This is the only sub-$1000 4060 laptop on the market today. I bought it not to play games, but to do machine learning (AI, pre-trained/large language modeling) AND, yeah, to play the occasional game on the road.
I can see why people are slightly disappointed if they only want to use this for gaming. I get it. I have the Gigabyte Aero 15 XD, which is a 4K OLED, RTX 3070, multiple ports, great speakers, great display, fast processor, yada yada yada.
Compared to my Gigabyte Aero 15 XD, the Gigabyte G5 KF, is lacking in screen resolution (1080p), port features (for example, the USB-A do not drive external displays, can't power laptop through USB-A, HDMI not connected to GPU), speakers are tinny, display isn't as crisp, processor isn't as powerful, and so on.
But we're talking a sub-$1000 machine versus a $2000 machine. The sound can be fixed with headphones, and you can plug in an external display if you need a nicer screen.
For machine learning, it is perfect. The VRAM is 8GB which fits most of the distilled, small-to-medium, models on HuggingFace. I've trained small language models (several hundred thousand parameters) from scratch, and it zooms. I was curious how much faster a 4060 was compared to an old nvidia 860M. The 4060 has 3072 CUDA cores, compared to 1152 for the 860M. The test model I trained completed in 5 minutes on a 4060 versus 90 minutes for the 860M (1152 CUDA cores).
But I digress, it is perfect for machine learning, and only slightly slower than my Desktop 3060 and 3070 machines for deep learning training.
I did try one AAA video game: Starfield, ultra settings. It only did 30-40 fps. But it was playable. Lower settings did get >60fps.
To summarize, as a portable machine learning machine, it is AWESOME with a capital "A". A good gaming machine speed wise, but only ok sound-wise and display-wise.
Note: I did upgrade to 32GB ram and an extra 1TB nvme-ssd. But even with these additions, it was LESS THAN $1000!
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 4.5 GHz core_i5 |
| Memory Speed | 3200 MHz |
| Hard Drive | 512 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 6 GB |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 3 |
