Soldato
Just a quick review on my new toy 
I really struggled to find any reviews at all on this laptop before buying it so thought I'd share my thoughts for future buyers..
Details: Gigabyte P27W V2 in black - £950
So specs look good for the money. The 870M should be powerful enough to handle most games at 1080p and the CPU is comfortably fast enough to embarrass most desktops.
The screen is matte which I personally prefer over glossy displays. 8GB RAM is perfectly adequate and it's easy to upgrade to 16GB thanks to providing 1x8GB instead of 2x4GB. The bottom of the laptop has an easily removable panel held on by one screw and a few clips and removing this reveals the HDD, mSATA slots (yes two of them!), RAM slots, wireless card and various HSFs. The manual explains how to change the HDD & mSATA drives if required.
The keyboard is a 'chiclet' design. The front was unfortunately festooned with stickers which I've removed with care which took about half an hour to get all the gunk left behind by one of them.
The front of the laptop has a brushed aluminium type finish which I like although it can attract fingerprints. It is easy to wipe down.
The back of the lid is understated with just a Gigabyte logo. It feels good quality and I like the look. I believe the laptop is also available with a yellow lid - not for me, enough said!
Screen
Glossy displays can make the image seem sharper in controlled environments but as soon as there's background light can easily be distracting. See a quick comparison between this and an old laptop with a glossy display I had lying around.
As you can see, the reflection from the window is easily visible and the reflection completely obscures the screen's contents on the glossy display. On the matte one it becomes harder to see the details but the glare is diffused making it less distracting and it's still possible to make out the details to a much greater extent.
The viewing angles appear good, only suffering a little when looking up at the panel which is quite an unnatural viewing position, requiring you to tilt the screen back and look at it from just above the keyboard, and I don't think it'll ever cause an issue for me. This is traditionally the area TN panels fall down on. I'm not sure what type of panel this laptop uses, but I'm happy with the screen so far although I've only used it inside.
The only negative here is there is an area on the lower right part of the screen which shows some distortion whenever the lid is moved or pressed, as though something behind it is pressing on it. It's not an issue at the moment but I wonder if it's a bit fragile and whether over time permanent damage could be caused.
I suppose in addition the bezel is quite large at around an inch all round and makes me wish they could've shoehorned a slightly larger screen in. However 1080p at 15.6" is adequately sized as long as your eyesight is good. I decided against getting a 4k panel because I hear DPI scaling isn't quite where it needs to be at yet so the compromises weren't worth it. Note that by default DPI is increased by 25% and text etc became much clearer (if smaller) once this was disabled.
Keyboard
As I say, this is a chiclet design and I find it easy to type on with good size keys. In addition it is backlit although I've yet to use this in darker conditions, which is a nice touch.
The numberpad has smaller keys than the rest of the laptop but this is to be expected in a 15.6" laptop. The arrow keys also encroach onto the keyboard and so far I've found it unintuitive to locate them without looking properly. The ↓ arrow key feels like it's in the place for the → key. However I accept it's difficult to squeeze everything in and this may be the best compromise.
One thing of note is there is no right-sided Windows key; instead there is a 1.5x-size Ctrl key. This is a pain because moving windows around using Win-key + arrows can no longer be done one-handed. In addition I wonder if that compromise could've been used to move the arrow keys one slot further to the left; however this may have ended up making the shift key too small.
Also if you use Start8 to replicate the classic Windows Start Menu you'll discover the remaining Win-key is actually identified as the right Win-key, which by default takes you to the Start Screen in Start8. Fortunately this is easily changeable.
Storage
This laptop is exceptionally well equipped for storage. As standard there is one 2.5" HDD bay and two mSATA slots apparently capable of supporting 1.5TB & 2x 512GB respectively. However commonly maximum supported sizes are limited by what is available at time of writing and are not a hard limit so I would expect the drive bay to support at least 2TB HDDs and there are 1TB mSATA drives on the market at the moment which may well work.
Usually it's also possible to replace the DVD drive with an additional 2.5" HDD using an adaptor - note this is not offered by Gigabyte, unlike on their P35G/W models - which may be possible using 3rd party kit.
RAID 0/1 is also supported but I've not gone down this route.
A warning to Truecrypt users - by default the laptop comes with the mSATA drive formatted as using GPT instead of MBR. This means you cannot encrypt the system drive. I got around this by changing some BIOS settings and reinstalling Windows using a spare ISO (Windows 8.1 Home x64). The BIOS settings have to be reset to Windows 7 defaults and I used version F06 (not the most up-to-date version) which came with the laptop. Then you need to open a Command Prompt when reinstalling Windows and use Diskpart to convert to MBR (plenty of guides on the internet).
If reinstalling Windows another point is that Smart Manager is required for onboard sound! I spent some hours wondering why I couldn't get the sound to work (except through headphones) and eventually installed this utility from Gigabyte which solved the issue.
Trackpad
This is medium-sized (Synaptics) and adequate for most purposes. It's not going to set the world on fire. It's sometimes inaccurate when two-finger tapping as it sometimes causes the cursor to jump half an inch or so on screen. Speaking of two-finger tapping, this is not supported by default but since I use this for middle-click I installed a program called Two Finger Scroll which allowed me to configure a two-finger tap. Other than that the Synaptics software allowed me to do everything else I wanted.
Speakers
They have some potential and they're better than plenty of other laptop speakers. I suppose they're similar to my old Dell L502x XPS (however take this with a pinch of salt as I sold that over a year ago) and augmented a bit by the Dolby software which I would probably recommend keeping as it does seem to make the sound a bit richer. There are four front-facing speakers, either mid-range/tweeters, two just under the front lip and two just underneath the screen. There is also a woofer which is unfortunately located on the bottom of the laptop and therefore partially obscured by whatever you put it on, however the battery compartment does keep the laptop at a bit of an angle so it shouldn't be too bad on a hard surface.
Innards
I'm not going to talk about performance since the CPU/GPU already have plenty of comprehensive online reviews available.
However the powerful components do require a powerful 180W power adapter. This is quite compact however compared to power bricks of old at 3"x6"x1.25". I've not yet used it on battery to test out its endurance. It does apparently use Optimus to turn off the 870M when not needed.
The power connector is unfortunately of poor design. There is a lip (the front fascia) covering all the external ports including the power. Firstly, this does make it hard to plug things in blind, but perhaps more importantly, the power connector doesn't plug all the way in at all angles. It's easy enough to plug in, but when it rotates it will force itself out (unplug itself). This is quite intrusive since it's accompanied by not just a change in screen brightness but also the screen goes black for half a second. I wonder if this is related to Optimus doing it's thing, mind.
Fans
This laptop has a dual exhaust fan setup, one either side at the rear beneath the lid. The design seems effective - I can feel plenty of warm air coming out when the fans kick in.
I've not yet studied temperatures or different fan profiles but on the default profile the fans will kick in when not doing very much and they're a long way from quiet after reaching mid-range but the noise isn't too intrusive. It's a movement of air sound rather than a high-pitched fan sound. Once they reach what is presumably maximum speed (only under load) you definitely know they're on, however. I guess this is to be expected with such powerful components (the GPU alone can draw over 100W I believe)
I'm hopeful that now I've switched the profile to 'stealth' they will be less noticeable but I'll be keeping an eye on the temperatures.
Overall
This is a good 15.6" gaming laptop with serious gaming credentials. It has a premium feel and decent screen. Plenty of storage options, good (for laptop) speakers and a backlit 102key keyboard complete the package. A few niggles which detract from the experience the most major of which are probably the power cable auto-disconnecting and the touchpad inconsistency (note this is when using an unofficial feature) and a few software quirks are the only significant cons.
I'd have no hesitation recommending this to someone as probably the best gaming laptop available for under £1000.
8/10
I really struggled to find any reviews at all on this laptop before buying it so thought I'd share my thoughts for future buyers..
Details: Gigabyte P27W V2 in black - £950
- Core i7 4810MQ (2.8GHz/3.8GHz boost)
- 15.6" 1080p LCD
- 8GB DDR3 SODIMM 1600MHz (1x8GB)
- 128GB mSATA SSD (Lite-on LMT-128M3M, 128GB)
- 1TB 2.5" HDD
- 3GB NVIDIA GTX 870M
- DVD-RAM drive
- SD card reader
- Intel AC-7260 WiFi (ac/b/g/n)
- Backlit keyboard
- Bluetooth v4, 10/100/1000 LAN, 2x 3.5mm I/O, D-Sub, HDMI, eSATA/USB 2 combo port, 2x USB3 ports, Webcam
- Windows 8.1
So specs look good for the money. The 870M should be powerful enough to handle most games at 1080p and the CPU is comfortably fast enough to embarrass most desktops.
The screen is matte which I personally prefer over glossy displays. 8GB RAM is perfectly adequate and it's easy to upgrade to 16GB thanks to providing 1x8GB instead of 2x4GB. The bottom of the laptop has an easily removable panel held on by one screw and a few clips and removing this reveals the HDD, mSATA slots (yes two of them!), RAM slots, wireless card and various HSFs. The manual explains how to change the HDD & mSATA drives if required.
The keyboard is a 'chiclet' design. The front was unfortunately festooned with stickers which I've removed with care which took about half an hour to get all the gunk left behind by one of them.
The front of the laptop has a brushed aluminium type finish which I like although it can attract fingerprints. It is easy to wipe down.The back of the lid is understated with just a Gigabyte logo. It feels good quality and I like the look. I believe the laptop is also available with a yellow lid - not for me, enough said!
Screen
Glossy displays can make the image seem sharper in controlled environments but as soon as there's background light can easily be distracting. See a quick comparison between this and an old laptop with a glossy display I had lying around.
As you can see, the reflection from the window is easily visible and the reflection completely obscures the screen's contents on the glossy display. On the matte one it becomes harder to see the details but the glare is diffused making it less distracting and it's still possible to make out the details to a much greater extent.
The viewing angles appear good, only suffering a little when looking up at the panel which is quite an unnatural viewing position, requiring you to tilt the screen back and look at it from just above the keyboard, and I don't think it'll ever cause an issue for me. This is traditionally the area TN panels fall down on. I'm not sure what type of panel this laptop uses, but I'm happy with the screen so far although I've only used it inside.
The only negative here is there is an area on the lower right part of the screen which shows some distortion whenever the lid is moved or pressed, as though something behind it is pressing on it. It's not an issue at the moment but I wonder if it's a bit fragile and whether over time permanent damage could be caused.
I suppose in addition the bezel is quite large at around an inch all round and makes me wish they could've shoehorned a slightly larger screen in. However 1080p at 15.6" is adequately sized as long as your eyesight is good. I decided against getting a 4k panel because I hear DPI scaling isn't quite where it needs to be at yet so the compromises weren't worth it. Note that by default DPI is increased by 25% and text etc became much clearer (if smaller) once this was disabled.
Keyboard
As I say, this is a chiclet design and I find it easy to type on with good size keys. In addition it is backlit although I've yet to use this in darker conditions, which is a nice touch.
The numberpad has smaller keys than the rest of the laptop but this is to be expected in a 15.6" laptop. The arrow keys also encroach onto the keyboard and so far I've found it unintuitive to locate them without looking properly. The ↓ arrow key feels like it's in the place for the → key. However I accept it's difficult to squeeze everything in and this may be the best compromise.
One thing of note is there is no right-sided Windows key; instead there is a 1.5x-size Ctrl key. This is a pain because moving windows around using Win-key + arrows can no longer be done one-handed. In addition I wonder if that compromise could've been used to move the arrow keys one slot further to the left; however this may have ended up making the shift key too small.
Also if you use Start8 to replicate the classic Windows Start Menu you'll discover the remaining Win-key is actually identified as the right Win-key, which by default takes you to the Start Screen in Start8. Fortunately this is easily changeable.
Storage
This laptop is exceptionally well equipped for storage. As standard there is one 2.5" HDD bay and two mSATA slots apparently capable of supporting 1.5TB & 2x 512GB respectively. However commonly maximum supported sizes are limited by what is available at time of writing and are not a hard limit so I would expect the drive bay to support at least 2TB HDDs and there are 1TB mSATA drives on the market at the moment which may well work.
Usually it's also possible to replace the DVD drive with an additional 2.5" HDD using an adaptor - note this is not offered by Gigabyte, unlike on their P35G/W models - which may be possible using 3rd party kit.
RAID 0/1 is also supported but I've not gone down this route.
A warning to Truecrypt users - by default the laptop comes with the mSATA drive formatted as using GPT instead of MBR. This means you cannot encrypt the system drive. I got around this by changing some BIOS settings and reinstalling Windows using a spare ISO (Windows 8.1 Home x64). The BIOS settings have to be reset to Windows 7 defaults and I used version F06 (not the most up-to-date version) which came with the laptop. Then you need to open a Command Prompt when reinstalling Windows and use Diskpart to convert to MBR (plenty of guides on the internet).
If reinstalling Windows another point is that Smart Manager is required for onboard sound! I spent some hours wondering why I couldn't get the sound to work (except through headphones) and eventually installed this utility from Gigabyte which solved the issue.
Trackpad
This is medium-sized (Synaptics) and adequate for most purposes. It's not going to set the world on fire. It's sometimes inaccurate when two-finger tapping as it sometimes causes the cursor to jump half an inch or so on screen. Speaking of two-finger tapping, this is not supported by default but since I use this for middle-click I installed a program called Two Finger Scroll which allowed me to configure a two-finger tap. Other than that the Synaptics software allowed me to do everything else I wanted.
Speakers
They have some potential and they're better than plenty of other laptop speakers. I suppose they're similar to my old Dell L502x XPS (however take this with a pinch of salt as I sold that over a year ago) and augmented a bit by the Dolby software which I would probably recommend keeping as it does seem to make the sound a bit richer. There are four front-facing speakers, either mid-range/tweeters, two just under the front lip and two just underneath the screen. There is also a woofer which is unfortunately located on the bottom of the laptop and therefore partially obscured by whatever you put it on, however the battery compartment does keep the laptop at a bit of an angle so it shouldn't be too bad on a hard surface.
Innards
I'm not going to talk about performance since the CPU/GPU already have plenty of comprehensive online reviews available.
However the powerful components do require a powerful 180W power adapter. This is quite compact however compared to power bricks of old at 3"x6"x1.25". I've not yet used it on battery to test out its endurance. It does apparently use Optimus to turn off the 870M when not needed.
The power connector is unfortunately of poor design. There is a lip (the front fascia) covering all the external ports including the power. Firstly, this does make it hard to plug things in blind, but perhaps more importantly, the power connector doesn't plug all the way in at all angles. It's easy enough to plug in, but when it rotates it will force itself out (unplug itself). This is quite intrusive since it's accompanied by not just a change in screen brightness but also the screen goes black for half a second. I wonder if this is related to Optimus doing it's thing, mind.
Fans
This laptop has a dual exhaust fan setup, one either side at the rear beneath the lid. The design seems effective - I can feel plenty of warm air coming out when the fans kick in.
I've not yet studied temperatures or different fan profiles but on the default profile the fans will kick in when not doing very much and they're a long way from quiet after reaching mid-range but the noise isn't too intrusive. It's a movement of air sound rather than a high-pitched fan sound. Once they reach what is presumably maximum speed (only under load) you definitely know they're on, however. I guess this is to be expected with such powerful components (the GPU alone can draw over 100W I believe)
I'm hopeful that now I've switched the profile to 'stealth' they will be less noticeable but I'll be keeping an eye on the temperatures.
Overall
This is a good 15.6" gaming laptop with serious gaming credentials. It has a premium feel and decent screen. Plenty of storage options, good (for laptop) speakers and a backlit 102key keyboard complete the package. A few niggles which detract from the experience the most major of which are probably the power cable auto-disconnecting and the touchpad inconsistency (note this is when using an unofficial feature) and a few software quirks are the only significant cons.
I'd have no hesitation recommending this to someone as probably the best gaming laptop available for under £1000.
8/10
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