Colorful EVOL P15 Review: Punching above its weight class

Name: Colorful EVOL P15 Review: Punching above its weight class
Item: Colorful EVOL P15
Rating: 8
Author: Manish Rajesh

By Manish Rajesh | Updated on 17-Jun-2024

Digit Rating 8

Performance

7.9

Features and Spec

8.5

Build

6.1

Value for Money

9.5

PROS:

Excellent value for money
Great performance across the board
High-quality display

CONS:

Build quality could be better
RAM and SSD speeds are slower
High surface temperatures during intensive tasks

Manish Rajesh

17-Jun-2024

VERDICT:

The Colorful EVOL P15 emerges as a formidable budget gaming laptop, offering the powerful NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU at an astonishingly affordable price of Rs 84,999. Its vibrant 15.6-inch QHD+ display with impressive colour accuracy make it a standout choice. The laptop’s performance is commendable, with the Intel Core i7-12650H processor and RTX 4060 GPU delivering excellent gaming and productivity results. Despite some trade-offs in SSD and RAM speeds, the EVOL P15’s upgradeability and solid internal thermals with the “Deep Chiller System” ensure it punches well above its weight, making it an attractive option for gamers and creative professionals on a budget.

The Colorful EVOL P15 is a budget gaming laptop that features an NVIDIA RTX 4060 for under Rs 90,000! Rs 84,999 to be exact. The laptop actually launched at Rs 79,999, which for a laptop featuring an RTX 4060 is pretty crazy. You would be hard-pressed to find an RTX 4060 laptop under the Rs 1 lakh price point. While Colorful is a new brand in the laptop space, they’ve been around for a while. They were primarily known for their GPUs, but have in recent years expanded to laptops. The Colorful EVOL P15 is their first gaming laptop offering to make its way to India. Having an RTX 4060 at this price seems too good to be true, so naturally, we had to test and find out if the EVOL P15 is just good on paper, or whether it actually packs a punch. Read the complete review to find out!

Colorful EVOL P15 Specs at a glance

Processor: Intel Core i7-12650H (6P + 4E/16T) @4.7 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060
VRAM: 8 GB
TGP: 140 W
RAM: 16 GB DDR5-5600
Storage: 512 GB NVMe M.2 SSD

Colorful EVOL P15 Build and Design

Colorful describes the EVOL P15’s aesthetic as “Retro Futuristic”. Now that might not make much sense when you read it, but if you look at the laptop, then you’ll see why it’s a pretty apt description. The review unit we received came in teal blue colour, however, there are grey and white colour variants as well. Compared to the grey and white variants, the blue colour definitely stands out a lot more. The lid features an angular print near the bottom which frames the Colorful logo, along with a reflective strip in the centre of the lid. The rear of the laptop and the grills under the laptop feature an angular design to “complete” the gaming laptop look.

Speaking of the build, you’ve got a fully polycarbonate body. The laptop doesn’t feel particularly robust; understandably, sacrifices needed to be made somewhere to keep costs in check. We wouldn’t say it feels too flimsy or unsturdy though, definitely worth the price if you consider what it’s packing inside.

Coming to the keyboard, you get a full-sized RGB backlit keyboard. The chiclet keys have good travel distance and decent feedback for an overall pleasant experience while typing and gaming. The lighting on the keyboard is adjustable via keyboard shortcuts.

Additionally, the laptop comes with expandable RAM and an extra NVMe slot which is always nice.

I/O Ports

The laptop has a decent number of I/O port options. You have a total of three USB Type-A ports. Of these, two are USB 3 and one is USB 2. You also have a single Type-C USB 3 port with PD. Other than that, you have an audio combo jack, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet port, a miniDP port and the DC in port for charging. Decent coverage for any additional peripherals you might want to plug into the laptop. The additional display ports are a plus.

Display

This took us by surprise, especially when the laptop was still under the Rs. 80000 price mark. The Colorful EVOL P15 comes with a 15.6-inch QHD+ IPS Panel, with a refresh rate of 165 Hz. If that wasn’t impressive enough, we tested nearly 100 percent sRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, at 99.8 and 99 percent respectively. That’s pretty bonkers, especially at this price range. The display was also fairly bright, with a maximum tested peak brightness of 324 nits. Thanks to the RTX 4060 onboard, you can comfortably game at QHD+, and this also means that this laptop is an excellent choice for demanding creative workloads. On a budget!

Colorful EVOL P15 Performance

Finally, we’re at the performance. I’m sure everyone is eager to know if this laptop actually performs like it has an RTX 4060 onboard. Well, I’m happy to report that it actually does. Let’s revisit the specs real quick. You’ve got a 12th gen Intel Core i7-12650H, paired with an NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU with a TGP of 140 W.

The 12th gen i7 is a fairly popular processor in gaming laptops north of the 90K mark. It has 10 cores (6 performance + 4 efficiency cores) and 16 threads, with a max clock speed of 4.7 Ghz. It’s more than capable of handling AAA games and intensive workloads. Paired with the RTX 4060, the Colorful EVOL P15 not only easily competes with, but surpasses laptops that cost over a lakh in terms of gaming performance. Let’s get to the numbers!

Starting off with basic productivity and processor benchmarks. We use Geekbench 6, Cinebench R23 and PCMark 10 to general productivity and processor performance.

Like we mentioned above, the numbers are solid, you are definitely getting bang for your buck with this processor.

The SSD and RAM is where Colorful have made some sacrifices. Or rather, we’d say the SSD and RAM are more inline with its actual price. It doesn’t compare to laptops that cost over a lakh which have substantially faster SSDs and RAM. However, Colorful have allowed for easy expansion and upgradeabilty, which is great.

Finally, we come to gaming performance. Let’s start things off with the synthetic numbers. We use the 3DMark benchmark for this.

The scores we saw were among the highest we’d seen in laptops upto the Rs 1.5 lakh price point. Easily in the top two or three if not the best score. Essentially, in terms of gaming performance this laptop can be compared to laptops that are nearly double its price.

However, all of that means nothing if real world gaming performance is weak. So let’s get to that next.

Once again, like with the synthetic benchmarks above we saw the Colorful scoring high across the board. The only games where it wasn’t able to score the highest benchmark numbers was CPU intensive titles. Here, laptops with newer and more powerful processors took the lead. That said, the scores are still excellent. Thanks to the presence of the RTX 4060, you can also use DLSS for games that support, and easily game at QHD+, which is the laptop’s native resolution. I honestly did not expect to see a gaming laptop under 1 lakh that can easily game at QHD+, at least not this soon.

Thermals

The Colorful EVOL P15’s cooling solution is called the “Deep Chiller System”. This includes a dual-fan setup and 6 cooling pipes to keep internals cool. We can vouch for the internals running cool; the CPU remained at a cool 65 degrees Celsius during our CPU stress test. Meanwhile, the GPU never crossed the 78 degrees Celsius mark after hours of intense gaming and testing. However, this doesn’t translate to cool surface temps. Some areas of the surface, especially the WASD and IJKL cluster can get pretty toasty, sitting north of the 43 degrees Celsius mark. The fans also get pretty loud when you start any intensive workloads. They’re clearly doing their job though, but you might want to keep that in mind if you need a quieter gaming laptop.