The Gigabyte P35X v3 Review: Slim GTX980M Gaming Laptop

Gigabyte has refreshed its P35 series to include the latest NVIDIA GPUs, and the P35X is the top model in their 15.6 inch lineup. Gigabyte has the lightest GTX980M gaming laptop available, with the P35X v3 coming in at just 2.3 kg (5.07 lbs) thanks to the all-aluminum chassis. At just 20.9 mm (0.82”) thick, it is a fairly portable laptop considering the components inside.

Buyers should not be short on computing power. The P35X comes equipped with the Intel Core i7-4710HQ processor, which has a TDP of 47 watts for the four cores to play in. The base frequency is 2.5 GHz with a turbo of 3.5 GHz. Optionally, you can opt for the i7-4720HQ, which is 100 MHz more of both base and turbo frequency, or Gigabyte is even offering the i7-4860HQ which is 2.4-3.6 GHz and comes with the Iris Pro 5200 GPU. The GTX980M is top tier as well, with 8 GB of GDDR5 memory available. System memory is a solid 16 GB, which is plenty for any gaming scenario and also a good amount for doing things like virtual machines or the like. Storage is likely not going to be a problem either, with the P35X coming standard with two 128 GB SSDs in RAID0 as the system drives, and an additional 1 TB 7200 rpm hard disk for extra storage. The P35X even has an optical drive as an option, but the optical drive can be removed to save weight, or an additional storage drive can be used instead, meaning the P35X has room for four drives!

Gigabyte P35X v3 compared to 14" ThinkPad

A lot of that comes down to the large body of a 15.6 inch laptop. Although a 14 inch and 15.6 inch laptop sound like they are pretty close in size, in reality a 15.6 inch device is significantly larger in every dimension. This opens up a lot of space for things like extra cooling, additional storage, more ports, and much more space for the keyboard of course, so the P35X features a number pad on the right side.

Below is a table of the specifications of the P35X for reference.

As you can see, the P35X is a well configured device, with 802.11ac wireless, a large battery, and plenty of ports. This laptop has almost every port that has ever been available on a laptop, with Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, mini DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA, a SPDIF headphone jack, and a SD card reader. The word kitchen sink comes to mind, but there is plenty of real estate to add the ports, so it is hard to complain about them being there.

Gigabyte has made a great choice with the display as well. The 15.6 inch diagonal display has a 1920x1080 as the base model, or optionally you can go with the 2880x1620 version like the review sample that Gigabyte has sent. The resolution is not unique to this device, but it works very well for a gaming laptop. The resolution is not so high that you need to use really high scaling on the desktop, nor is it so high that the GTX980M will struggle excessively at this resolution when gaming. You may have to turn the resolution down a notch or two for some of the newest games, but as we will see in the GPU performance section, many games are very playable at the native resolution of the panel.

There is quite a bit of competition in this space, but if you are looking for a powerful and portable gaming system, the P35X has a lot to offer. On paper, it should be able to trade blows with any other 15.6 inch system, so let’s dig into the aspects of the laptop and see how it holds up under closer inspection.