A top gaming laptop at a reasonable price? What’s the catch?
When it comes to gaming-capable laptops at this price point, the P55W v4 faces some stiff competition. Yet based purely on specs, it certainly gets off to a solid start: it’s about the cheapest 15.6-inch laptop you’ll find that packs a top-end Core i7 CPU, GeForce GTX graphics chip and both an SSD and secondary hard drive for storage. And those aren’t budget parts — they’re basically just a step or two down from the top spec, meaning overall performance is first-rate.
The all-important gaming performance was bang on what we’ve seen from other laptops sporting the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. With Ultra graphics settings at the screen’s native 1080p resolution, you’ll get around 40-50fps in newer titles and 70-80fps in less-demanding games. Those are definitely playable frame rates, and you can often double them by turning down the detail settings to High.
The CPU is one of Intel’s latest fifth-generation Core i processors — the speedy quad-core i7-5700HQ. It outperforms the previous gen i7-4710HQ (as seen in many other laptops around this price) by around 5-10% in CPU-intensive tasks, like media encoding.
Even the storage is better than average. While that 128GB main SSD (a well-specced SATA 6Gbps model) is a little smaller than we’d ideally have liked (256GB would at least give you some room for games, which will realistically need to be stored on the secondary 1TB Hitachi storage drive) just having an SSD at this price really is a bonus — it makes a huge difference to boot time and overall system responsiveness.
Although the P55W’s charcoal-grey exterior is entirely plastic, this is still a handsome laptop — and in some ways, it looks a bit better than mixed-finish laptops (sporting metal on the lid and keyboard deck) because its finish is more consistent. Even the orange ‘racing stripes’ — new to this v4 model — aren’t too ostentatious; they’re enough to give it some personality without screaming ‘I’m a gaming laptop!’
The P55W does have some drawbacks, though we wouldn’t call any of them serious. It’s not particularly portable, for example. You could carry it around if needs be, but at 2.63kg for the laptop and another 700g for the charger, it’s venturing into the ‘pull your shoulder off’ zone.
And there are a couple of spots where the P55W’s performance could have been better — specifically, battery life and heat. Unplugged, this unit can stretch to 2.5 hours in lighter workloads (like web surfing), but that drops to under 2 hours when you push it in more demanding tasks. And speaking of, the CPU hits a toasty 95ºC under load, while the GPU reaches 83ºC, so the cooling system here isn’t the most efficient — compare those to the similar Venom Blackbook 15’s 74ºC and 70ºC, respectively, and there’s a pretty stark difference. Regardless, the P55W v4’s temperature measurements are technically within the spec for those parts, although it’s worth noting that they will also heat up surrounding components.
Some shortcomings are to be expected when you’re getting this high-value hardware, of course, and none of these are what we’d classify as deal-breakers. If you’re on a tight budget and you want all the performance you can get, this one’s a solid choice. Dan Gardiner
Punches above its weight in terms of specs for dollars, but heat and battery life could use improvement.