Launching alongside the P57X V6, the P55W provides a cheaper alternative that still manages to impress. Gigabyte’s latest laptop range houses one of the new Nvidia graphics cards which provide desktop gaming power in a portable form factor and this laptop is no exception, despite the lower price point.

To be fair, we’re still talking over £1000 at time of writing (£1,349.99 on Amazon), but these are premium products designed to cope with modern gaming and even VR. This model is some £300 cheaper than the flagship P57X.

It’s a little smaller than the P57, with a smaller 15.6″ screen setting the 380 x 269mm form factor. This also makes the laptop a little lighter at 2.6 kg.

Ports and Connectivity

As with the previous model from earlier this year, Gigabyte’s new laptop is well catered for in terms of ports. Three USB 3.1 ports are joined with a forth USB 3.1 Type-C port, which should be ample.

Video output comes from either HDMI, mini-DisplayPort or VGA. As I noted in the P57 review, I’m surprised Gigabyte haven’t seemed to go for an obvious VR headset supporting range of ports, though. 2 HDMI ports would have been welcome.

There’s also an SD card slot for quick access to camera, phone and tablet data and standard earphone and mic ports.

The keyboard is comfortable to type on and seems responsive, while the track pad hasn’t really moved on from the V5 model, but works well enough. It’s probably personal preference, but I don’t like the virtual buttons, I prefer to see a button.

A removable DVD-RAM drive is another interesting option, with physical media on the way out and digital certainly becoming the norm on PC, it’s an extra weight, but it’s removable and you can always replace it with an extra SSD drive.

The laptop sports both Wireless, via the Dual-Band Wireless-AC adaptor, and Ethernet, both of which worked well and instantly connected to several different networks without issue.

The speakers aren’t anything to write home about, unfortunately. There’s little bass and the 2 speakers just don’t produce the sound we’ve had from other laptops containing subwoofers or dedicated gaming speaker setups.

Screen

The 15.6″ anti-glare 1920×1080 IPS screen is smaller than the 17″ screen on its big brother, but this may be welcome for those looking for a little more portability. There’s a good argument for keeping to the HD resolution; laptop power is at a premium when on the battery and as new games take more advantage of the Pascal cards, the resolution should ensure that this device can still run games at decent detail and framerates for some time to come.

Couple this with the ability to output to a 2K or 4K screen if you really want to make the upgrade and it makes more sense. The GTX 1060 card’s lower power will benefit from a slightly smaller screen, too.

Thankfully, as with the other laptops in the range, the screen quality is excellent with good brightness and contrast on the matt finish helping it to work well in brighter, outside conditions.

Battery

The tested 2 hour battery (just under, 1 hour 42, to be precise) isn’t bad while pushing the laptop for gaming, possibly thanks to the lower power of the new Pascal card. It’s probably best to carry the mains charger around with you, though if you’re going to be using it for a long session. Gaming still pushes everything to the limit and the battery takes some bashing because of this.

Outside of gaming, the laptop managed around 3 hours in normal use (tests included watching videos, running intensive calculations on spreadsheets and general internet searching).

Gaming Benchmarks

Despite the fact that the standard external casing seems a little over familiar, it’s in the actual usage where the P55 really sets itself apart.

Our Shadow of Mordor test at 1080p on Ultra gave us an average of 85 FPS. The screen obviously limits play to 1080p unless a monitor is connected.

GTA 5 got 64 FPS on Very High at 1080p.

CPU heavy title The Witcher 3 (with Hairworks off, Ultra settings) managed 38 FPS on average during our 1080p test, with some dips in frame rate during more complicated scenes (which we’ve found across the range of Pascal cards).

3DMark

A Firestrike test brought back a hefty score of 9,700. In comparison, the new P57 got 15,705 and the equivalent older P57 with its 970M card achieved 6,724

I wouldn’t recommend getting the card to try anything recent at 4K resolution but 1440K is reachable.

In Use

This is very much the same as the P57. Cooling works well on the underside of the Laptop, allowing it to remain comfortable (though I still wouldn’t recommend keeping this directly on your lap) but we did find the centre of the keyboard heating up quite a bit during some intensive gaming, leading to a slightly uncomfortable gaming experience when using keys. I’m concerned that even with the lower spec graphics card, the cooling isn’t adequate here to prevent this heat build up in the keyboard.

Speakers are adequate but given the top spec of the rest of the laptop, a little disappointing in their bass levels and overall effect.

Conclusion

As with Gigabyte’s P57 the P55 with the latest Pascal cards may have similar styling to the previous generation but it hides an impressive turn of speed, with the lower spec 1060 card still managing to hold its weight at the screen’s 1080p resolution in modern games on high to ultra settings. The already hefty CPU and fast DDR4 RAM help to make this laptop a powerful force without sacrificing too much in battery life. The only thing I’m not convinced over is the cooling on this slightly smaller model ,which heats the keyboard up a little too much.