***Gigabyte P37X Owner's Lounge***

The reviews thus far have noted that the p37x has an IPS screen:

From TechRadar:

 

Not good when it comes to fan noise, now I know gaming laptops tend to be loud but this is getting ridiculous across all Gigabyte models, performance is fantastic but ruined,a great laptop with annoying bad fan profiles.
C'mon Gigabyte you have to improve the fans to really have an amazing laptop.

 

If the noise is stressing you up better return the product.
Stress will build up and eventually anyone will give up and destroy the source of noise.
I had an X7 Pro and the only way I've found to bear with the noise was do underclock it so the Fan Control could be set to Stealth (minimum noise) mode.
You can also try good headphones but I just can't take them all the time.
Indeed they must come up with something really silent next time and the only way I know to make them do it is not buying this loud junk they are selling now.

 

Blaming Gigabyte here is like blaming BMW because their cars don't fly.

The reality here is that at the current state of technology, no manufacturer (MSI, ASUS, Acer, Alienware, etc.) has created a thin laptop with the top of the line CPU/GPU that is quiet. The TDP requirements are simply too high for a thin and light design to accomplish (there are not going to be significant advances in the kind of cooling fan designs offer). The bottom line is that thin designs require small fans, fans are loud when they spin fast, and small fans need to spin fast to generate airflow necessary to cool high TDPs.

The fact that the fans are loud on thin laptops like the P37X should be disclosed in reviews, however they should be taken into proper context. If fan noise is not your thing, stepping up from a 6 lb laptop to a much thicker 8.5 lb ASUS g751 solves the problem quite nicely, but there is the obvious tradeoff of a heavier, thicker laptop and so it will boil down to personal preferences and what tradeoffs a person is willing to make to suit those.

The situation will improve over time as both GPUs and CPUs get more efficient, lowering the TDP to a point where small fans can spin slower...

 

Your car analogy makes absolutely no sense.
Given that they are slightly thicker and weigh slightly more(barely) Clevo/Sager makes thin and lite laptops that are pretty darn close that offer much better cooling and much less fan noise.
Now I'm not trying to say the P37X doesn't do a lot right(it does) but you have to admit cooling and fan noise are not one of them, every review I've read so far has mentioned how terrible the fan profiles are and point out specifically that it impacts how it's rated. Temps are also above average even for thin and lite models.
I get that thin laptops run hotter and louder than you regular "gaming" laptops but the least they could have done is add more air vents on the bottom to help keep temps lower which would translate to less aggressive fan profiles.
I mean just look at how tiny the bottom vents are to draw in cool air, seems very restrictive.
Adding more vents would help a great deal in my opinion.

 

Adding more vents could also create more turbulence, which would also hinder cooling. You can't just create a bunch of vents and expect it to be cooler. To keep things cool, you actually have to control the airflow by getting the cool air in quickly and the hot air out quickly. It's not necessarily simply a matter of volume. Looking at that picture you posted, though, it looks like there's actually a lot of vents to me. Other thin gaming laptops don't have that many. Here's the bottom of a GS70:


I agree that they need to continue to work on it, but I don't necessarily feel like they dropped the ball. Nobody else is putting a 980m in a slim laptop and that is obviously going to create more heat all by itself. It seems to me they've done a good job keeping temps down too, if we can trust the TechRadar numbers. They only got the GPU to 72 during the Unigen Heaven test, which is very reasonable. NotebookCheck had the GS70 between 90 and 100 on the GS70 during the stress test. You could possibly set the fans on the "Auto-Low" setting and let the temps creep higher and have a nice compromise. I'll likely wait until Notebookcheck reviews one before I really trust the numbers, though.

Which Sager models are "barely" thicker than the Gigabyte? I haven't seen any that are less than an inch thick.

 

I think this is a good example of what I was getting at. There are tradeoffs with thinness and thermal capacity, and each notebook in the 17" category is somewhere along that tradeoff curve, and no one laptop is "Pareto Superior" to any other (for a given set of constraints, it is still superior than others).

Based on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A0LiCTs3MTI-4ptvZufLTWGLuyfdlL0j97sdUpUMHjQ/edit?usp=sharing

It seems that the thinnest 17" Clevo/Sager is the P670SG/P671SG, which has a thickness of 1.18". This is 32.58% thicker than the 0.89" P37x, and it is 18.49% heavier (a pound heavier). To you, this may be within your acceptable bounds of thickness, but over 30% thicker is not trivial and you can't say that Clevo has proven that good cooling with top of the line CPU/GPU at the thinnest laptop possible can be done. This increase in thickness and weight may be more of a preference to others if not to you.

I admit haven't exhaustively looked at the thin and light high-end gaming field, but from what I've seen, the players here are really only:

• MSI GS70 Stealth Pro (970m)
• Razer Blade Pro (older hardware)
• Gigabyte P37X (980m)
• Aorus x7 (970m SLI)

These are all within a 0.1-0.4" of another and are suitable for comparison. From the reviews I've seen of these laptops, the kind of heat and fan noise have been comparable, or in other words, there is no one manufacturer that has conclusively shown that they can cool better than the others (and that there is some engineering solution that the others have missed).

Other laptops with better cooling in the reviews benefit from thicker and heavier chassis. So as far as I can see, there is no laptop that has shown it can be done better given the same constraints (though I'd love to hear that I'm wrong here).

 

Just got my P37X today, ran a few preliminary tests for those of us interested in some data around fan noise and temperatures, especially compared to the P35X.

I ran Prime95/Furmark for around 20 minutes to get these results.

Max Temp GPU: ~80C
Max Temp CPU: 95C (Only 1 core reached 95, others ~92)
Max Fan Center Keyboard: 56dB
CPU throttled back to 2.31ghz at the above.

If I left the fan on the default profile (Automatic - Low), the noise at the center of the keyboard was ~50dB, which I found completely usable. This caused the CPU to scale back to 2.1ghz.

Note this is completely stock, not repasted.

 

New review from Pocket-Lint:

 

Thanks for the info! Seems it has pretty similar temperatures (though GPU seems cooler) and noise compared to the GS70, despite having a better GPU (980m vs 970m). I'm leaning toward the P37w, so I'd think that would do slightly better on temps. How are you liking everything else about it? It seems the only real complaint the two reviews have had so far are the trackpad, but I don't really use trackpads all that much anyway. It would be nice to get some OSX-esque touchpad gestures, but Windows 10 looks to be bringing that natively. Looking good so far!