Gigabyte P2542G Review

Yellow Yellow… The Taiwanese manufacturer, Gigabyte wants to make a mark in the PC world even though it is well established in the hardware components sector. The new P2542G features a Full-HD panel, Blu-ray burner and a GeForce GTX 660M that is not something to be sneezed at. Both gaming fans and multimedia enthusiasts have something to look forward to. So is the 15-inch test model worth your money?

For many years, the laptop giants, Asus, Dell, Sony, MSI, Acer, HP and Samsung, have been fighting for dominance of the multimedia arena. The buyers of this group look for good price-to-performance ratio, and as such, manufacturers usually skimp out on the quality and/or hardware of the laptop by installing a low-quality display, a slow HDD or using a cheap case.

Gigabyte has taken a different direction with the P2542G. This 1500 Euro (~$1900) entertainment machine offers a premium package - at least partially. This 15-inch model not only has a high-resolution non-glare panel but also comes with a Blu-ray drive.

The manufacturer has cut no corners with storage media of the laptop: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit runs on a lightning-fast 256 GB Solid State Drive. The CPU is a quad-core Ivy Bridge model (Intel Core i7-3610QM) and the integrated high-performance GPU belongs to the new Kepler generation. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660M offers a great balance between performance and power consumption. The package is rounded off by 8 GB of DDR3-RAM (2x 4096 MB and 1600 MHz).

According to the manufacturer, this hardware assortment is installed in the English model. The German version is supposed to be equipped with a 128 GB mSATA SSD and a 750 GB HDD.