Gigabyte's been crafting plenty of gaming laptops over the past few months, and each one looks to improve on the previous version with improved specs and hardware. Enter the Gigabyte P37W v4, the latest machine from the Taiwanese manufacturer, and it sports a hefty 17.3-inch display and plenty of speedy guts all crammed into a 22.5mm thick chassis. Big, yet slim, is the P37W your next gaming laptop? We fired one up to find out.
The good
We're used to seeing gaming laptops land like huge tank-like behemoths on our desks, so it's refreshing to see a manufacturer focusing on slimming its machines down - yet not compromising on its specs. Gigabyte's P37W is pretty thin for its class, as most 17.3-inch laptops are usually comically thick, but it's still fairly heavy at 2.7kg. Owe that to its top-class specs packed in, as it's powered by a hefty quad-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 processor, a meaty 16GB of RAM while Nvidia's powerful GeForce GTX 970M chip takes care of all your graphical needs. It comes with a 1TB hard drive along with a 256GB SSD, giving you both plenty of storage and a speedy drive for the apps and games you access often.
Those speedy specs mean the P37W flies, powering its way through apps and games with ease - and while it sports a large display, it only packs in a 1080p screen, meaning the graphics chip doesn't have to work as hard as it would if there was a Quad HD or 4K display included. That means you get to crank the graphics quality right up in your favourite games, all while keeping the frame rate ticking at a rapid pace. You won't be disappointed by the performance on offer here, as it's capable of handling some of the most demanding games with ease, including our tests with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, DiRT Rally and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
As a gaming laptop, you'll find some bits and pieces tailored to that market, including programmable macro keys and a backlit keyboard (complete with WASD markings) - but they're not as in-your-face as other laptops out on the market, and the whole laptop itself looks fairly understated and non-obnoxious. Our biggest surprise with the P37W though, was its battery life: usually we expect to see laptops of this size and specs chomp through battery life quickly, but the P37W managed to keep on trucking well beyond our expectations. On a typical day with some light gaming, regular browsing, word processing and the odd video thrown in, we saw the P37W grab around five hours of battery which is pretty good, especially considering its power.
The bad
Not every laptop is perfect though, and we found a few complaints about Gigabyte's P37W. The keyboard itself feels rather cramped, even though there's plenty of space on a 17.3-inch laptop for a slightly larger set of keys. We'd even be happy to completely nix the full sized numpad for a more spacious keyboard, while the keys themselves are competent to type with too - it's just a shame that it all feels rather shoehorned together.
There's also the trackpad to consider, as it shares a few problems that other Windows notebooks fall foul of too: it's just not accurate enough. We found the cursor would often skip and jump around, while gestures would simply not work all of the time. It's also fairly small considering the size of the laptop, and we wish it'd take a page from HP's book and craft a much wider trackpad that's actually accurate.
The bottom line
Gigabyte's P37W v4 is one of the fastest laptops we've had the pleasure of using, and its battery life isn't as bad as we were expecting from a gaming laptop. It is ridiculously expensive though at around £1,450, and the keyboard and trackpad could be a whole lot better. Still, in its class of 17.3-inch laptops, it's one of the best.
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