Synthetic benchmarks increase,
but for the most part it does not
help game performance much.
Overclocking the GPU does yield
some tangible gains, but we are
dealing with the 1080P model here,
which the GTX 980 is more than
capable of handling. So you’re
moving your frame rate
from smooth and very playable to
the other side of redundancy. The
out the box shipping performance
is staggering as is even when the
notebook is running of the battery. It
manages to produce some
impressive numbers, ones that
put it at the forefront of notebooks
performance (barring those GTX
52 The OverClocker Issue 38 | 2016
980M SLI offerings). Obviously this
does come with some drawbacks
regarding battery life but this is the
kind of machine that should ideally
be plugged in and used as a portable
desktop replacement rather than a
gaming notebook in the truest
sense. With that said, it still clocked
in 143 minutes in PCMark8’s battery
test compared to MSI GT80 TITAN
SLI that managed 68minutes.
To ROG engineer's credit, they have
managed the thermal characteristics
well, as even under full load, neither
the GPU or CPU throttle their
performance as witnessed on other
high end notebooks. The numbers are
consistent and reliable with a
fair degree of fan noise, but not
enough to disturb your game play.
This is actually where I believe the
GX700 shines. Even with the dock
unattached, it delivers more than
acceptable game performance
especially with the 1080P model
I used for testing. There's a 4K
alternative which of course is
likely to cost even more than this,
but that supports NVIDIA’s G-sync
technology. Even though no GTX 980
is 4K capable (desktop or otherwise)
you’ll not suffer screen tearing and
other performance anomalies
courtesy of this frame synching
technology. Be it you