. Hence, the Gigabyte P27 has been shipped with a standard - although good quality - screen instead.

It isn't, strictly speaking, Gigabyte's fault, but the P27 also "lost" programs that had been freshly installed, with tiles failing to appear on the "start" screen and the search function, too, failing to locate them. It would be unfair, though, to whack Gigabyte for the failings of Microsoft's operating system.

But probably the biggest drawback of the P27, though, are the truly awful speakers. Sure, Gigabyte has gone to the trouble to locate them prominently on either side of the case, just above the keyboard. However, they are ear-bleedingly bad - tinnier than all the mines in Cornwall and a real let-down when the rest of the package is so good.

On the plus side, though, and unlike any MacBook produced these days, the Gigabyte P27 happily sports a DVD-drive so you're not restricted in terms of the media you can play on the device.

Conclusion

The P27 is a good quality, well-made all-rounder, that can readily turn its CPU cycles to work or play. Gigabyte, mercifully, haven't tried to imitate Apple and, given the 17-inch size of the screen, have designed a chassis that enables the device to comfortably and quietly run all the high-end components inside it without overheating.

In use, it feels like a quality device.

However, we did have some reservations: the speakers were terrible and anyone wanting to listen to music or games will be sorely disappointed. The battery, meanwhile, gave around four hours of use running normal office applications and web browsing - but much less playing games, as you would expect.

In addition, while the screen is good, the viewing angles it offers are far from market leading. We have tested sub-£200 tablet computers from Novatech and Prestigio recently that offer near-180-degree viewing angles. However, with the prices we've seen quoted online at below £1,100 (£1076.60 at www.scan.co.uk at time of writing), we'd say that's a good deal for the package.

It is a very well designed laptop, that is both robust and quiet, and a pleasure to use as a result. The guts of many mobile workstations and gaming laptops struggle inside the case in which they were shoe-horned, especially after a couple of years when dust has coated all the small vents and little heat sinks that consequently struggle to cool the device down when it was new.

Provided that you don't intend to carry it around every day, the P27 is decent, high-end lap top, but one best suited for lugging between living room and study, rather than to work and back every day.

But Gigabyte, please - for goodness sake - do something about the truly awful loudspeakers.

[Next page: Our rating, pros, cons and raw specs]

Gigabyte P27 high-performance laptop: Review

High-performance laptops can be a pig-in-a-poke. The Gigabyte P27, though, shouldn't disappoint - except in terms of the quality of its loudspeakers

Rating: 4/5

Pros

Cons

Benchmarks

Tool: PC Benchmark

GPU Test: 10,309.41

RAM Test: 881.88 MB/s

CPU Test:

Single threaded - 137.8 MB/s

Multi-threaded - 497.15 MB/s

Threads - 10 (3.61)

Disk Test:

Linear - 297.67 MB/s (write); 481.2 MB/s (read)

512k - 274.1 MB/s (write); 303.45 MB/s (read)

4k - 14.25 MB/s (write); 16.72 MB/s (read)

Specifications: Gigabyte P27K

Microprocessor: Intel Core i7-4700MQ

Graphics card: nVidia GTX 765M, two gigabytes (GB)

Memory: 8GB

SSD: 128GB

Conventional HDD: One terabyte

Screen size: 17.3"

Weight: 3.2 kilos

Size: 27.8cm by 41.3cm. 4.9cm height

Price: £1,100 (Scan.co.uk)