Hardware Overview and CPU Performance

Within the Gigabyte P34W v5 is a decent selection of hardware, which starts with the new Intel Core i7-6700HQ. This is a Skylake CPU, built on a 14nm processor, from the performance 'HQ' segment of Intel's line-upward. Equally such, it features 4 cores and eight threads, with 6 MB of L3 enshroud and a TDP of 45W. It's clocked at 2.half dozen GHz across all four cores, with Turbo speeds of 3.5, 3.3 and iii.one GHz in single, dual and quad core configurations respectively.

The 6700HQ isn't the top-of-the-line mobile SKU from Intel – you tin can get college-clocked variants that become correct up to the 2.9 GHz (iii.8 GHz Turbo) i7-6920HQ – but these are typically pricier. However, the main advantage of the i7-6700HQ over a U-series part like the Cadre i7-6600U is the jump from two to four cores, which provides a significant boost in performance in games and other high-performance workloads.

The P34W v5 is equipped with either 8 or xvi GB of DDR4 memory, and in the model I received to review, I got 16 GB. This isn't a huge amount of RAM, as there are some laptops out there with upward of 32 GB of RAM, only for all gaming workloads 16 GB should suffice. 8 GB, on the other paw, might exist a trivial slim for some games that make heavy utilise of loftier-resolution textures, peculiarly those coming out in the adjacent few years.

On the GPU side, the P34W v5 comes with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, which is a 28nm Maxwell GM204-based function that's over a year old at present. Nevertheless, in the absence of new GPUs from Nvidia for the time being, the 970M is the third-fastest mobile chip they make, with a TDP of 75W and raw performance around the level of the desktop GTX 960. The GPU features 1280 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs and 48 ROPs, with a core clock speed of 924 MHz that boosts to at least 993 MHz.

The GTX 970M in the P34W v5 is equipped with three GB of GDDR5 memory at five,012 MHz on a 256-scrap bus, providing 120 GB/s of bandwidth. 3 GB of frame buffer is slim for current-gen games that can use upward of four GB with high-res textures, then I'd have preferred to see Nvidia support 4 GB with the 970M. That said, for a discrete laptop card, three GB should normally be fine.

For storage, the Gigabyte P34W v5 gets an SSD+HDD philharmonic: 256 GB of Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD goodness, also as a HGST 1 TB 7,200 RPM difficult drive. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity is provided through an Intel Dual Ring Wireless-AC 8260 chip, which provided splendid operation in my testing.

The Skylake Cadre i7-6700HQ provided no surprises in our CPU encoding benchmarks, coming in roughly 6% faster than the last-gen Core i7-4710HQ. This isn't a huge jump in functioning, simply it'due south in line with Intel's usual speed boosts going from one generation to the next. Bigger jumps come in memory bandwidth, although for the past several generations in that location has been no issue with memory operation.