Face Off: Aorus X3 Plus vs. Gigabyte P34W vs. Razer Blade 14

[Redaktion]

Small brawl with powerful punches. Don't let their small footprints fool you — these high-end 14-inch gaming notebooks carry big guns with more firepower than competitors almost twice the size. If you're in the market for an ultraportable powerhouse, the bottom line will almost certainly come down to one of these three.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Face-Off-Aorus-X3-Plus-vs-Gigabyte-P34W-vs-Razer-Blade-14.142980.0.html

[Auros Winner]

To me the Auros is the clear winner here by virtue of it's steady high performance of both CPU & GPU where it maintained high clock rates & low temperatures during the Heaven Benchmark, and during the Metro Last Light tests.  The P34 was woeful in these tests, really not performing well with greatly reduced GPU & CPU clocks.  Great review notebookcheck, those Heaven Benchmark tests & Metro Last Light tests that you did along with all the temperature & clock rate tables is really good for comparing between the long term gaming performance of the laptops.

[Shoe]

In the Negative Points for the P34W: "- Boring chassis design "

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, some people actually like non-flashy designs.  Personally I really don't like the whole blinged out, angular, LED-loaded design of something like Alienware machines, and I quite like the more reserved look of the P34W.  I know many people do like extravagant designs but I don't think it's fair to mark it down on something which is essentially personal taste.

I just wish Gigabyte hadn't decided to scrap the P34K with a 965M instead of the 970M.

(Also, in the comparison table for Ports and Connections you mention that the Aorus has Gigabit Ethernet but you don't have that down for the P34W, even though you mention it in the text.)

[gary]

Bangs for bucks !  P34W... Ive got one and very happy I did..
why pay for 260ppi when human eye can only resolve 180ppi?
Can fit second SSD easily if desired, great colour screen...  I didnt get any dramatic throttling on unigene test and 40fps is still comfortably playable in any game

[Kiani]

These are the kind of articles you should be doing. Was waiting for somehing like this.

[Vlad Bieg]

And Dell Alienware 13 was not included because...? (13.3in screen is close enough to 14in).

[Jmbo]

Please, update the BIOS on the Gigabyte P34W and tell us if the throttling is the same. Word is the throttling issues are fixed with the new BIOS (and IC diamond thermal paste never hurts).

[Allen.Ngo]

Fixed the Ports and Connectivity section for the P34W, thanks for the feedback

We'll have more comparisons in the future, maybe with the Alienware 13 will be included

Unfortunately we longer have the P34W, but that would be a fantastic test. Should Gigabyte release a P34W v4 in the future or some other update, we will certainly jump on it.

[JAE]

Well.... I hope AORUS x3 plus fixes the quality of the product in general. Unlike Gigabyte P34G, AORUS is gigabyte's premium brand, and I think they should do more quality control.

[Niels]

Some rather serious drawbacks of Razer's Blade 14 have been missed:

- keyboard lettering is painted on and will come off from heavy typing.
- Only repair option is to mail the unit to the United States for repair, no parts available.
- no num-pad overlay is available, which is bad for a lot of games.
- battery charge level is often not detected or incorrectly detected.

[Niels]

Forgot two more:

- From the factory, it came with settings that had the unit immediately turn itself back on repeatedly after either shutting it down or hibernating it.

This is really bad during travel.  In spite of a lot of work to disable wake permissions from both hardware and software (Windows maintainance and other annoyance), I have never gotten a handle on this problem.

The only solution is to wait 2 minutes between shutdown and actually closing the lid and packing it.

- There is no way to have the touchpad disable itself as soon as you plug in a mouse (which would be the correct way to set things up).  Even if you disable it entirely from the driver panel, it will randomly re-enable itself, fouling up any and all attempts at fluid typing and other activities.

Eventually, I found a way to disable it for good, I forgot the method, but of course, it would be better to have it available in case no mouse is plugged in.


Why do I have to do Google's stupid new Captcha twice every time?