Eurocom Monster 4 14-inch Gaming Notebook Review

Years ago, it felt like no mobile GPU could give us a great gaming experience at the resolution that shipped with our notebooks. Today, things are quite different. Modern mobile GPUs are so powerful, that the highest-end ones can handle resolutions that are higher than native. That includes the GeForce GTX 970M. It can eat most games at up to 1080p (as seen on the previous page), and it can handle 1440p games quite well, too.

That said, the 970M has 83% of the CUDA cores that the 980M does, and based on that and the experiences I’ve had, I can say that 1440p won’t be flawless, but it will most certainly be “good”. Just expect the latest and greatest games to require some serious tweaking.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

After seeing the Monster 4 getting punished with RotTR at 1080p, I cringed when opening the game up at 1440p. As you might have expected, low graphics settings have to be used here – and even then you’re not going to be getting 60 FPS. The upside? That ~47 FPS didn’t feel that bad, and somehow, the game still manages to look great. Admittedly, I’d recommend just sticking to 1080p even if you’re connected to an external monitor for this one.

Far Cry Primal

Like RotTR, Far Cry Primal is a seriously punishing game. Dropping the detail levels on this one isn’t going to help the frame rate much. I have a hard time calling an FPS “playable” at 39 FPS, but that’s the best I got. What we can take away from this is that like RotTR, Primal should stick to 1080p even on an external display.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Wild Hunt like the two previous games, proves to be a bit much at 1440p. While the game was fairly playable, I am again going to have to recommend sticking to 1080p for this one.

Dying Light

Dying Light might have great graphics, but it’s not quite as punishing as those earlier games, which allowed me to retain “Medium” detail levels at 1440p. Perhaps not surprisingly, ambient occlusion was a big, fat “no” for this game and resolution combination.

Grand Theft Auto V

With as many knobs and dials as GTA V has, you could spend an eternity fine-tuning the game for your particular rig. In this notebook’s case, I could thankfully stick to the higher-end of the options spectrum. While ambient occlusion definitely wasn’t happening, many other settings were able to be High or better.

Crysis 3

I had anticipated having to go even lower than I did in Crysis 3, but thankfully, the game runs quite well at ~50 FPS.

GRID Autosport

Being that GRID Autosport isn’t the most demanding game around, I was able to attain playable framerates at 1440p without much of an issue. Some of the “Ultras” had to be turned into “Highs”, and soft ambient occlusion had to be disabled entirely. As it is, these are still high detail settings, so the game will look almost as great at 1440p as it does at 1080p – without sacrificing framerates.

Borderlands 2

As with GRID above, we’ve entered the “easier” set of games, which definitely includes Borderlands 2. As cool as the game looks, you can achieve great detail levels and framerates at 1440p with this notebook. If you really love the PhysX effects in the game, you might want to increase that detail level and just deal with the lower framerates, because in reality, the heavier PhysX parts don’t come along too often.

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

I can’t think of many examples that are as great as Sleeping Dogs where the graphics/performance ratio is concerned. With dropped anti-aliasing (which makes almost no difference in the game, in my opinion), the game can run at max detail with good framerates. If you want to secure 60 FPS+, SSAO should be the first thing to go.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Blacklist

We’ve reached the end of our real-world game testing with Blacklist, a game that runs very well at 1440p on the Monster 4 if AO and tessellation are turned off. Fortunately, those features don’t impact the overall visual quality that much.

On the next (and final page), we’ll take a quick look at system performance, and then wrap this thing up.