GIGABYTE - 15.6" FHD 144 Hz - Intel Core i5-12500H - GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU - 16GB Memory DDR4 3200 - 512GB SSD - Windows 11 Home ()

Pros: Gigabyte does not load down their systems with bloatware like Asus and most others do. Very little garbage on this unit when first booted up.

Wifi 6 + decent internet = all my games downloaded very quickly.

3050Ti puts my desktop's GTX 970 to shame.

Cons: Having major trouble finding a proper backup power supply. I always buy an extra power brick for any phone, tablet, laptop, etc as any brick is easy to lose/break/get wires chewed on by a kitten... finding a 150w, 20v, 7.5a brick for one of these has been problematic. The only results that come up look either cheap or have red flag warnings (blurry pictures of the label, bad grammar on the few reviews that are there, etc). Apparently Chicony has no USA dealers, nor does Gigabyte have an Accessories page for its products like Dell does where you can buy power adapters, memory, hard drives, etc.

Overall Review: Immediately made a backup recovery stick using their creation tool, shut it down and installed the Kingston KC3000 2tb gaming drive (which blew away the 512gb drive that came in it once I ran banchmarks) and the 64gb Crucial memory I'd gotten to go with it... was very pleasantly surprised to find Gigabyte already had Crucial in it. Just wanted more...

Once I got everything loaded... this thing blows away my main machine, an 11th gen Intel with a Crucial P5 SSD and 16gb RAM with a GTX 970. I absolutely could not believe how well Fallout 4 ran, and the same jaw dropping differences followed with every game I tried. I know from 25+ years building PCs for myself and others, and supporting tech as my job (albeit not gaming devices, it is somewhat hard to talk enterprises into gaming computers as their standard) that desktop graphics cards always outclass laptop ones. It is no small annoyance to gamers that Nvidia and AMD both weaselly name their laptop GPUs similar to their desktop counterparts despite a desktop card of the same chipset always blowing away a laptop with the same set... but this G5 ME is a beast, and all for a quite reasonable price yet. It trashed my 970 which I had thought to still be a decent card given the ridiculous prices dedicated graphics cards go for these days... but I guess I have a new main machine.

Pros: Not pricey for the specs, i think i paid 700$ CAD and bought a 2tb nvme ssd with it. Worked great for a bit less than a year and now its crashing pretty often, at least twice or three times a week.

Cons: random Blue screens of death and more and more often. Build quality is not out of this world.

Overall Review: it would have been a great deal if it wasnt crashing that much after less than a year. My old asus laptop (1050ti) never had this problem. Save some money, buy something better.