The Gigabyte G5 (2023) is a steal, which is a bit surprising given the price hikes of new gaming laptops. But you won't find any trendy features or unnecessary add-ons that drive up the cost here. Just a straightforward, well-built, and skillfully provisioned gaming laptop that, at £1,200 (open in new tab) (or ~$1,100 in the US for a similar, only slightly worse model), offers enough frames for gaming.

Let's start with the star of the show, the RTX 4060; we have yet to see Nvidia's RTX 40 series drop to this level on a desktop, but even this reasonably priced card delivers impressive 1080p 144Hz display worthy 1080p performance. This is partially due to the power Gigabyte puts into this machine's GPU: 75W.

This may not seem like much compared to the 175W RTX 4090 laptop we reviewed this year, but MSI's own RTX 4060-powered Cyborg 15 gaming laptop (opens in new tab), 30W more than the power it supplies to the G5. And every time the extra watts flow to the G5's GPU, you can see the frame rate increase. In our tests, the Gigabyte G5 is up to 27% faster than the Cyborg 15, and the Cyborg 15 has an even better gaming CPU.

At roughly the same price as the RTX 3060 laptop, with generally higher performance than the RTX 3060 laptop and added support for DLSS frame generation, the new G5 is already a done deal.

The CPU in this machine is an Intel Core i5 12500H. It is a rather wise choice, although it is a bit disappointing that it has only four performance cores (P-cores). This is one of Intel's hybrid Alder Lake chips with Efficient cores (E-cores) to offload the faster gaming silicon There are eight E-cores, for a total of 12 cores on the chip.

In general, I would prefer a few more P-cores, at least six in there, like the Core i7 12650H in the MSI Cyborg 15. This CPU has six P-cores and just four E-cores; the MSI laptop also has DDR5 memory, which is faster than the legacy DDR4 in Gigabyte machines. However, as the benchmark results show, the actual performance difference between the two is relatively small, even in CPU-intensive applications and tests.

This laptop is relatively easy to open with a Phillips screwdriver. Make sure you are willing to jump in there before you do, as you will be breaking through some stickers on the screws that might void your warranty. Behind the back panel, however, is a single free M.2 SSD slot that can be easily upgraded for storage capacity. The 512GB SSD on this machine will fill up quickly, so you will probably want to take advantage of this slot at some point.

The biggest drawback of the G5 is the noise it generates when running even the most loaded games. This will not be a new experience for those who have used gaming laptops in the past, but take this as a warning that gaming laptops generally won't be any quieter in 2023. Unless you're looking for high performance. The MSI Cyborg 15 I tested last week is only quieter because of its much lower performance.

The Gigabyte G5 also offers a significant reduction in performance in exchange for quieter operation, but in quiet mode the GPU's power envelope is only 25W. Performance drops with it. Instead, we found the slightly more powerful Entertainment mode to be more suitable, with the GPU running at around 48 W. The Entertainment mode is still quite noisy, but it provides a playable enough frame rate.

The G5 is admittedly not very good looking. The glossy black exterior with barely visible decals is not very attractive to me. However, it is a functional design and relatively compact. Especially useful is the USB Type-C port, which offers a fairly comprehensive set of connectivity options. The power adapter is also quite compact for a 150W brick.

There are many good things to say about the G5's screen. It's vibrant and responsive, and at 15.6 inches, it's a happy median for frame rate, resolution, and size, although at 1080p it can feel a bit overpowering. Colors are nicely saturated, and it's a solid all-around panel, although this laptop suffers a bit in contrast.

The G5 (2023) feels like a very solid design for a gaming laptop. Performance is there, flexibility and upgradeability are there, and you don't have to pay a lot of money for a hot new product. In fact, it's quite affordable. It would be hard to beat this as an affordable gaming laptop to buy now.