Gigabyte P34Wv5 Laptop Review

Not too long ago, I reviewed the Gigabyte P35, which sported a power block big enough to club a passing vagrant with. Thankfully, the P34 is smaller in every way, from the size of the screen to the size of the power block...

The P34 has a 14 inch QHD screen, GTX970M graphics card, i7-6700HQ processor and 16GB RAM. The hard drive it comes with is 1TB, but it also has a 128GB SSD which Windows is installed on.

In the box you get the laptop, manual, warranty, two-part power back, setup DVD and a copy of PowerDVD 12. However, you don’t get a DVD drive. The laptop has plenty of USB ports, and even two hard drives (one of which is an SSD), but absolutely no optical drive. Three USBs, one USB-C, an HDMI, an ethernet port, VGA socket and even an SD card reader -- but once again I stress -- not even a space where a DVD drive could fit. So if you’re all about watching DVDs on the move, then I’ll tell you right now that you won’t enjoy this laptop without an external drive.

The laptop itself feels solid, with a plastic underneath being quite a surprise. I was certain it was metal -- and it’s made me doubt the rest of the case. One problem I had with the P35 was that USBs stuck out quite a bit from the case. The P34 doesn’t have this problem, with there being only a little metal still visible when a USB is inserted.

I decided to try my go-to game Elite Dangerous: Horizons, which played well, but I had to come off after about an hour. I felt that, despite being propped up to leave the fans uncovered, it was about to turn itself off due to overheating -- or the fan might ping off in some Final Destination-style murder accident. However, the fans did manage to cool the P34 down really quickly. I also played Mad Max for half an hour with it unplugged, and it warned that I only had seven minutes of battery life left after a full charge, when I exited the game. Both games performed perfectly, with no slow-down or missing textures anywhere, so I can confirm this works well as a gaming laptop.

The recommended resolution for the display is 2560 x 1440, which does look good on the 3K IPS screen, it makes all of the text in Windows look too small. I know it’s a laptop, but I shouldn’t have to move my head towards my lap just to see text… I have 20/20 vision, so there’s no situation where I wouldn’t be able to see text.

The keyboard is very responsive, with no sponginess to the keys, and it's even backlit. The trackpad is much better than the P35, which has the left and right buttons as part of the pad itself. The P34 has a completely separate button, meaning that clicking won't accidentally move the cursor a few pixels to the side.

So perhaps the P34 isn’t a perfect gaming laptop, but if you’re looking for something to watch Amazon or Netflix on, and do some occasional AAA gaming, then certainly consider it.