Gigabyte P57X v7 Gaming Notebook Review

We recorded an average brightness of 407.7 cd/m²—21% brighter than the P57X v6, and the brightest of any of the screens we measured across the laptops in our comparison field. Distribution is decent (slightly lower than that of the v6) at 86%, though the center of the screen is the brightest region (at 441.3 cd/m²), so it’s not as noticeable a difference as in some other situations. Meanwhile, the contrast ratio of 1003:1 is a good overall result, even if it’s a ways below most of the competitors, including that of the v6 (1233:1, 23% better). All things considered, these are good numbers.

Turning to our color measurements, we came away with 100 percent sRGB coverage, and a very good 87 percent of AdobeRGB 1998, to boot. This is nearly identical to the performance of the Acer Predator 17 G9-793-77LG (88%) and EVGA SC17 GTX 1070 (87%), and it’s well beyond the P57X v6’s 57% coverage. Along with the brightness and resolution, this improved color reproduction adds up to a much nicer display panel that on the v6 review unit we assessed.

The CalMAN 5 results hardly diminish this performance. A total gamma of 2.08 (ideal: 2.2) and CCT Average of 7345 (ideal: 6500) aren’t perfect, but they’re inoffensive nonetheless. The same goes for the DeltaE measurements of 5.1 and 4.3 for Colorchecker and Greyscale (respectively). While none of these are excellent, they’re right in line with the rest of the competition, and they’re certainly good enough.

The response times on the panel are below what we would like to see for gaming, which is perhaps the sole disappointment conjured by the 4K panel. PWM was also detected (as shown above) at all brightnesses below 29 percent—but on the bright side, that's pretty low, and the frequency of 1 kHz is high enough that most people will not notice the flickering.

Outdoors, the machine performs admirably. Thanks to the matte screen finish, extremely bright (400+ cd/m²) panel, and high contrast, screen contents remain visible in even the brightest environments. Viewing angles are also very good, thanks to the fact that the display uses IPS technology.

The Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7700HQ is a very powerful quad-core chip. It features a base clock rate of 2.8 GHz and can achieve Turbo frequencies of up to 3.8 GHz single core max Turbo (3.6 GHz for two cores, 3.2 GHz four cores). Its performance is roughly on par with the Core i7-6970HQ from last generation, and in some of our tests today (specifically, Cinebench R11.5 and R15), we also saw it hanging around the Core i7-6820HK quite often. It carries a TDP of 45 W, so it’s no more power hungry than its predecessors, in spite of higher frequencies made possible by a more efficient 14 nm+ manufacturing process.

In our synthetic benchmarks, the P57X v7 did not disappoint. Most of the time it’s near the top of the field, with only the MSI GT73VR (packing an overclocked Intel Core i7-7820HK) managing to beat it, generally by a margin of around 10 to 20% (though in wPrime the MSI absolutely decimates the rest of the competition).

The Gigabyte P57X v7 features a dual storage configuration with a 256 GB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB 7200 RPM conventional hard drive. The SSD—a Transcend MTS800—is actually the same model we evaluated in the P57X v6, and it’s not the fastest drive around. Although the P57X v7 actually supports two PCIe (NVMe) SSDs, the MTS800 is a conventional M.2 drive. We measured sequential read/write speeds of 305.7 MB/s and 516.8 MB/s, which were close to the values we received when reviewing the v6. Overall, performance is a mere fraction of the NVMe competitors, but the average consumer will never notice in everyday use. Besides, replacement/upgrades are relatively easy on the P57X.

These two M.2 slots are also in addition to the internal 2.5-inch drive bay plus the swappable expansion bay. One of these bays was populated in our review unit by a 1 TB 7200 RPM HGST Travelstar 7K1000. This is a good drive for storage of additional games or less critical data which doesn’t require the same access speed as provided by the SSD. It’s appreciated that Gigabyte chose a 7200 RPM model instead of the 5400 RPM drives we so frequently see in this application.

Graphical performance is the big story here, of course, and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 in the P57X doesn’t disappoint. We should mention before continuing that we performed all graphical benchmarks on this machine with the SmartManager GPU overclock set to Level 5 (highest) to squeeze as much power out of the notebook as possible for the purposes of the tests. We also forced the output resolution in the 3DMark Cloud Gate and Ice Storm Extreme tests to 1080p (as suggested by Futuremark) to help compensate for the challenges introduced by upscaling output video to 4K/UHD resolution.

We really shouldn’t expect to see much of a difference in terms of graphical performance between the P57X v7 and its predecessor, and we don’t. In 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics, we received a score of 17170, almost identical to the 17106 we received from the v6. The rest of the hierarchy is just as we’d expect, with the MSI GT73VR (and its GTX 1080) taking the top spot in this test by a margin of 22%. The Acer Predator struggles a bit here and lags behind the two P57X notebooks by around 8%. The P57X v7 also achieved a score of 8236 in 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme Graphics and a 3957 in Ultra, both of which are very respectable scores.

3DMark 11 scores are much the same, though the P57X sees a little bit of a boost from its newer CPU and better RAM configuration in the Performance Combined benchmark (9116 vs. 8366). Scores in Performance GPU, meanwhile, are nearly identical (as we’d expect them to be—23243 vs. the v6’s 23356). Again, in all of these tests, the MSI GT73VR is around 20-23% faster, thanks to its much more powerful GTX 1080 GPU and Core i7-7820HK CPU. Of course, that notebook is also much larger and more expensive.

We use Prime95 and FurMark to simulate synthetic maximum load conditions as part of our review process. While these conditions aren’t likely to be encountered often (if ever) during real-world use, this section is of particular interest during gaming and workstation notebook reviews thanks to their intended use. We should note that during these tests, we had the fan profile set to Gaming and the GPU overclock at defaults (Level 1).

The P57X passed our CPU load test with flying colors. We witnessed solid 3.4 GHz frequencies across all four CPU cores for the entirety of the test duration (30 minutes), and temperatures never exceeded 76 °C during that time. This machine should never struggle to meet CPU processing demands. GPU stress similarly did not produce worrisome thermal conditions, however we did not witness turbo clock rates (rather, base clock rates of around 1430 MHz) during the GPU load test using FurMark.

Combined system stress sees GPU performance prioritized (and still stable at 1430 MHz), but CPU performance cut slightly to the 3.2 GHz mark. This is really only a loss of 200 MHz, however, and thermals still are not bad—never exceeding 80 °C at any point during our test, which is certainly not a concern.

High-powered gaming notebooks and low noise profiles are basically mutually exclusive concepts, but the P57X performs surprisingly well in this category in spite of its relatively compact form factor. It’s still significant, but with a load maximum of 51.5 dB(A) and an average of 45.6 dB(A), it’s a couple of decibels quieter than the v6 was, and right in line with the rest of the competition. Idle values are predictably low; the fan is inaudible under many circumstances here unless the fan profile is set to one of the more powerful options. Speaking of which, we should take this opportunity to remind you that, should you disagree with the system’s choice of fan speed management parameters, you can adjust them at will using the SmartManager application.