Gigabyte P34G Gaming Ultraportable Notebook Review & Unboxing
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,763 words · ~8 min read
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buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
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items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more so I knew Gigabyte made
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laptops but we'd never really encountered one that I looked at and I went holy crap we have to unbox that we
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have to show that to everyone this all changes with the p34g this is the first
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thing I've seen that I would consider to be a genuine competitor to the Razer
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Blade 14 now the Razer Blade 14 has a
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beautiful industrial design smoking
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Hardware that is to say it runs a little on the hot side and it's amazingly fast
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and one of the worst LCDs that I have seen on a laptop in the last 10
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years the p34g takes that 1600x 900 horrible TN
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panel LCD that's on the blade 14 and upgrades it to a 1920x 1080
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VA panel all right so instead of TN
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we're looking at an ahv panel which is going to mean better
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color reproduction and compromising perhaps a
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little bit on the response time from a gaming perspective now you might say
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well lonus I'm never willing to compromise on response time to which I would reply oh come on response time's
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important but when we're talking you know a panel that has color shift when
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you move sort of 3 in to the right or the left left that's uh that's not
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something that I'd consider to be acceptable so where do we compromise on
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this one well number one is build quality okay so the bottom of the unit
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is plastic what's good about it is we do have access to upgrade the components so
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it comes with a single 8 gig module of memory in this particular configuration
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but it can be upgraded to up to 16 gigs it comes with get this guys and this is
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another advantage over the blade 14 it comes with an MSA slot for an SSD and a
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2 and 1/2 in mounting point for a hard drive up to one tbte so you can have up
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to 256 gigs of SSD goodness and one tbte
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of storage for your OS and then all of your games and music and movies and all
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that good stuff super cool so there's two heat pipes going to each the CPU and
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the GPU you can actually kind of see them through that vent right there and they each exhaust separately from the
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back of the system and other than that there's not much of note on the bottom we got some little rubber feet and stuff
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like that okay all right another advantage against the blade 14 so
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Kensington Lo boom G give it Ethernet port why is there a VGA port on this
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laptop well in much the same way that the blade 14 is targeted to the
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traveling gamer you know the businessman who likes to kick back and play some
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games in the hotel room at the end of the day VGA is necessary it's necessary
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for business meetings because all them projectors and all them boardrooms
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support VGA only usb3 ports including
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Apparently one boosted one for faster charging a a headphone microphone combo
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Jack and then moving around to the other side we've got USB 2 then we've got
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another USB 2 a card reader HDMI out and
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wouldn't have minded seeing DisplayPort there and Power in all right so
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disadvantage against the blade 14 um this is quite a large power brick this
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isn't really something that I'd consider to be too awesome this is 6.15 amps 19.5
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volts Razer really did a great job on their power brick making it truly as
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portable as the laptop so you got to factor that into the size although the
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size is very similar to the blade the top of the unit Metal finish so that is
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not like the underside that's made of plas and then moving into the inside here ah
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yes okay so we've got I can't quite tell what yeah that looks like more plastic
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and then a metal finish on the inside so all the parts that you're actually going
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to touch are made of metal now I you note I haven't even talked about specs
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at all yet and that's because there's not really much to say it's about what
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you'd expect out of a modern laptop that you know runs Modern Hardware so it's
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got a core I 74700 that's a quad core processor so that runs from 2.4 GHz up
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to 3.4 GHz turbo it has a GT x
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760m with 2 gigs of gddr5 memory that
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makes it a very respectable performer
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when it comes to gaming especially compared to laptops other laptops that
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are this thin so just like the blade 14 this is truly a portable gaming box it
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has a 14in ahva 1920 x 1080 panel so
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it's full HD all that good stuff it uses a matte screen rather than a glossy
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screen so they're not faking things when it it comes to the uh the vibrant color
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and the sharpness of the image by putting a glossy screen in front of it
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it um it has a 47.7 wat six cell battery
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it is 21 mm thick 1.67 kg and I'm just
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trying to see if there's anything else I forgotten ah yes the El backlighting on
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the keyboard so it has an auto sensing keyboard so we're going to go ahead and
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cover what is presumably the light sensor here and see if we can get that
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to kick in uh the last notebook that I checked out that had an e backlight was
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actually the Acer Aspire s seven quite liked the implementation there I guess
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we'll have to do b-roll to show this off but the overall keyboard layout is what
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I'd consider to be pretty good full sizee shift Keys enter enter keys in
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backspace so no cardinal sins committed although these these are a shame these
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arrow keys really are a shame because if you were going to use it as a gaming
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laptop and you were going to game using the arrow keys that would be a bit of an issue for you although I suspect most
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people won't be doing that it also doesn't have a click pad so it has a
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dedicated touch pad with dedicated buttons below it I personally prefer for
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this implementation but I've seen other reviewers complain about it so I figured
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it's something that's probably worth mentioning it comes with Windows 8 no
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touchcreen though so if you do want touchcreen then I guess you'll probably
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just go have to go buy something with a touch screen because neither this nor the blade which are the only two super
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portable gaming notebooks I'm aware of come with a touchcreen so basically guys
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the age-old can it run crisis the answer is yes we've spent a little bit more
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time with the LCD and while it's not perfect it's not as good as a as you'd
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expect from you know a really nice IPS or VA desktop display it is so much
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better than what we've seen on other laptops over the past several years and
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a lot better than what's on the blade that uh I give it I give it a pass it is
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it is just quite nice now this is
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something that's actually probably the most impressive thing to me about this laptop so far the keyboard is by the way
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what I would classify as not just good but excellent there's a little bit of
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flex to it but I hope you guys can hear the
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sound the keys have quite a nice tactile
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response even when you're typing the onboard sound is nothing special but
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you'll probably want to use headphones on a laptop most of the time but this is
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where things get really really impressive even compared to the blade
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which was already in engineering Marvel we have put a thermal probe right here
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on the wrist rest this is an important spot for us because this is where your
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hand's going to rest when you're on WD it is running at under
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26° on the palm rest that is
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standing what that means is your hand is not going to sweat or get unnecessarily
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hot when you're using this laptop like it did with the aluminum sheld razor
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blade now if we take this and we put it somewhere like on the exhaust at the
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back I think we're going to see a bit of a different story now the exhaust is angled down in kind of a clever way but
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let's go ahead and take a spot where it might rest on your lap and look at what
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kind of temperatures we're going to get there we're just going to paste that
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down so I'm going to go ahead and reject that call got to love my Pebble so that
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that's going to be running at you know into the 30s so there we go now that
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we've put that down we've got it running you know anywhere between about 38 40°
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so much like the blade it's not something that I would consider to be a
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laptop in the same way that I wouldn't consider a fire to be suitable for
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putting on your lap but but for the traveling business person who just wants
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something that they can game with on the go this looks like an absolutely
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outstanding choice so I think that concludes my video on the p34g from
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Gigabyte a most excellent portable gaming laptop don't forget to subscribe
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to lus Tech tips more unboxings reviews and other computer videos like the video
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if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and let us know what you
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thought about it in the comments or what you think about this product I mean is
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this the perfect portable gaming notebook