Gigabyte announce new slimline gaming laptop

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Taiwanese tech giant, Gigabyte, announced this week their latest slimline gaming notebook, the 14-inch P34G v2. It's a thin 'n' light laptop that's supposedly "perfect for any corporate worker who needs a reliable laptop by day and then wants to play demanding games after work."

The GK104 Kepler chip should deliver impressive gaming performance at the 1080p native res of the 14-inch screen, but will kick out a lot of heat in return. When I checked out Gigabyte's GTX 765M-powered P35K it made a lot of noise when gaming because of the svelte chassis and the heat it needed to disperse.

The GM107 Maxwell GPU that appear in some versions of the 860M is relatively lower-powered, but will still give a pretty decent level of gaming performance. It's not in the same league as the Kepler version, but will have significantly less impact on battery and your ears. The Kepler GPU is only likely to give you 90 minutes of gaming on battery, at best.

The new P34G v2 has got three modes of fan speed, so maybe we'll at least be able to tone down the VTOL-esque roar that it might otherwise create. That 14-inch 1080p screen looks pretty interesting too—it's an AHVA screen rather than the dreaded TN or IPS and that means it'll have excellent viewing angles and blacks inkier than a scared squid.

My review sample is on order as I type and it'll be available later this month for around $1,400 / £990.

Dave James
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.