Rivalling desktop graphics is tough for any notebook, but in a thin ’n light?
When Nvidia pulled the wraps off its GeForce GTX 980M mobile graphics chip, the internets burst alive with much rejoicing; at last, here was a laptop GPU that could give the best desktop graphics cards a run for their money. Well, kinda.
Make no mistake, the 980 looks mega on paper. With 1,536 Maxwell-style shaders and a baseclock north of 1GHz, the 980M is one hell of a GPU by any metric, including the desktop. What it’s not is unique in history. In fact, to reach what’s arguably the golden age of laptop gaming you have to wind the clock right back to 2005 and the GeForce Go 7800 GTX, a mobile GPU with the same number of pipes and shaders as the fastest desktop graphics of the day.
In that context, we’re actually disappointed that the 980M doesn’t have all 2,048 of its shaders switched on. The 980M is based on the same GM204 chip as the desktop 980, but lacks 512 shaders.
That minor point aside, we can introduce the vehicle for our first taste of the 980M, Gigabyte’s P35X v3. We’ve seen the P35 before, of course, and all of what we previously liked remains. It’s impressively thin and light for such a powerful mobile rig. Likewise, Gigabyte has done a decent job keeping the power brick non-presposterous in terms of proportions, especially since the P35 houses a quad-core Intel Core i7-4710HQ chip too.
It’s the quad-core CPU du jour for this kind of lappie and none the worse for it. With a baseclock of 2.5GHz and a maximum Turbo speed of 3.5GHz, it has more than enough performance to deliver on the P35’s gaming core competence. That it also delivers nearly four hours of HD video playback on battery power is pretty nice, too.
Where this system differs from P35s passim is the screen. It’s a glorious IPS panel with 2,880 by 1,620 pixels. Immediately, we’re worried about overkill. After all, this is a 15-inch mobile rig: surely 1,080p is plenty – and don’t forget about Windows traditional resolution scaling f-wittery. But here’s the thing; the ultra-dense pixel grid doesn’t just get close to making anti-aliasing redundant, it also means non-native resolutions look less blurry and interpolated.
That’s intriguing because, although the 980M makes an incredibly good fist of gaming at that ludicrous 2,880 by 1,620 pixel native resolution, for truly smooth frames rates you’re going to either need to play without anti-aliasing or drop down to 1,080p.
Our one major worry is heat management. For starters, this notebook is offensively loud in-game when the fans spool up. We also doubt how long this system can realistically manage the high GPU temps. The Heaven benchmark was reporting 85 degrees out of the box and it’s not at all unusual for laptops to develop cooling problems over time. The P35’s thinness and lightness looks great at first, but may end up being a longterm liability. Jeremy Laird
Bonkers screen, crazy performance, insanely loud. We just worry if life expectancy is as good as you’d hope…
VITAL STATISTICS
Price £1,599
Manufacturer Gigabyte
Web www.gigabyte.com
CPU Intel Core i7-4710HQ
GPU GeForce GTX 980M
Memory 16GB
Storage 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD
Screen size 15.6-inch
Native resolution 2,880 x 1,620
Dimensions 270 x 20.9 x 385mm
Weight 5.5kg