Benchmarks: System and Gaming
Put it all together and you have a swift, highly-capable machine, but the other cost-cutting measure is the GPU. It's no surprise to see Asus's £875 machine employing a GeForce GTX 960M, but as we can see in the 3DMark results, it's a significant step down from the GTX 970M typically found in laptops priced from £1,000.
Synthetic benchmarks are one thing, actual games are another. So what sort of performance level should you expect? We've taken a trio of recent titles - Alien: Isolation, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Total War: Rome II - and found all three to be perfectly playable, provided you're willing to give and take when it comes to image quality. Shadow of Mordor posed the biggest challenge, and quality settings had to be dialled down to medium in order to maintain properly smooth framerates.
There's a good amount of gaming potential on offer, and your mileage will vary from one title to the next, but don't expect to be able to crank everything up to 11 with a GTX 960M doing the legwork.
