Gigabyte U4 UD Intel i7 14″ Laptop Review

Performance

It wasn’t until I standard benchmarking this notebook that I discovered it actually DOES have a fan. It’s pretty quiet though and only really spun up much after extensive benchmarking, rendering, or gaming. Still, it’s one of the quietest notebooks I’ve ever used, short of some that were passive cooled or Chromebooks.

The i7 is pretty potent too, sure, not so potent as its desktop counterparts, but 4-core and 8-threads at a peak of 5GHz can get some real work done on the go.

The keyboard uses a white LED backlight, and after endless RGB models, this stripped-back design was much appreciated; it just felt more mature to me.

Now, this is where things get interesting. No, it doesn’t run Halo Infinite natively that well, but I did find that with the fast WiFi, I could use Xbox xCloud to stream a few games. Just hooked up my Xbox controller and it was time to party. It’s certainly a good idea for smaller systems without a full-fat GP. Plus, graphics cards are bloody expensive these days.

One thing is for certain, the screen is gorgeous. It’s pretty sunny today, and the matte finish does a superb job of removing glare. Plus it has lovely colours, and really impressive black levels, making everything really pop; not that my photos do that justice.

Totally didn’t spend an hour playing Halo and Dirt 5 on xCloud; spoiler, I did.

So what about that iGPU? Surely it’s a gutless piece of crap? Wrong. The first game I tried, Streets of Rage 4, maxed out and 1080p, and it ran as smooth as silk. So far so good.

Street Fighter IV? No problems at 720p (that’s the default setting).

It looks great, and even at 1080p it was rocking 60 FPS, which is awesome. This isn’t one of our usual benchmarks, but more me just tinkerings instead of getting around to writing about it.

I play a lot of games on emulation, especially older arcade stuff. That being said, I even managed to get Gran Turismo 4 running via PCSX2. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for this quad-core CPU and iGPU, but with some tinkering, it ran surprisingly smooth.

The panel is superb though. The brightness is great, the colours are vibrant, and it’s more than good enough for some editing work on-the-go or in the office.

Viewing angles are good too, albeit, you get a little more glare at extreme angles. Again, it’s very sunny and bright in here today.

At 1080p, it’s more than enough for some browsing, working, writing etc. Obviously, if you’re working with multiple windows side by side, then perhaps a 14″ laptop isn’t going to suit your needs.

The excellent colour reproduction makes media consumption a joy too. I’ll keep going, see if you can guess the movie…

Details look good, colours aren’t blown out, and highlights retain their detail. For a small screen, it really is quite pleasant to look at.

Got the film yet?

Well, it’s Starship Troopers, and watching it on this laptop would be a joy while sitting on the train. What’s more surprising were the speakers. They pack a punch, and they’re not completely gutless either. I’m not sure how the sound is so full from such little speakers. Perhaps it’s something to do with them being downward firing? I don’t know! I just know that I like what I hear, and that’s a surprise from a notebook.