Benchmarks: Gaming
The GPU is the only meaningful way to distinguish the two SC17 models, and though the price is steep, there's a significant increase in graphics horsepower. With a 3DMark Fire Strike score of 12,493, the GTX 1070 delivers a performance boost of 50 per cent, and that's at stock speeds. Hit SuperClock and the score climbs to 14,041.
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3DMark scores are impressive across the board, and performance is in line with expectations of a GTX 1070-based laptop. Moving from a 100W GPU (GTX 980M) to a 150W GPU (GTX 1070) may have presented a challenge in terms of stability, yet at stock speeds the refreshed SC17 returned a promising stress-test score of 98.4 per cent.
There's plenty of power to drive modern games, with all four of our test titles being rendered in excess of 60 frames per second at 2,560x1,440. Cranking the resolution up to native 4K UHD highlights the GTX 1070's limitation - it can manage 30fps in most games with maximum quality, but you'll need to drop the settings down a touch or two in order to get closer to a silky-smooth 60fps. We also re-ran the UHD gaming benchmarks with the SuperClock enabled, resulting in a small uplift in performance.
