Korth wrote:
The G501 is equipped with a 3840x2160 display, it's not true DCI-defined 4K but it's the same resolution as television "UHD" 4K and it's still a whole lot of pixels to push around.

At reference specs, a 4GB GTX960M is roughly 85% the GPU performance of a 4GB GTX960 and roughly 70% the performance of a 4GB GTX980. Many people claim that Witcher 3 is unplayable at highest quality 4K on a single GTX980, though that's a highly subjective generalization filled with countless hardware and software variables.

I think the G501 should be able to run Witcher 3 at full res with middling quality settings at a decent sustained fps. But it will bog down under heavy physics so fps will probably dip alarmingly when you really need it the most. But bear in mind that Witcher 3 is arguably the most hardware-heavy current game title, most games are much less demanding.

Temps?
It's a laptop. It will get warm under normal use, it will get hot under heavy use. It'll suck the battery dry and need to be plugged to survive hours of happy gaming, but it will only get even hotter while simultaneously charging and discharging the battery under heavy gaming load. It would be wise to get some kind of laptop cooler. You can invest your hopes into Asus warranty or you can seize fate by the throat and do a full re-paste.

But replace that powersucking heavy slow clunky fragile HDD and puny gutless SDD with a manly Samsung 850 SDD (or two) immediately! Longer battery life, faster, lighter, bigger, smaller, better in every way. It's a real shame to bottleneck the performance of such impressive (and expensive) laptop hardware with garbage storage devices.

xarot wrote:
I have the 1080p version of this laptop.

Witcher 3 won't run even on 1080p with minimum settings if you want good FPS. It only runs around 20-30 fps on 1920x1080 and minimum settings. If you drop resolution to 1366x768 it'll run around 40-60 fps with some added details too. Well I thought the performance on 1080p was enot enough as I have Titan X SLI in my desktop computer, so... 🙂

Witcher 3 is the most demanding game right now I think.

I think the cooling system draws and pushes air inside/outside the laptop from near the hinges of the screen. There's just a small gap for it. Probably it draws cooler air from the middle and outputs the heat from the sides. I've seen some severe throttling with this laptop's GPU as it starts to throttle near 80c. In more demanding situations the GPU clocks went down from 1097 MHz as low as 405 MHz and this had a huge impact on performance. This depends on what you'll actually play on this.

The previous 'gaming' laptop I had had Radeon 9200 and a later model HD 6470 in it. The GTX 960M is a gaming-grade GPU, but don't expect much from it. I think it's quite comparable to desktop GTX 750 or older GTX 570. It's inside a laptop after all.

Hope this helps. 🙂