Pros: Impressive audio quality; Bright and sharp full HD display; Stylish understated design; Pretty good gaming performance for price
Cons: Awkward touchpad placement; Observable flex on the deck; No Blu-ray drive
The Verdict: A 15-inch entertainment notebook, the Gigabyte P2532N boasts a 1080p display, robust graphics, and 5.1 audio for a reasonable price.
Gigabyte P2532
Asus G53SW-A1
Dell XPS 15 (Sandy Bridge)
Category Average
0
1700
3400
5100
6800
8500
10200
Performance
With a 2-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-2630QM processor and 8GB of RAM, the Gigabyte P2532N powered through PCMark Vantage, a benchmark that measures overall performance, to post a score of 8,780. That's an impressive 2,947 points above the current category average of 5,833. The P2532N also bested the ASUS G53SW-A1 (8,470) and the Dell XPS 15 L502X (8,548), both of which have a 2.6-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU. During real-world use, we simultaneously opened 11 tabs on Google Chrome, streamed a movie on Netflix, and chatted on Skype, and the Gigabyte P2532N never faltered or showed any signs of lag.
The 750GB hard drive (spinning at 7,200 rpm) booted Windows 7 Home Premium in exactly 1 minute, four seconds faster than average. This beats out the ASUS G53SW-A1, which took 1 minute and 8 seconds, but the notebook underperforms slightly compared to the Dell XPS 15 L502X's 53-second boot time.
On our file transfer tests, the P2532N duplicated 5GB of mixed-media files in 2 minutes and 33 seconds for a rate of 33.3 MBps. This is fairly decent considering the category average of 3:12 (data
rate of 26.7 MBps), and it's exactly the same file transfer rate as posted by the Dell XPS 15. However, the ASUS G53SW managed the task in 2:10.
Finally, we set the Gigabyte P2532N to perform a complex VLOOKUP operation on 20,000 rows on the OpenOffice software; it accomplished this in a fairly quick amount of time (5 minutes and 14 seconds), compared to the category average of 7:14.
