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Battery, Thermal, And Display Testing
Battery Test - Tomb Raider 2013 Battery Rundown
To test battery life, we set each laptop’s battery profile to Balanced while running Tomb Raider’s built-in benchmark at the lowest detail preset. The frame rate is locked at 30 FPS through GeForce Experience’s Battery Boost to limit the strain on the battery. Meanwhile, a script running in the background monitors and time stamps the system’s battery percentage. The laptops are set to hibernate once battery levels reach 5%.
The Gigabyte P57W v6 gives us an impressive run of 1 hour and 53 minutes, just shy of two full hours. This is enough time to game during short trips or flights, and while we don’t recommend playing on battery life for a full two hours, the P57W has enough juice to come close. It is only outdone by the Asus GL702VM-DB71, which beats it by about 15 minutes.
Thermal Testing
For our thermal testing, we used our Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermals. For more information about how we test, be sure to check out our Measurement Science article.
Unlike the Gigabyte P37X, the P57W handles heat extremely well. Our Optris camera illustrates temperatures hovering between 38°C and 40°C, which is a normal idle temperature. After running Furmark for 15 minutes, the Optris detects temperatures no higher than 71°C on the CPU heatsink, the GPU heatsink, or either of the heat pipes. Furthermore, the Aida64 GPU diode sensor logged the average temperature at 70.3°C, only barely rising to 73°C at max. For a laptop, this is impressive, and although we don’t see temperatures as low as those of the Asus Strix GL502VM-DB71 we reviewed, the P57W still performs cooler than its similarly-sized competitors. Perhaps our previous suggestion for an additional cooling fan via the hot-swap bay isn't as necessary as we initially thought.
Display Testing
We used the SpectraCal C6 Colorimeter to measure the P37X v6’s display. Be sure to check out our Display Testing Explained article for a full description of our test methodology.
The previously reviewed Gigabyte P37X v6 received top marks for its excellent display, so the P57W v6 has plenty to live up to, and it does for the most part. It has excellent contrast ratios, with low minimum and maximum black luminance in particular, although it would benefit from brighter white luminance.
The P57W also has some of the most balanced RGB levels of any of the laptops we’ve tested. The red levels rise slightly at around 30% brightness and normalize at 80% brightness. Green levels dip within this range, but they recover at 100% brightness. Finally, the blue levels dip slightly between 40% and 70% brightness.
The display’s average gamma is just a bump above 2.2; sure enough the CalMAN gamma point chart illustrates a dip at 10% brightness and a spike at 90% brightness, but hovers close to 2.2 otherwise.
Grayscale and average color accuracy have been points of failure in many of the laptops we've tested, and the Gigabyte P37X was one of the few that succeeded. The P57W follows in its footsteps with low grayscale and average color errors. Its grayscale error score is slightly higher than that of the P37X’s, but its overall color errors are lower, making the P57W’s display one of the most accurate laptop displays we’ve tested so far.
