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Gigabyte P15F review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £785
inc VAT

A perfectly capable desktop replacement laptop, but it's not much cheaper than its rivals

Gigabyte’s P15F 15.6in laptop is a reasonably portable desktop replacement laptop with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor and a midrange graphics card for gaming and graphics work.

While Gigabyte has used a standard Clevo chassis, it has at least had it customised and improved. On other laptops we’ve seen that use this case have had rather cheap, plastic lids; Gigabyte has used a good-looking soft-touch matt black plastic that feels much more pleasant and also looks more stylish thanks to gently tapering edges. This material does show some greasy marks, although it’s not as bad as some other laptop lids. The palm rest is made of a different matt black plastic that doesn’t pick up grease quite so easily.

Sadly, Gigabyte hasn’t done anything to address the quality of the keyboard. Its keys are spongy and don’t have much travel to them, so they’re not particularly pleasant to use and typing becomes tiresome after long periods.

With such a big chassis, there’s plenty of room of ports: there’s a DVD drive, two USB ports (one USB3) and two 3.5mm audio jacks on the right, while the left side has a VGA port, HDMI connector, eSATA (doubling up as USB3) and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

A 1TB hybrid hard disk is included, which gives an 8GB high-performance solid-state storage cache for faster boot times and loading times of your most frequently used applications. You don’t get an SSD, though, which is a shame, as we’ve seen other laptops at this price with one.

Gigabyte’s screen isn’t very good, and we’ve seen better choices in this chassis. While our colour calibrator showed its overall accuracy was reasonable at 78.9%, colours appear cold and a little washed out. This isn’t helped by poor contrast levels of just 256:1 and very poor viewing angles, which make the overall viewing experience pretty disappointing. Games and movies simply won’t look that good on this laptop, which is what we’d expect buyers of this laptop will spend a fair amount of time doing.

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Core specs
ProcessorQuad-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710MQ
RAM8GB
Memory slots (free)2 (0)
Max memory16GB
Size374x252x31.4mm
Weight2.5kg
SoundRealtek HD Audio (2x 3.5mm audio ports)
Pointing deviceTouchpad
Display
Screen size15.6in
Screen resolution1,920×1,080
TouchscreenNo
Graphics adaptorNvidia GeForce GTX 850M
Graphics outputsHDMI, VGA
Graphics memory2GB
Storage
Total storage1TB hybrid hard disk, 8GB SSD cache
Optical drive typeDVD drive
Ports and expansion
USB ports1x USB2, 3xUSB3
BluetoothYes
Networking802.11n Wi-Fi, gigabit Ethernet
Memory card readerSD, MMC
Other portseSATA
Miscellaneous
Operating systemWindows 8.1
Operating system restore optionWindows 8 restore
Buying information
Parts and labour warrantyTwo-years RTB
Price inc VAT£785
Detailswww.gigabyte.com
Supplierwww.ebuyer.com
Part numberP15F v2 

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