[section_title title=Performance]Â Performance
The first thing to take away from the P34 is how close it is to the P27 as was suggested earlier on in the review. The slower and cooler GPU combined with a more comprehensive cooling setup meant that during our tests the P34 would have no issue hitting it’s advertised CPU clocks and could stick there for a reasonable amount of time. Likewise, the GPU in P34 didn’t throttle when I checked over temperatures and core clocks whilst running benchmarks.
A second boon of the revamped design is how quiet the P34 is for what hardware is inside – both in terms of its own sound output and compared to the monstrously loud P27. The fan profile seemed quite reasonable and responsive with little to no noise during general browsing and video watching and ramping up to a noticeable, but expected, volume under gaming and benchmarks. You wouldn’t want to take this to your Uni library to game on, but it’s slim and quiet enough for you to finish essays there.
Expanding on the performance numbers a little, and the P34 really is great. Our Play3r tests are, perhaps, unreasonably harsh both due to the settings used and the slight skew in the graphs in favour of high-end desktop systems. The difference between the top two Tomb Raider settings is only that of the TressFX hair implementation. Turning it off would nets you a solid 30FPS frame-rate which frankly looks gorgeous on screen. Likewise with Hitman. Our benchmarks scale quality up with MSAA – the latter being particularly demanding – but on a screen of this size you can probably forgo MSAA without noticing the “jaggies” too much. Certainly, dropping the MSAA setting on Hitman alone doubles the frame-rate at our highest benchmark setting.
In terms of the more mundane but still important aspects of a gaming laptop, the P34’s all around experience is great too. Even at a relatively compact 14″, the 1080p helps out immensely with web browsing turning what’s usually a frustrating experience on most laptops into one no different from a desktop. Similarly, having the screen clarity offered up by the P34 is a bonus for Netflix and YouTube. Whilst the panel itself is TN, I found the colours on the P34’s screen to be quite good with good uniformity. Angles aren’t great as to be expected but then given it’s a laptop you’re more than likely going to be sitting in prime position most of the time. Sound quality from the integrated speakers is serviceable but perhaps limited both in terms of what can be accomplished in such a small space and design focus being elsewhere.
Rounding out the P34’s hardware and there isn’t any immediate shortcomings. The inclusion of VGA still strikes me as odd on a laptop of this spec, though. The keyboard is easy enough to type long articles on without getting frustrated as I usually find is the case with laptop keyboards and the back-lighting is bright enough to light the keys without being too glaring. Battery life is good enough to give you around 2 hours general usage across browsing, Office applications and the like. Depending on the demands of your game, you’re looking at an hour or so on battery for gaming.
