Between its low starting price of $1,249 ($1,349 as tested) and potent silicon inside, the Gigabyte G6X 9KG looks like a worthy laptop on paper. Its performance rivals competent rigs like the Dell G15 and Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 9, but powerful components alone do not a gaming laptop make. With a lackluster display, a disappointing keyboard, and an overall bland build, the G6X 9KG doesn’t quite deliver what you should expect for the money. It may be worth a look if you value raw performance over quality and aesthetics, but this notebook falls short in too many areas to compete with like-priced Editors’ Choice-award winners such as Lenovo’s Legion Slim 5 Gen 8.
Configurations and Design: Perhaps a Bit Oversimplified
The G6X 9KG is available in just a few configurations, all based on an Intel Core i7-13650HX processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 (105 watts) GPU. The $1,249 base model comes with 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage.
Our test configuration bumps the memory up to 32GB for $100 more, which isn’t a huge levy for doubling the RAM. Opting for 32GB of memory plus 2TB of storage brings the total to $1,499, at which point the G6X 9KG’s pricing becomes untenable for reasons you’ll soon see. Gigabyte lists a sister model, the G6X 9MG, which downshifts to an RTX 4050, though details on US availability for that configuration are scarce.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
This Gigabyte is a beefy machine, not overly wide or deep for a 16-inch gaming laptop but a ponderous 1.13 inches thick. It also weighs a hefty 5.62 pounds, so if you plan to travel with it much, you’ll feel the bulk.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The G6X 9KG’s mass gives its structure some solidity, but it still feels somewhat flimsy in spots. Its display flexes under slight pressure, and its hinge wiggles considerably. The notebook’s bottom is a rough plastic that might have been sturdier if not for its excessive air intake vents. Worst of all, the keyboard deck is the mushiest I’ve tested in years. Just typing lightly, whether in the middle or near the edge of the keyboard, bends the panel every which way. Combined with the laptop’s all-plastic construction, this doesn’t make for the best-feeling build.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Gigabyte’s keyboard is also rather basic, with single-zone RGB lighting that at least effectively lights up the key legends. The company was thoughtful enough to include a numeric keypad on this plus-size model, but it also committed one of the cardinal keyboard sins: squeezing full-size arrow keys into the middle of the layout so that some primary and numeric-pad keys get squashed. If you have muscle memory around the right Shift key or the keypad’s 0 key, get ready for some growing pains.
The display is pretty typical fare for lower-cost gaming laptops. It’s a 16-inch panel with 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. Gigabyte’s screen housing cuts down on the unsightly chin bezel prominent on many gaming systems. The screen has an anti-glare finish to help with visibility in more lighting conditions and supports a 165Hz refresh rate, but no variable-refresh-rate technology.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Like too many gaming laptops, the G6X 9KG has a generic 720p webcam above the display but no biometric login (neither a face recognition camera nor a fingerprint reader). The webcam itself is unimpressive, capturing low-resolution, grainy video. The mics flanking it picked up my voice well enough, but they also collected ambient noise and echo. The system’s 2-watt speakers sit along the outer bottom edge near the front of the machine.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Gigabyte provides a decent number of ports, though they’re not all up to today’s standards. The left side of the G6X 9KG holds a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a Kensington lock slot. The right houses two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C with Power Delivery 3.0. Around back are Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI 2.1 ports, the AC adapter connector, and a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 connector with DisplayPort 1.4 support. It’s disappointing to see a lack of Thunderbolt or USB4 connections on any laptop north of $1,000.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Wireless connectivity is a little better. The laptop provides Wi-Fi 6E via an Intel network adapter, which is fast and reliable. Its Bluetooth radio is a little dated at version 5.2 but perfectly sufficient.
Using the Gigabyte G6X 9KG: Compounding Compromises
With the combination of packed-in arrow keys and substantial keyboard-deck flex, the Gigabyte’s keyboard ends up feeling rather unpleasant to use. My typing speed wasn’t half bad—118 words per minute with 98% accuracy in my first attempt with Monkeytype, thanks to the keys’ slightly firm resistance and prompt snap back into position for subsequent presses. Perversely, the flexing deck almost feels like a gasket mount that you might find on a quality mechanical keyboard. Of course, this kind of flex doesn’t inspire confidence in its durability, regardless of whether I could manage an impressive typing speed.
The touchpad is large and serviceable but unimpressive. It’s smooth enough but has a rough plastic feel and a clunky click. While it didn’t pose any problems in use, its left-of-center placement may cause some confusion, as trying to swipe and click around the laptop’s center line will result in unintentional right-clicks.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The G6X 9KG’s display is a thorough reminder that refresh rate is only half of the battle when it comes to motion clarity—pixel response time also plays an important role, and this panel is a letdown in this department. With Blur Busters’ UFO test, the screen exhibited obvious, long ghosting trails. This made it hard to see precise details in moving objects and will affect fast-paced gameplay significantly. The display is also low quality in most other respects, producing a weak 70% coverage of the sRGB color space—not how you want your games to look. It’s at least modestly bright and easily visible thanks to its anti-glare finish, but the lower pixel density of 1200p resolution stretched across a 16-inch screen further holds it back.
The Gigabyte’s speakers get shockingly loud, but it’s not to their credit; when pushed past about 50% volume, the speakers become harsh and grating. You’ll hear resonance within the laptop chassis that only worsens at higher volumes. The speakers focus heavily on mid-tones, making it hard to enjoy much treble or bass detail without facing excessively loud mids, though you’ll notice at least some bass depth.
Speaking of noise, when running intensive applications and games the laptop kicks its fans into a raucous high gear. While running benchmarks, I had to turn the speakers on my other PC up considerably to hear what I was listening to over the drone of the fans. I suggest you game on the G6X 9KG with decent headphones that block or cancel out noise.
Gigabyte didn’t overload the G6X with bloatware; there are scarce few extra programs preinstalled beyond what Windows 11 generally includes. A Control Center app manages RGB lighting, performance modes, and other hardware settings, but it’s hidden in the interface. I could only find it by hitting Fn+/ on the number pad, a shortcut for lighting customization, and in the running applications list in the taskbar. The app doesn’t appear in Windows’ Start Menu.
Testing the Gigabyte G6X 9KG: This Midrange Gamer’s Biggest Merit
At $1,349 as tested, the G6X 9KG is on the lower end of the midrange gaming laptop market, providing some potent components at an affordable price. However, you’ll find plenty of competitors also packing RTX 4060 GPUs for not much more than $1,500, and the extra cost often proves worthwhile. The Acer Predator Triton Neo 16 ($1,599 as tested) and Dell G15 (2023) ($1,659 as tested) are two worthy examples.
We rounded out our benchmark charts with two smaller-screened powerhouses, the gaming-oriented HP Omen Transcend 14 ($1,699.99 as tested) and content-creation-focused Acer Swift X 14 ($1,699 as tested). They can’t match the Gigabyte’s low price, but pack beefy internals in more portability-minded packages.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators rates a PC’s image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
We had little doubt that the G6X 9KG would perform well in these tests. Despite its rapidly increasing age, the Intel Core i7-13650HX is a beast with 14 cores and plenty of power to push excellent performance. Sure enough, the Gigabyte mostly led the way in our CPU-centric benchmarks, readily outpacing the newer Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and even the higher-tier Core Ultra 9 185H.
The Gigabyte traded blows with the Dell G15, which has the same CPU, but pulled ahead in multi-core performance, suggesting superior cooling to keep thermals in check. With ample memory and reasonably fast storage, the G6X 9KG also proved ready for the many workloads PCMark 10 threw at it, and it even handled Adobe Photoshop admirably.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge each laptop’s and desktop’s graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad’s regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth 3DMark test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance using Vulkan or Metal APIs at 1440p resolution.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies.
The RTX 4060 at the heart of the G6X 9KG isn’t Nvidia’s most potent GPU option, but we saw Gigabyte again ensuring it can run at capacity. Across our synthetic benchmark suite, we saw the G6X 9KG mainly leading the way. It thoroughly outpaced the two thinner laptops, even the Acer Swift X 14 and its RTX 4070—showing power limits and cooling can be more important than the GPU itself. It even led the Acer Predator by a healthy margin, again suggesting the merits of Gigabyte’s cooling. Only the Dell G15 proved a worthy rival, outpacing the Gigabyte G6X 9KG in a few tests where its single-core CPU performance likely helped out. But the Gigabyte G6X 9KG managed a narrow victory in the more GPU-bound Steel Nomad test.
The synthetic benchmark results were a decent indicator of overall performance in actual games. The Gigabyte maintained its lead over the HP and Acer by similar margins. The G6X 9KG proved itself up to 1200p gaming at high settings while maintaining playable frame rates. DLSS technology helped it push even further, though ray tracing can hit it hard, especially in Cyberpunk’s all-too-demanding Ray Tracing Overdrive mode.
Battery and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the panel can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Gigabyte G6X 9KG has a big but unimpressive display. Its color coverage was uncompetitive with the others, making games appear drab and professional design work untenable. The anti-glare screen was respectably bright with good contrast, but that factored little in our judgment with overall screen quality so lacking. Similarly, while we’ve seen gaming laptops’ battery life improve significantly in recent years, the Gigabyte doesn’t hold back its power when operating on battery, delivering commendable brightness at the 50% setting but the shortest runtime here.
Verdict: A High Performer in Need of Polish
The Gigabyte G6X 9KG is a classic midrange gaming laptop, but it makes some painfully noticeable sacrifices to deliver speedy gameplay for a few hundred dollars less than its competitors. Its keyboard deck flexes substantially, and the all-plastic chassis is bland and uninspiring. Most obvious, though, is the display, marred by low pixel response time even with a high refresh rate—and poor color production on top. The G6X 9KG performed impressively (if noisily) in our benchmarks, but it’s hard to overlook its negatives, especially when the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 9 isn’t far off in price and delivers comparable performance with more quality in many respects.
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The Bottom Line
Performance is key for a gaming laptop, and the Gigabyte G6X 9KG delivers plenty. But too many of its other features are lacking, making it an unappetizing choice even at its relatively low price.
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About Mark Knapp
Contributing Writer
