Rut, Dissonance and Battery Life

While the CPU and GPU performance of the Gigabyte P34W v5 is generally pretty good, thermal performance is not. Make no mistake: this laptop runs hot and loud, and it's sure to irritate users who plan on gaming without a decent gear up of racket-cancelling headphones.

I'll start by discussing the thermal performance. Clearly Gigabyte'southward ii fan solution with minimal vents is not good enough for cooling a 45W CPU and 75W GPU. With a combined 120W of power to dissipate, the body takes on a significant corporeality of this thermal load, causing some parts of the laptop'south underside to exceed 60°C while gaming. With the body getting this hot, the P34W v5 is essentially unusable on your lap, especially with whatever sort of directly pare contact.

On height of that, the keyboard itself gets to around 45°C in some places, particularly on the right-manus side. Luckily, the primary gaming keys on the left are kept to 35°C or under, but the heat output on the correct is not great. And then there'southward the rut output from the fans themselves, which can accident a lot of hot air onto whatever is backside the laptop, which volition probably be on your desk considering the device'south hot underside.

Fifty-fifty during idle or light tasks like web browsing, the bottom of the P34W v5 could be as hot as 38°C, which feels pretty warm on your legs, for example.

Things become even worse when looking at what temperatures the components themselves report. Both the GPU and the CPU reach upwards of 78°C during load, which is pretty hot, especially for the CPU. Considering it is sometimes possible to overclock these parts, I'd say in that location is pretty much no overclocking headroom in the P34W v5, and you certainly wouldn't want to push the case temperatures above threescore°C.

The dissonance of the P34W v5'due south fans during gaming is only as much of a concern as the heat output. While playing Grand Theft Automobile V on maximum book from the laptop's congenital-in speakers, I could still clearly hear the loftier-pitched whine of the organisation'south two fans piercing through the game'due south sound. The sound is very reminiscent of a jet engine, and apace becomes annoying afterward a short flow of gameplay.

A solution to the noise issue is to merely play games with a pair of headphones on, which I expect most gamers volition do anyhow. But if you're the sort of gamer who likes external speakers, or perhaps wants to use the laptop's speakers, unfortunately you're going to have to deal with the laptop's noisy cooling system, which as well happens to not be very effective.

The battery included in the P34W v5 is a 61.25 Wh not-removable lithium ion unit, which is not particularly large for this class of laptop. In comparison, the MacBook Pro 13-inch packs a 74.nine Wh bombardment in a smaller trunk, while the competing 14-inch Razer Blade gaming laptop packs a 70 Wh battery into a thinner design.