makes use of the desktop GTX 980
and not the 980M which is less
capable than the desktop 970 by
some margin. As such, even though
the difference between the regular
or at least more commonly found
GTX 980M may seem to be
somewhat miniscule at face value.
In performance terms, the GPUs are
miles apart and subsequently the
GX700 extends its performance lead
over the competition by a massive
margin. In fact, many times it is
capable of eclipsing the GTX 960M
SLI powered notebooks while
sporting lower TDP. Consider the
overclocking aspect of the notebook
as well and it should dawn on you
why this is no ordinary collection of
parts slapped together. The key
selling point of this notebook is
performance and the ability to
extend that further via liquid cooling
courtesy of the docking station.
To that end, you can absolutely
overclock this system especially via
the pre-installed software which
also has some safety features
preventing you from setting
unrecoverable settings to a degree.
The only time this software falls
apart if you resort to overclocking
via the Base clock, if you do so
and the system fails to boot up
afterwards. You may have a trying
time attempting to recover from this
as the system may resort to an
endless boot loop. Fortunately, this
can be remedied by the curious or
knowledgeable individual via a BIOS
reset. ASUS may have dealt with this
concern by the time you read this,
but you should in general refrain
from this kind of overclocking. Keep
in mind as well that base clock
tuning is not accessible through the
ASUS utility, but rather via INTEL
XTU. As such, it is not a shortcoming
of ASUS, rather that there’s no
protection mechanism against this
in the eventuality that one does end
up using XTU for overclocking.
The reality is, there's little to be
gained in performance from doing
this anyway, when you have the
CPU multiplier to work with.
Issue 38 | 2016 The OverClocker 51