Review: Gigabyte P15F- Budget gaming (HD, 4710QM and GTX 850m)

Preliminarily review- First Impressions

First review of this laptop (in the world)-



Specifications:
The Nvidia GTX 850M (2GB) ranks 40th for its’ performance ( Reference). It comes with 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz Ram (1x stick) and an Intel Core i7-4710MQ 2.5GHz - 3.5GHz (47W, 6MB Cache). The icing on the cake was the 2 year International warranty (including pickup/return within Australia)
Hard drive capabilities are very good- it comes stock with an optical drive SSD/HDD cradle. So you can seamlessly pop your hard drive straight in. It can support 4 Hard drives in total (2x mSATA SSD's and 2x SATA HDD’s).

Product page

I bought it from eStore Australia- despite the little detail on their site, very good customer support and was at my door after 2 days.




This hits a unique spot in the market, for me. I wanted a laptop suitable for:

• Work/the professional environment
• Occasional gaming
• Reasonably slim(not ultra, but thinner than standard gaming/entry level)
• Comfortable for web design, video editing and photo shop (so 1920x1080).
• Outdoor use (Matte display)
• Reasonable battery (4hr minimum)

Laptops considered:

• Gigabyte P15F v2 (~$1220AUD purchased)

• Dell 15 1500 (~$999AUD special)

For the saving of ~$200, I didn’t think it was worth jumping down to the Dell. The only benefit was the touch screen. The Radeon R7 r265M GPU is ranked significantly lower than the 850M (135th vs 40th), and it was quite a bit thicker (438mm vs 314mm). On top, the Gigabyte gives a 2 year international warranty.

• Gigabyte P35G (~$1549AUD)

This is a slimmer (209mm vs 314), lighter (2.2kg vs 2.5kg) version of the P15F, carries a GTX 860m (4GB) and has up to 7 hours battery. Costing around 30-50% more than the P15F, I decided against it as performance wise it wasn’t much of a jump (860m ranks 35th, however the performance increase is said to be around ~25-35%).




I had 2 big concerns before buying this:

• Battery life- Being such an unknown laptop, I could not find any idea of it’s’ battery life. Doing some calculations I figured it should last for around 4 hours with standard use
• Gigabyte- A relatively new Laptop manufacturer for Australia. I have no idea of their reputation. 2 year international warranty definitely helped eliminate my concerns.

So far:

• Reasonably slim (314mm)
• Great shape- angles make it far less cumbersome than others I considers (such as the Dell Inspiron 15 1500)
• Optical drive bay- SSD cartridge comes in the box
  
  
• Battery has been okay. Took 3hrs 40 minutes to reach 10% under medium use (Youtube, and installing programs)
• Screen flexibility could be better- being a non-IPS screen the viewing angles aren't great. So when viewing it whilst standing (for example) you can't lay the screen out flat (like on other laptops I've used)...
  
  
• Screen: brightness seems a little dim and viewing angles are bad. Is there a technical reason for either of these issues?
• Power adapter a little heavy- is this unavoidable with this kind of powerful laptop?
• Touch pad- software missing some key features I like (ie like tap zones for actions like mute, minimize etc. (maybe I can replace it with Synaptics software- will report back)
• Possibly a noisy fan

Plans for further review:

1. General usage after 1 week (using Windows 7)
2. Gaming (Hareware temps)
3. Noise levels
4. Battery analysis
5. Customer support/service from Gigabyte

Any other requests/questions please go ahead and ask

NB: For those on 8.1, Windows Updates will fail and it's caused by HotFix KB2920189. The P15 installs it, then on reboot it takes about 30 minutes as it says "Could not install update. Undoing changes"

 

Nice review. I have the P35G V2 and I don't think the bloatware is that bad.

 

Thanks. Thought the world needed a review of this device!

How is the battery life on the P35G v2? That is my only real reservation about the P15F

 

What about cooling thats always a big problem with laptops

 

I'm yet to try any games on this, still working out some drama's with Windows 8.1. Still issues with Microsoft. Think I'll be switching back to Windows 7

Will run a CPU/GPU temp monitoring program and report back

 

Do note that the GPU rankings that show the 850m only 5 spots below of the 860m doesn't tell the whole story. That may be using the GDDR5 version of the 850m. However, the laptop you've got actully houses the ddr3 version of the 850m. There is actually a ~25% difference between these. Regardless, the fact is, the difference between the 860m and the 850m you have is ~35%, a very significant amount.

 

Hey ycon
I'm about to take a plunge and buy one of these machines but you are (still!) the only person who has done a review - I'm keen to hear more about your concerns about the fan noise (general use and with games) and how the battery is fairing up. Any more updates or comments that you have would be appreciated.
cheers mate.

 

A few questions..
1. Is the start up and shut down time good?
2. Does it run heavyish duty games like halo or crysis?
3. (The most important one) is it worth it?

 

Is that flinders Street station I see in the background?
How's the overclocking on the GPU?

 

Hi Guys,

I ordered the Gigabyte P15F from Alternate today. I have two Questions: Is this Notebook comming with an Driver CD? And where can i download the Gigabyte Smart Manager for this Notebook? I mean this Manager: https://www.facebook.com/notes/gigabyte-nb/gigabyte-smart-manager/232779256744855 I dont find it on the Gigabyte Homepage.

Thx a lot!

 

1. From dead to desktop, it takes about a minute - 2 minutes. Same deal with shut down. Would love to test it with the OS on mSATA, but too cheap to actually get Windows legit.

2. I can run Spec Ops The Line and Bioshock Infinite on max settings at 1920x1080 with little frame rate drops or other issues, so I'd think it can do Halo. Would like to try Crysis on it though. Too bad I missed the sale on Steam a couple weeks ago.

3. Build quality is just okay, feels too plasticky, the screen is kind of average and the touchpad is horrendous, but considering what you get (1920*1080 screen, GTX 850m) it's well worth the asking price of 1249AU. I got it for cheaper than that though.

I've replaced the optical drive with a 1.5tb HDD and it was pain free. Hoping upgrading the RAM is the same story.

Also, I've just disabled automatic anything on updates and done everything manually. Had the same experience with 8.1 update 1 being bonked, so screw it.

 

Apologies for not responding sooner, forgot about this post.

Nope, it's in Sydney have a guess where...

And no overclocking was tried

Overall it hasn't been a great experience unfortunately. I returned the P15F a couple weeks ago and am awaiting a refund from the retailer (eStore). Overall issues with Windows 8 updates, a screen flickering line (hardware related) and lack of customer support (Gigabyte simply don't respond) led me to returning it.

Aside from that, it was heavier than I wanted (2.5kg), the battery is weak (2-3 hours) and the screen isn't good enough (imo). Viewing angels are poor- at no angle can you see all the colours displayed correctly.

 

how about the temperature at full load?