Sleek, powerful, well built – The Gigabyte P37X is a decent buy if you’re after a 17″ gaming laptop.

As usual, lets start with the exterior – it’s black brushed aluminium, which as usual is a huge fingerprint magnet! It does, however, look damn fine! You’ll also find a mirror finish Gigabyte logo on the top which adds to the overall sex-appeal, although any points added by that, are immediately detracted thanks to the front. Not only do the fairly good quality speaks point the wrong head (if you’re male), but there is a space at the front for a WAIT WHAT? A DVD DRIVE? On a high end gaming laptop! Comment and tell me why I’m wrong, but honestly, why is this here? Just like when you say something at a party that is meant to be a compliment, but comes out like you just b*tch slapped them, then save yourself from the impending doom – Gigabyte puts a and extra 2.5″ HDD/SSD tray that you can ridiculously easily swap out the DVD drive with. To make it clear, with the DVD drive in, you get a 1TB HDD, and depending on model, a 128GB or 256GB SSD – but with the HDD sled, you can put ANOTHER 2.5″ drive in, meaning you could throw another SSD in, or another HDD for all those steam games that you just seem to have installed even though you have never even launched the game…

Let’s take a look at the I/O. On the back you get a what tonne of ventilation for the load based fan profiles (which annoys me), on the right you’ll find DC in from the fairly large power brick, VGA (a bit dated, but cool if you use if for business too), HDMI, a charging USB 3 port and a standard USB 3 port, as well as a mini-DisplayPort. On the left you get headphone and microphone jacks, an SD card reader, 2 USB 2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and a Kensington lock slot – and that’s about it. Good collection.

To talk a little about why I’m mentioned raging inferno’s and the large amount of ventilation – thanks to the GTX 980m in here, alongside the traditionally rather warm i7-4720HQ, these chips heat this rather skinny laptop up rather easily. In fact, the core i7 hit (and stayed at) 97 degrees Celsius! You could pretty much boil water with that. You could cook a full english breakfast on that. And the GPU didn’t help, it began throttling at 80°c.

Let’s talk about the keyboard – I’ll be straight with you. I don’t like it. It’s spaced out well, no sins, it even has five – five layer macro keys on the left – but to actually type on the thing… I don’t know. Maybe if I’d actually lived with it and just it for a few weeks I could have gotten used to it, but for me the actual key presses only registered if the key was pressed square in the centre all the way down. And the spring system (I know it’s membrane so no actual springs, I mean the way the key is evenly returned to the correct position) wasn’t great. I should mention the keyboard has a white backlight with three settings, off, weak, and slightly less weak. Unlike the MSI laptops we have checked out in the past, which are a lot more flashy, you could take this into a board room and do a presentation with it, without raising too many eyebrows. As long as you didn’t do anything mildly intensive, then the fans would make the room sound like you just arrived in your private jet.

To go back to the keyboard quickly, the macro keys have 5 layers, each shown with different colour on the layer switching button at the top. The software included with the laptop, including the macro software, felt a bit 1990s. It was a bit limited, and felt strange having lots of separate applications that all looked quite different to control things, like the general settings menu. Again, just my opinion.

 

The matte 1080p screen is pretty good, it’s IPS, but it seems to be really dim – even at full brightness! The actual quality is great, but you’ll only be able to use it in darker areas, so keep that in mind if you do get it.

Battery Life

Something people always ask, and for good reason, is about the battery life, and here’s the stats.

Web browsing/light use: 3 hours (This is with my used review unit, expect around 4 from a brand new unit)

Gaming: 45 mins (again, expect around an hour from new)

Benchmarks

Here it is, the numbers:

Games	avg	min	max	avg	min	max
	Gigabyte P37X 980m			MSI GS70 970m
Bioshock	129	88	190	106	85	130
BF4	64	51	83	52	37	69
Grid 2	101	81	121	93	75	111
Ungine	74	16	145	57	25	119
GTA V	90	70	109	57	45	65
Temp	80 limit?			76
CPU Temp	97			86

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My answer to that, despite the badly layed out keyboard – is the GS70. I know, it has less performance and gets almost as hot, but the heat is distributed evenly across the laptop making it still usable – and it’s more flashy which is a bit more my style! Don’t get me wrong, this laptop would be great for someone – it’s just that someone isn’t me.I’ve tagged on the GS70 970m results too, just to show you the difference. Please note, these laptops cost the same, depending on HDD/SSD capacity and RAM size – so which one would you go for? Leave a comment below!