First off, Gigabyte has wisely gone for an understated look whereas similarly-priced laptops like the Asus TUF Gaming F15 and Acer Nitro 5 lean heavily into show-off aesthetics, the G5 looks lot more grown up, with a straightforward all-black chassis and tasteful single-colour backlighting (you can change the hue, but I like the default: a light green so pale it might as well be white). Specs like 16GB of RAM and a 144Hz refresh rate on the 1080p screen also show that the G5 is aiming higher than entry level – but will its shots land? Still, that’s preferable to the absolute bottom-rung RTX 3050, and you’re also getting a capable hexa-core CPU in the Intel Core i5-11400H. The G5’s affordability cuts both ways, and that means a you get a RTX 3050 Ti: a GPU so modest Nvidia hasn’t even bothered to produce a desktop version. Granted, you’re not exactly getting the RTX 3080, the RTX 3070 or anything else from the annals of the best graphics cards. Ports: 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x Mini DisplayPort 1.4, 2x USB 3.1 Type-A ports, 1x USB 2.0 Type-A port, 1x USB-C port, 1x Ethernet port, 1x SD card slot, 1x 3.5m headphone jack, 1x 3.5mm mic jack.Believe it or not, this particular model is – at £850 / $969 – one of the cheapest routes possible into a complete PC gaming system with Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing and DLSS powers. With graphics card prices being what they are, gaming laptops like the Gigabyte G5 have been making a lot more sense.

Asus tuf gaming backlight settings