For those familiar with Nvidia’s line-up, the performance results here are exactly as expected: the GTX 970M slots right in between the 980M and the 960M, with performance usually falling somewhere between the two. With results like this, it’s clear the 970M isn’t suited to 4K gaming, though it should be perfectly capable of gaming at 1440p or 1080p on high or ultra settings, depending on the title. Of the games not included in our benchmark suite, I played a bit of Fallout 4 on the P34W v5, and had no trouble achieving upwards of 45 FPS on the game’s high preset at 1440p. Grand Theft Auto V is also playable on mostly Very High settings at 1440p while achieving frame rates above 45 FPS, which is a great result.
The performance from the 256 GB Samsung SSD included with by Gigabyte review unit was outstanding in sequential read and write tests, boasting speeds well over 1.2 GB/s. It didn’t fare as well as other SSDs in random read/write tests, which is disappointing as they are the primary type of transfers in day-to-day operations, though it’s still a significant step above a hard drive. Speaking of hard drive performance, you can expect to get pretty typical speeds from the 1 TB unit that’s included: around 130 MB/s in sequential tests, and below 1 MB/s in random tests. I’d normally try and leave as many games on the SSD as possible, but due to its limited capacity, the hard drive can be used as archival storage for games you play less frequently.
