Synthetic Benchmark Results
Plugged into the wall, Gigabyte’s P34W v3 generates a 3DMark FireStrike score of 6603, which falls to 4960 on battery power. For context, consider that the GeForce GTX 970M is about 80% of a desktop 970, and that when Thomas reviewed Gigabyte’s P35X v3 earlier this year, its GeForce GTX 980M achieved 8261 points. A Physics result of 8786 actually exceeds the P35X’s 8620 score, which we’d expect since that system had a Core i7-4710HQ instead.
Thomas ran his PCMark 8 numbers without acceleration, choosing to focus on raw CPU performance. I turned acceleration on, though. When you’re on the road and battery life is what limits your laptop’s utility, anything you can do to get back to idle quickly will stretch the system’s run time. This includes leveraging compute resources whenever possible.
To that end, Gigabyte’s P34W v3 scores 4645 points plugged into the wall in PCMark’s Work module. The P35X v3 did 4787 points. From there, the P34W v3 blows past its bigger brother without looking back, quadrupling its performance in the Home test and more than tripling it in the Creative metric.
Storage performance naturally varies depending on whether you’re using the SSD or hard drive. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter if you’re plugged into the wall or on battery—the results are similar in both cases.