Infinix GT Book review – GSMArena.com news

The GT Book is Infinix’s first foray into the gaming notebook segment. The company recently launched the model in the Indian market at, as is usual for the brand, a very attractive price, starting at INR 59,990 or approximately $720.

As it happens, we have the very same base model with us for testing, which features an Intel Core i5-12450H CPU and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU. It also features a 16-inch 1200p 120Hz display, 16GB memory, 512GB of storage, 210W charging, and lots of RGB LEDs. Let’s see how it performs.

Unboxing

The GT Book comes in standard packaging consisting of just the laptop and the charger. However, for a limited period, Infinix is providing an accessory bundle, which includes a mouse, headset, and a desk mat, all with RGB lighting.

The accessories feel a bit cheap and the headset, in particular, is of very low quality. The desk mat is fine, if a bit small, and the lighting isn’t bright enough to be visible during the day. The mouse is the only good thing in the package as it is a good size for medium-sized hands using a palm grip. It also has a quality sensor with good controls and a smooth scroll wheel.

Design

The Infinix GT Book is a large-sized notebook thanks to its 16-inch, 16:10 display. At almost 2kg, it’s a bit heavy but par for the course for notebooks of this size.

The GT Book is built very well. The back of the lid, as well as the base of the notebook are made out of aluminum. The base around the keyboard is plastic but it’s also fairly sturdy with very little flex.

Aesthetically, the design isn’t too over the top for a gaming machine. The exterior is mostly finished in gray with relatively subtle patterns on the lid and some orange highlights on the vents. The back features a strip of RGB LED lighting but it can be disabled if you aren’t into it, especially since it’s not something you can ever actually see while using the machine.

Overall, Infinix has done a good job with the design and build quality of the GT Book. It’s not too gamery or divisive, and I can see people liking it even if they aren’t into the whole gamer aesthetic.

Display

The GT Book has a 16-inch, 1920×1200 resolution 120Hz IPS LCD. The panel features a matte coating with really thin bezels on the top and sides.

The display also supports variable refresh rate but for whatever reason, Infinix makes no mention of it in its marketing material. Both Windows 11 and the Intel Graphics Command Center detect the display as having VRR, with the Intel app specifying the refresh window as being 48-120Hz.

Infinix claims 100% sRGB coverage and up to 300 nits of peak brightness. Except for a slightly blue white point, the overall color calibration is pretty good out of the box. The 300 nits peak brightness is also perfectly adequate for indoor use. The display also has decent contrast for an IPS panel and the viewing angles are also great. There’s no HDR support but with an LCD panel and 300 nits brightness, that’s probably for the best.

The 16:10 aspect ratio is really great for productivity applications and even for general use. It also looks great in games that support it. However, some games only support 16:9 and in that case, you get black bars on the top and bottom.

Unfortunately, what lets the display down is its response times, which is the time taken by the pixels to switch states. Fast response times are desirable for any display but are especially critical for gaming displays, where there is a lot of fast motion on the screen. The pixels on the GT Book aren’t able to switch states fast enough as they transition from one color to the next between refreshes, which causes objects on the screen to have a trail behind them, creating a natural motion blur of sorts. This can be quite distracting and can potentially affect your performance in fast-paced competitive titles.

Ultimately, it will boil down to how sensitive you are to this particular issue and also what kinds of games you play. Depending on that, it may or may not be a big deal for you but regardless, the bare minimum expectation from a gaming PC is to have a display with not just high refresh rates but also fast response times.

One final note is for the webcam above the display. The quality isn’t great but it is usable and if you don’t have anything better lying around then it will get the job done. If you don’t need to do video calls frequently, then you can easily get by with it. The issue is that the camera has no privacy cover, so it’s always open and does not have any indicator light for when it’s on. Second, it’s placed exactly where you might place your thumb to open the screen so it’s always covered by smudges.

Keyboard, trackpad, and audio

The GT Book has a standard chiclet-style keyboard with a ten-key number pad on the side. The choice to include a number pad on a gaming device is a bit questionable, especially since the company’s more professional Zero Book range does not have one. Still, it has its uses and if not for anything else can be used to assign macros.

The keyboard has RGB lighting that is split into four zones. The Control Center app lets you pick through various flashing lighting patterns or you can pick your own color and have the lights stay on in a static pattern. The lighting is even but not especially bright so the lighting effects only really stand out in the dark. The borders around the WASD legends are a bit “how do you do fellow kids” for me and look extremely tacky.

The keyboard has a row of combined function buttons at the top. On the right are dedicated buttons for the three performance modes. The problem with these is that there is no way to know which of these is on at the moment without going into the app. You get an on-screen icon when you press one of them but it was a bit buggy so sometimes nothing appeared even if the function itself activates. It also feels wholly unnecessary for there to be an individual button for each mode instead of a single button that could toggle through the three profiles.

The keyboard on the GT Book has decent travel and feedback. The keys feel reasonably well-dampened and not especially loud unless you like to slam on each key. The layout is pretty standard so it shouldn’t take long to get used to. Overall, the keyboard works quite well. Unfortunately, the GT Book is missing a fingerprint sensor, which feels out of place on a machine that can be specced up to 100k INR.

As for the trackpad, it is reasonably large at about 117x75mm. It has a smooth surface that is easy to glide on and can be clicked almost anywhere with a satisfying click. All the touch gestures also work fine so overall the trackpad gets a thumbs up.

The stereo speakers are placed on either side and are bottom-firing. The GT Book comes with the DTS app pre-installed and activated so by default you will be hearing sound enhanced by the app. As usual, the DTS app makes the small laptop speaker sound fuller and richer with more mid-bass and improved spatial properties. However, the app works best with spoken content and the sound gets a bit fuzzy and muddled when trying to play music. The speakers do get quite loud, though, so that’s good.

Hardware and Connectivity

The GT Book is available in three configurations. The base variant features the Intel Core i5-12450H with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050. The mid variant comes with the Core i5-13420H with the RTX 4050. Finally, the top-of-the-line variant features a Core i9-13900H with the RTX 4060.

The base and mid variants include the same 16GB of 5200MHz LPDDR5X memory and 512GB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage. Meanwhile, the flagship variant gets 32GB of 6400MHz LPDDR5X memory and 1TB of storage. The memory is soldered on all machines but you can swap the included SSD for a larger model.

The connectivity on the GT Book is disappointing. Despite the size of the machine, you are limited to just two USB-A ports, one of which is USB 3.2 Gen 2 and the other USB 3.2 Gen 1. Then there’s also a single USB-C port, which also supports charging, along with an HDMI 2.0 port. There’s also no Ethernet port, which means you will have to rely on the Wi-Fi being strong and reliable while playing online.

Software

The GT Book ships with Windows 11 Home Edition. As we have seen on other Infinix notebooks, there is almost zero bloatware pre-installed (other than what Microsoft insists on).

You get three apps by default; one is the Infinix Control Center. Through this app, you can control the three power modes, adjust the lighting for the keyboard and the LED strip on the back, disable the Windows key, enable a Max Fan mode, and toggle USB Charging for other devices when the notebook is switched off. There is also a toggle for a MUX switch, which lets you choose between iGPU only, dGPU only, and dynamic modes.

The other app is Infinix PC Connection, which lets you mirror the display of your phone on your laptop. And finally, the last app is for the bundled gaming mouse. The best part about all of these apps is that they can be uninstalled, although I would highly recommend keeping the Control Center app around as it’s actually useful.

That aside, there isn’t much else to speak on the software side, which itself is a good thing. Infinix once again gets props for not stuffing its machines with bloatware, something much larger brands have a hard time doing.

Performance

As mentioned before, our GT Book review unit was the base model running the i5-12450H and the RTX 3050 GPU.

The i5-12450H has an 8-core design with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. It can top out at 4.4GHz turbo frequency on the P-cores and 3.3GHz on the E-cores. Officially, the chip can be configured to pull up to 95W during turbo but on the GT Book, the chip maxes out at 80W.

The 80W figure is just part of the story, as the machine has three performance modes each for plugged-in and battery use. While connected to power, the highest Gaming profile has a PL2 of 80W and a PL1 of 55W, which is to say it can turbo up to 80W for a short duration and then settle down to 55W long term. In the Performance profile, the PL2 is 60W and the PL1 is 45W. The Office profile can go up to 55W in PL2 and 35W in PL1.

When running on battery, the Gaming mode can only go as high as 35W in PL2 and then 25W in PL1. The Performance mode is seemingly identical, as it had the same PL1 and PL2 values for the same time duration. Finally, the Office mode runs at a PL2 and PL1 of 20W, which it maintains throughout.

On the GPU side, the RTX 3050 is configured to run up to 80W in Gaming mode but it drops down to 65W in Performance mode and 30W in Office mode. On battery power, the GPU maxes out at 30W regardless of the power mode (the power modes don’t do anything on battery for the GPU) but realistically runs under 25W most of the time. The GPU will only run in high-power mode with the supplied 210W barrel charger. Plugging in a USB-C charger will also limit the GPU to 30W regardless of the charger wattage. The battery will also drain while gaming with the USB charger, unlike with the 210W charger.

Now moving on to some gaming benchmarks. All tests here were done with the charger connected in the Gaming mode with the games installed on the local SSD. All tests were run at the native 1920 x 1200 resolution at medium (or medium equivalent) settings without upscaling or frame generation.

The overall results from the 20+ games that were tested are satisfactory. Despite their age, both the i5-12450H and the 3050 provide a reasonable gaming experience at the native resolution at medium settings. What makes the results more impressive is that there was no upscaling used, which means enabling DLSS even at the Quality preset can often vastly improve the numbers with next to no discernible loss to the image quality. And while the RTX 30-series GPUs do not support Nvidia’s frame generation, a growing number of titles have started adding AMD’s FSR 3 frame generation, which works fine on this hardware.

This means it was exceedingly easy to just dial in console quality settings, set the output resolution to native, and enable DLSS to usually get 80-90FPS even in relatively demanding titles. Thanks to the variable refresh rate display, there was no judder or screen tearing, and motion performance remained smooth overall. And for those interested in competitive shooters, it was easy to get triple-digit frames even without turning the settings down all the way.

The 12450H and the RTX 3050 are well-matched to each other, with the CPU proving adequately performant for the frames the 3050 can push out. Most of the time you will be GPU bottlenecked, which is preferable, but even when you are CPU bottlenecked, the 12450H can provide a relatively stable frametime experience.

The only time the CPU proved to be an issue was in Elden Ring, which isn’t listed in the benchmarks above. That’s because the game was unplayable due to extremely poor frametime performance. Looking it up online revealed that the game engine has issues with Intel’s hybrid architecture at times and the solution is to disable E-cores from the BIOS. Unfortunately, Infinix BIOSes are useless and barely offer any features at all so there was nothing that could be done about it.

That aside, I didn’t really find any issues with the other games I tested. Most of the games ran perfectly fine and while some like Alan Wake 2 and Hellblade II proved to be challenging, they were still playable thanks to upscaling. Really, the MVP here is DLSS and thanks to that one feature you should be able to get years of use out of this hardware.

What I will recommend is upgrading the stock 512GB SSD to a larger 1TB or even 2TB model. A lot of games these days clock at around 100GB or more and it was quite a struggle to benchmark all those games above as it was only possible to fit 3-4 of them at a time on the disk while leaving some free space to not affect disk performance. Unfortunately, there’s just one storage slot so you will have to swap out the existing 512GB drive and find another use for it.

Speaking of SSD, the Foresee XP2100F512G actually performed quite well and was more than adequate for gaming.

I decided to try the mux switch in the Control Center app by switching it to iGPU and dGPU-only modes. The iGPU mode works fine and may get you a bit extra battery life if you aren’t gaming. The dGPU mode didn’t really have any performance benefit, which was disappointing. It also had image corruption issues when playing titles like RDR2 so ultimately I felt it was best to leave the machine in dynamic mode.

Moving on to everyday performance, the GT Book usually performed well. The combination of a reasonably fast CPU and a 120Hz display even made web browsing and office apps pleasant to use, even though the slow response times from the display were distracting at times. Considering this is the base spec, you can only expect better things from the more expensive variants.

A final note on cooling. The GT Book has a dual fan system with a dual heat pipe design. The cooling system is quite effective and able to prevent the system from throttling while gaming even in 30+ degrees Celsius ambient temperatures. However, the fans can get quite loud in the Gaming profile. The Performance profile fans run noticeably quieter, and often there wasn’t a noteworthy drop in performance compared to the Gaming profile. The Office profile has the quietest fan speeds but isn’t suitable for gaming unless we are talking very basic titles.

One particular annoyance was the way a specific spot on the keyboard deck would heat up. This was just to the left of the trackpad and exactly where you would rest your wrist while using the keyboard. I’m not sure why this specific spot heats up more than anywhere else on the keyboard deck and why it just had to be where the user would normally rest their wrist. Of course, if you use a controller while gaming, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Battery and charging

The GT Book has a 70Wh battery and comes with a 210W power brick in the box, which is quite hefty. Of course, the laptop doesn’t actually charge at 210W but the extra headroom is there to allow the hardware to run at full spec.

In terms of battery life, I could get about five hours of usage with basic productivity tasks like working in word processors, web browsing, image editing, and the occasional video streaming. This is with the Office power profile, which doesn’t feel any different in everyday use compared to the Performance and Gaming profiles on battery.

For gaming, I only managed to get about an hour and a half of playtime with a demanding 3D title. You may be able to get more time with a simpler game with a frame rate cap enabled.

The charging speeds aren’t particularly great. After about 30 minutes of charging from flat, the battery was at around 30% and 55% after an hour. A full charge takes just over two hours.

The thing is, you can get similar charging from a 65W USB-C charger, which takes about two and a half hours for a full charge. This means you don’t have to lug around the heavy power brick while traveling if you have a high-power USB-C charger. However, this is only viable if you don’t plan on gaming since, as mentioned before, the laptop can only run up to 30W with USB-C charging and you need the supplied power brick to hit peak performance.

Conclusion

The Infinix GT Book is priced at INR 59,990 for the model we tested. For the price, you get a well-designed and well-built laptop with a decent display, comfortable keyboard and trackpad, clean software, and, most importantly, good gaming performance. The downsides include high response times on the display and limited wired connectivity.

For the price, the downsides aren’t too egregious and can be alleviated with an external monitor or a USB dock down the line. So with all that into consideration, the Infinix GT Book gets a strong recommendation for the base model tested here.