Gigabyte G6X (2024) review

Our VerdictIt has the right balance of hardware for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop but could do with better power profiles and a nicer screen wouldn’t go amiss, either. For the money, though, it’s grand.

Our Verdict

It has the right balance of hardware for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop but could do with better power profiles and a nicer screen wouldn’t go amiss, either. For the money, though, it’s grand.

ForGreat 1080p gamingBig 16:10 screenStorage easy to upgradeAgainstUnnecessary Performance modeDisplay is rather blandPoor battery life

ForGreat 1080p gamingBig 16:10 screenStorage easy to upgrade

AgainstUnnecessary Performance modeDisplay is rather blandPoor battery life

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GIGABYTE - G6X (2024) Gaming…

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$999.99View

$999.99

$1,149View

GIGABYTE - G6X (2024) Gaming…

Amazon

$1,149View

$1,149

$1,249View

GIGABYTE - G6X (2024) Gaming…

Amazon

$1,249View

$1,249

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(Image credit: Future)CPU:Intel Core i7 13650HXGPU:Nvidia RTX 4060Memory:32GB DDR5-4800Storage:1TB NVMe SSDScreen size:16-inch IPSResolution:1920 x 1200Refresh rate:165 HzBattery:73 WhrDimensions:36.1 x 25.9 x 2.51~2.89 cmWeight:2.5 kg (5.67 lbs)Price:$1,350|£1,198 (16GB)

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

CPU:Intel Core i7 13650HXGPU:Nvidia RTX 4060Memory:32GB DDR5-4800Storage:1TB NVMe SSDScreen size:16-inch IPSResolution:1920 x 1200Refresh rate:165 HzBattery:73 WhrDimensions:36.1 x 25.9 x 2.51~2.89 cmWeight:2.5 kg (5.67 lbs)Price:$1,350|£1,198 (16GB)

I’ll come to that in a moment but for now, let’s talk about the screen. It’s a full 16 inches in size, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, 1920x1200 pixels, and a refresh rate of 165 Hz.

My immediate impressions of the display weren’t great. It seemed pretty dull and overly dark, even at maximum brightness, and in graphics tests that ran under 30 fps, there was a lot of inverse ghosting present. Testing the panel showed it had a peak brightness of 350 nits, with a colour gamut of 66% sRGB.

So not great, not terrible, to paraphrase a certain HBO show. The best I can say is that the screen is perfectly average. Just don’t compare it to a nice desktop monitor and you’ll be fine with it.

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

Anyway, this is a gaming laptop, so let’s get on with some benchmarks. We’ve tested quite a few RTX 4060 in recent months, so comparing the G6X to some of those makes sense. However, it’s the only one with a 105 W power limit on the GPU—the others are much lower, so it should result in a noticeable performance lead.

Overall, none of the results are shocking. You’ve got a 14-core CPU and an RTX 4060 running at near-maximum power, so it would have been surprising if the G6X wasn’t faster than the others. That said, it wasn’t massively better than the Lenovo Legion LOQ, despite its RTX 4050 having 512 fewer shaders. Only in Cyberpunk 2077 does the G6X show its real hardware advantage.

In the games where the CPU was the limiting factor in the recorded performance (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn), it looks like the i5 13650HX isn’t given enough power to maintain its workload. At 1200p, the extra pixels mean the GPU becomes more of a limit, giving the CPU an easier time of things, and so it requires less power which the laptop can readily supply.

Gigabyte Control Center app

The most disappointing result is that for the 3DMark Storage test—a 22% lower score than the Legion LOQ’s is not great, especially considering that it’s a ‘proper’ PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive. However, as we’ll shortly see, it was perfectly fine in another storage benchmark and running some peak performance checks showed nothing amiss.

Image1of2(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)

Image1of2

(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

Anyway, the 1080p gaming performance is really good, although you’ll probably want to stick to the display’s native resolution and just turn down the graphics quality settings a notch or two. Alternatively, you could activate any in-game upscalers or frame generation to nix the drop in frame rate, though it won’t look as nice.

Even the 2 W speakers are pretty decent, though I should imagine most G6X users will prefer agaming headset.

I could live without the odd-looking lines on the back of the display, though, and the plastic material attracts dust and fingerprints like an industrial vacuum cleaner. Trying to get clean images of the laptop close-up was a serious challenge.

If you want to use your laptop for more than just gaming, that Core i7 13650HX is more than capable of churning through content creation workloads. In our usual batch of Cinebench, Blender, and X264 encoding tests, the G6X produced results as good as any similarly-specced laptop and even comes close to a few really expensive ones.

The fans are unbearable in Performance mode, not just loud but shrill and piercing. You certainly wouldn’t want to game in this mode, so to see what the other settings were like, I played some games in each mode, recording the average and 1% low frame rates over 10 minutes.

As you can see, there’s no need to use Performance mode when Entertainment is just as good. Better yet, the fan noise in this mode is far more tolerable with this setting, as the overall pitch is lower, even though the relative loudness is roughly the same.

The CPU and GPU do run a tad hotter in Entertainment mode, as the fans just aren’t spinning flat out, but it’s still well within the maximum thermal limits for either chip.

Image1of2(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)

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(Image credit: Future)(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

(Image credit: Future)

Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop

Interestingly, Quiet mode really is quiet. Almost completely silent, in fact. I couldn’t get the fans to spin up much in any test. Of course, with the chips running on a handful of watts, performance gets squashed to a slideshow but for just general browsing or watching a video, Quiet mode is the way to go.

Not that it would do much for the battery life, though.

That’s pretty disappointing but par course for a 73 Whr battery in a laptop. You’re never going to get several hours of gaming with a Core i7 13650HX and RTX 4060 combination, unfortunately.

Buy if…✅You want good gaming performance:That 105 W RTX 4060 handles 1080p in most games without a fuss, and that’s before you enable DLSS.✅You want lots of storage:The space PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot is easy to access, making it a breeze to throw in a second SSD.

Buy if…

✅You want good gaming performance:That 105 W RTX 4060 handles 1080p in most games without a fuss, and that’s before you enable DLSS.✅You want lots of storage:The space PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot is easy to access, making it a breeze to throw in a second SSD.

Don’t buy if…❌You don’t like fan noise:While you can set your own fan curves, it’d be better if they just weren’t so loud in the first place.❌You like a plush screen:This one is nothing special, just average, even though its specs suggest otherwise.

Don’t buy if…

❌You don’t like fan noise:While you can set your own fan curves, it’d be better if they just weren’t so loud in the first place.❌You like a plush screen:This one is nothing special, just average, even though its specs suggest otherwise.

I do think, though, that a Core i5 processor would be a more sensible choice, rather than the 14-core i7, as it would be easy to keep cool and squeeze a bit more runtime out of the battery. In gaming, you’d be unlikely to notice the difference and if you’re using this kind of laptop to do content creation, a bunch of extra E-cores won’t help all that much.

There are plenty of connectivity options, too, with one HDMI 2.1 port, a 1G LAN socket, and four USB ports—two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, and another Type-A that’s USB 3.2 Gen 1. The Type-C on the rear can provide a DisplayPort signal, for hooking up a gaming monitor, whereas the other has PD 3.0 support for charging other devices.

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The Verdict

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It has the right balance of hardware for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop but could do with better power profiles and a nicer screen wouldn’t go amiss, either. For the money, though, it’s grand.

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Our Verdict#

Our Verdict