Gigabyte G7 KE: RTX 3060 gaming notebook with no Windows operating system

With the G7 KE, Gigabyte has a relatively affordable gaming notebook on offer: For around 1,200 Euros (~1,300 USD), buyers receive 17.3-inch laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 laptop GPU. Cheaper models with a GeForce RTX 3050 (G7 GE) or a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti (G7 ME) are also available. All variants are equipped with a Core i5-12500H Alder Lake processor.

The lack of an included Windows operating system plays a significant part in the relatively cheap price point of our test model.If you do not own a valid Windows license and do not wish to purchase one, installing a Linux distribution should also be possible. However, the installation and setup process of the alternative OS may be very challenging for some users.

The system is suitable for FHD gaming at high to maximum settings. The components also support higher resolutions when connecting an appropriate, external display - some of the graphics settings may have to be reduced in that case, however. In total, up to three external monitors can be connected to the G7 (1x HDMI 2.1, 1x Mini DisplayPort 1.4, 1x DisplayPort via USB-C).

The matte FHD display (IPS, 300 Hz, sRGB) of the G7 features short response times, good viewing angles, great colors, and a good color space coverage. The brightness and the contrast ratio match or exceed the values we consider good (300 nits, 1000:1). With the fast PCIe-4 SSD, the gaming laptop delivers a sufficient amount of storage (1 TB) and short loading times. Expanding the storage is also possible in the event that the first drive's capacity is exhausted: There is space for a secondary SSD (PCIe 3).

More information and many benchmark results can be found in our in-depth review of the Gigabyte G7 KE.