Review: Gigabyte U2442F ultrabook

The Gigabyte U2442F comes from a company better known for its motherboards. But is this pricey "Ultrabook" worth the £999 that it is asking? Graeme Burton investigates

Gigabyte is probably best known for its motherboards, graphics cards and other PC components. But the company is now branching out into finished hardware and, with a well-deserved reputation for producing quality components, its laptops and other products ought to be worth close consideration.

Unfortunately, the Gigabyte U2442 is a grand's worth of laptop that, frankly, doesn't look it. Or rather, it is a machine that comes close to brilliance in some areas, but falls woefully short in others.

The cover is a brushed aluminium, which is nice enough, but adds weight, while the base of the machine is painted plastic with a chiclet keyboard and a grill for the tinny speakers. Picture a laptop made to look like a Macbook on the cheap, and you're probably not far from the appearance of the Gigabyte U2442.

The bezel also houses a webcam and microphone. The unit has a whole, though, is robust and ought not warp or bend if roughly shoved into a crowded rucksack or briefcase.

It is billed as an "ultrabook", although the screen is not detachable and it looks just like any other laptop. To keep the weight down, it lacks a DVD drive, which is a reasonable compromise in a laptop. However, it does have a solid-state disk drive instead of conventional disk storage. But with only 128 gigabyte (GB) capacity, there's only about 70GB left after Windows 8 is accounted for.

An extra £80 or so will buy a device with a 750GB hard-disc drive on board, but that's a pretty hefty wedge of cash when you could buy a one terabyte (TB) hard-disc drive for half that amount, or a 1TB hybrid solid-state/conventional disk drive for the same amount.

It does, though, sport Windows 8. That will mean it has one of those touch screens that you can fondle lovingly to navigate your way around FrankenBallmer's operating system, as if it were a poor man's iPad, yes?

Err. No.

In fact, for a laptop of this price, the screen is one of the biggest disappointments. It doesn't support touch, so the only way to navigate around Windows 8 is with a basic touch pad (which supports "pinch to zoom" but lacks features for fast scrolling).

If you need the "charms" interface, scroll all the way over to the right hand side, then scroll back to the left hand-side to open the application you want... It's a time-consuming chore. And, yes, it does interfere with touch-typing too and, no, you can't turn the touchpad off.

But it gets worse. It is supposed to be an HD screen offering a maximum resolution of 1600 by 900 over its 14 inches, which on paper is okay - not up there with the very best, but not far from it, yet at £1000 rivals are starting to offer full HD - 1920 by 1080.

That isn't a total disaster, but the trouble is, its viewing angles are so poor that you have to look at it from a particular angle if you want to see the colours on the screen properly.

Even then, it's hard to discern what the colours are supposed to be as they change with even the slightest movement. The colours, too, look washed out. That would be barely acceptable on a £300 Acer, but for a machine of this price, it badly lets the whole package down.

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Review: Gigabyte U2442F ultrabook

The Gigabyte U2442F comes from a company better known for its motherboards. But is this pricey "Ultrabook" worth the £999 that it is asking? Graeme Burton investigates

So what are you getting for the considerable sum of money Gigabyte is asking?

Well, a massive chunk of it has been invested in an Intel Core i7-3517U, which is not to be sniffed at, but at a list price of $346 accounts for a huge chunk of the overall purchase price. The i7-3517U is a dual-core Ivy Bridge mobile microprocessor that runs at 1.9 gigahertz (GHz), but is capable of stepping up to 3GHz to tackle heavy duty tasks. As such, Intel rates it at 17 watts TDP (thermal design power).

As a result, the battery offers a decent, but not spectacular four hours of life under normal usage, although with the SSD making it quick and easy to turn off and on, in real-life usage it will often seem much longer. It is also tucked away in the device so it had better last.

Alongside that, it's got a proper, dedicated graphics card in the form of an Nvidia GeForce GT650M. This really makes it standout from "ordinary" laptops and ought to mean that it's capable of much more than spreadsheets.

As the GT650M is often found in gaming laptops, purely in the interests of research we downloaded Steam and Crysis 2 to give the card a good workout, pushing the resolution all the way up to the max. And it performed superbly, demonstrating fluid movement, perhaps slowing a little in one or two places, but performing extremely creditably.

However, it's not a laptop to play games on the move - Crysis 2 would have drained the battery in under an hour if we didn't have this review to write. The problem is, the Gigabyte 2442 is plainly not a gaming rig - the screen isn't good enough, nor are the horribly tinny speakers, and while the graphics card is excellent for a laptop, it's probably overkill for users that don't want to play the latest games.

Finally, there's a very healthy 8GB of memory, a double-antenna for better Wi-Fi networking and support for 802.11n, which you don't necessarily see everyday.

Indeed, the Wi-Fi capabilities of the machine really do deserve closer scrutiny - and praise. The range it provides is superb, easily double that of any conventional device. Indeed, It could be more, but I ran out of garden while testing it out...

In action

So, with all that out of the way, what's it like in everyday use?

Well, the inadequacies of Windows 8 have been much written about, and it would be unfair to judge a PC by its operating system alone. However, Windows 8, a laptop with just a touchpad for screen navigation and a non-touch screen does not make an entirely happy combination. Gestures that are easy enough with touch become a chore when endless amounts of touchpad movement is required.

In everyday action, the machine is very fast and quiet, too: it takes less than ten seconds to boot up - thanks to the combination of SSD and i7 microprocessor - and web surfing and office work is satisfyingly quick. It does not overheat when literally used as a laptop, either, while the fan whirs almost noiselessly when it is called into action.

But the screen is exceptionally poor, and the speakers, too, are horribly tinny. The keyboard, too, although it does the job, feels rattly and cheap. Indeed, the keyboard is noisier in use than the fan.

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Review: Gigabyte U2442F ultrabook

The Gigabyte U2442F comes from a company better known for its motherboards. But is this pricey "Ultrabook" worth the £999 that it is asking? Graeme Burton investigates

The Gigabyte U2442 is a good device gone wrong. While the unit is fast and responsive, it's a performance that in many respects is wasted - is this a device for road warriors in suits or spotty teenagers more inclined to play Sniper Ghost Warrior? It doesn't seem as if Gigabyte has properly thought through exactly who this machine is aimed at.

When the rough bill of materials is added up, Windows 8, the i7 microprocessor, SSD and the graphics card probably account for as much as three-quarters of the £1000 retail price, and the company seems to have skimped on the screen, speakers, touch pad and case in consequence.

The "guts" of the Gigabyte U2442F

While the SSD adds a lot of zip to everyday use, it is nevertheless too small to store too many applications, videos and images. The result is a machine that could be brilliant, but which falls between two (or more) stools.

A smaller, cheaper cache SSD alongside a conventional disk drive, a less meaty microprocessor and graphics card along with a better screen would have made for a more satisfying machine.

The bottom line is that a thousand notes will buy you an Apple Mac laptop, which will at least buy you some credibility in certain quarters (whether you want it is another matter). But it would also buy a superior gaming laptop if that was your thing, or a business laptop, if you wanted to do your spreadsheets in style.

For example, £700 will buy a Novatech "high performance" laptop with the same graphics card and the same generous helping of RAM, but with a Seagate hybrid disk-drive, which combines a modest SSD for caching alongside a conventional hard-disk drive, and an Intel i5 3230M mobile microprocessor instead of the more expensive Core i7.

Laptops from Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba, furthermore, all offer Windows 8 with touchscreens at a lower price - even at High Street retail prices.

Then, there's the Microsoft Surface Pro, which also weighs in at a lower price than the Gigabyte U2442 in a more compact form factor, even with the attachable keyboard. While version one of the Surface Pro can now be snapped up at competitive prices, version two (announced this week) ought to run a bit a cooler and will surely be worthy of consideration at this price point.

While the machine is hugely promising, it falls short on a number of key criteria and, ultimately, is far too expensive as a package to warrant recommendation. This is a shame: where the machine is good, it is exceptionally good; but where it is bad, it lets the whole package down very badly indeed.

Regardless of configuration, though, it is simply too expensive to deserve a high rating - especially when there is so much choice out there at the £1000 price point.

Our rating: 2/5

UPDATE: We've added an image of the inside of the U2442F (above), which reveals a neatly designed and laid out device, together with space (and a port) for a conventional 2.5-inch hard-disc drive.

We'd conjecture that it ought to be straightforward and much cheaper to purchase the drive seperately and to add it yourself, rather than to spend £80-£100 more for the model with the 750GB hard-disc drive.