Gigabyte P15F review

Unsurprisingly, processor performance is excellent. The quad-core, 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710MQ is a proven success and enduringly popular with performance laptop builders, providing near-desktop levels of performance for every laptop we test it in. This were not different with the P15F where, with 8GB of RAM, it managed an overall score of 89 in our multimedia benchmarks. Multitasking was particularly strong; it scored 98 in this test, just two points off our reference Core i5 desktop machine. This laptop will race through simple Windows tasks and browsing the web, and is no slouch when editing videos and photos, either.

Fan noise isn’t too big an issue; while whooshing sounds were certainly audible, we wouldn’t call them intrusive. Nonetheless, if you want quality audio you should invest in a set of desktop speakers or headphones because the ones built into the chassis are typically average for a laptop, lacking depth and volume.

Graphics performance comes from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 850M, which is a cheap mid-range chip that can hold its own in some modern games. In our Dirt Showdown benchmark at Ultra settings and Full HD resolution it was able to output an average frame rate of 41.7fps. Dirt Showdown is a few years old but there are plenty of visual effects that challenge modern graphics cards. The much trickier Crysis 3 proved to be a bigger challenge, with an average frame rate at High settings and 4x anti aliasing yielding a jerky 19fps. Dropping anti aliasing to 1x or 0x, lowering texture details to Low improved things to a more playable 37.5fps. If you have trouble running some titles from 2014 and 2015 on this machine, dropping the resolution to 1,600×900 will also help significantly. Modern games aren’t out of the reach of this laptop, but you’ll need to tweak them to make them playable.

The Gigabyte P15 is a good-looking 15.6 laptop that’s also very powerful, but it’s currently too expensive compared to its competition. At the moment, the Scan 3XS Graphite LG156, which has a more powerful graphics card is the best choice.