Two chips. One laptop. What’s that remind us of...
OK, maybe not. But the Gigabyte P55K in this revised v4 format does come with plenty of interesting newness. Don’t let its familiar threads fool you. For starters, the fancy Core i7-5700HQ CPU debuts Intel’s new Broadwell architecture in quad-core format for laptops. In outright performance terms, it’s not a dramatic step forward over older Haswell models.
It’s a sweet chip with Hyper threading and a top Turbo speed of 3.5GHz. It’s just not going to rock your world if you’ve experienced a Haswell mobile quad. Well, apart from battery life. Your mileage will vary depending on usage, but our testing suggests you get up to five hours HD video playback in flight mode. That’s pretty bloody solid for a 15.6-inch gaming laptop.
The P55K’s other intrigue involves its graphics chip, the nifty new Nvidia GTX 965M. Right away, you should be wondering exactly what GTX 965M means. There is no GTX 965 desktop card, just 960 and then 970. Fire up GPU-Z and the first numbers you’ll spot are the 1,024 CUDA cores and 128-bit memory bus. Ah, it’ll be a GM 207 chip as per the GTX 960, then.
But hang on. GPU-Z also shows a GM 204 chip ticking away. That’s the much bigger beast that powers the GTX 970 and 980 desktop boards. Long story short, the 965M is a GM 204 chip with half of the good bits turned off.Why not just use theGM207 chip?Who knows or really cares.
As it happens, the 965M chip makes for a nice match with the P55K’s rather lovely 1080p LCD panel. As our benchmarks show, at native res and maxed out, most games are pretty playable. That applies even to Shadow of Mordor with its über-textures enabled. You’re still looking at average frame rates in the 30s. Wind back on just a few settings for serious smoothness. The bad news involves noise. The P55K is a whiney little bitch under full gaming load.
While we’re talking graphics, what about mobile G-Sync? That’s Nvidia’s game smoothing tech that syncs graphics output with display refresh rates. For G-Sync to be functional in a laptop system, you need the Nvidia graphics directly connected to the laptop’s LCD panel via embedded DisplayPort. This immediately throws up an incompatibility with Nvidia’s Optimus tech, which routes the discrete GPU’s output through the Intel-integrated video port. And thus, no direct connection twixt Nvidia graphics and the panel. The P55K does indeed implement Optimus. And thus our take is that you’ll likely never be able to switch on G-Sync.
As for the rest of the P55K, it’s a pretty nice portable. The chassis sports some really nice plastics. Of course, they’re still plastics. The likes of a MacBook have nothing to fear. Still, the keyboard is seriously slick, free from flex and deftly backlit. Even better, however, is the LCD display. It’s a wide-angle IPS effort with a 1080p native and it’s absolutely glorious. Games, movies and even the Windows desktop look gorgeous.
If we’re being really picky, we’d say the mSATA Liteon SSD is a bit disappointing given the advantages of the latest M.2 drives. And at 128GB, it’s not exactly huge, even if there’s a 1TB magnetic drive to back it up. But the fact that all of this is yours for around the £1,000 mark means we’re willing to allow a little leeway. It’s a very appealing all-round package and a lovely little gaming portable. JEREMY LAIRD
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i7-5700HQ
GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M
RAM 8GB DDR3
Screen 15.6-inch, IPS, 1920 x 1080
Chipset Intel HM97
Storage 128GB mSATA SSD, 1TB HDD
Weight 2.5kg