Gigabyte P55W V4-CF1 Gaming Laptop

Gigabyte P55W V4-CF1 Gaming Laptop
Welcome to a Biomedical Battery specialist of the Lenovo Laptop Battery
No doubt you’re thinking ‘What, Broadwell and DDR3?’ and that’s a fair point and Skylake and DDR4 would doubtless give more performance – but it would come at a higher cost. P55W isn’t exactly cheap at £1150 but neither will it break the bank, and that is of keen interest for gamers on a budget.
This spirit of compromise is a constant theme with the P55W so there is a 128GB M.2 SSD to ensure the laptop boots fast and is responsive and it is backed up with a 1TB hard drive. Clearly it would be more elegant if Gigabyte had used a 256GB or 512GB SSD but that would have raised the price significantly.
It is less obvious why Gigabyte has specified Intel with battery like Lenovo 43R9252 Battery, Lenovo FRU 42T4656 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad U350W Battery, Lenovo 57Y6352 Battery, Lenovo L09N8P01 Battery, Lenovo FRU 42T4690 Battery, Lenovo 51J0497 Battery, Lenovo ThinkPad T410s Battery, Lenovo 45K2221 Battery, Lenovo L08S6D01 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad Y430 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad V450a BatteryWireless-N Wi-Fi as that can surely save very little money compared to 802.11/ac, and the retro theme continues with the inclusion of a DVD Supermulti drive. The P55W makes no claim to be a thin and light laptop and instead sits squarely in the middle ground at 2.5kg and a thickness of 34mm at the thickest point.
Gigabyte has used the size of the chassis to good effect by installing two USB 3.0 ports on the left side and two more on the right side. It would be nice to also see a Type C connector but you’re out of luck on this model. Other ports and connectors include headset jacks, Ethernet, VGA and an SD card reader on the front.
We asked Gigabyte about the specification of the HDMI port and were told that P55 v4 has HDMI v1.4 while the forthcoming P55W v5 (Skylake) will have HDMI v2.0. While this is technically better it doesn’t make much difference in the real world as you won’t be doing much 4K gaming with GTX 970M graphics. It would have been pleasing to see either Thunderbolt or DisplayPort however it is clear that Gigabyte has deliberately shied away from cutting edge technology on the P55W v4, presumably to keep the price lower.
Initial impressions when you turn the laptop on are less than ideal as the screen is covered with a number of icons that give the impression that Gigabyte has loaded the P55W v4 with bloatware, however this is not an accurate picture. Gigabyte LAN Optimizer and Smart USB Backup are par for the course but SmartManager and Smart Update are both excellent.
These two utilities work like a combination of software we have seen from Lenovo and MSI. The first manages short-cuts for screen brightness, speaker volume, Wi-Fi and that sort of thing while the second handles driver and BIOS updates. Both work really well.