The GAPW force implementation is assessed with respect to, first, the conventional allelectron molecular quantum chemistry code Gaussian, and, second, the underlying pseudo potential based GPW implementation in CP2K. Both comparisons elucidate how the GAPW ansatz impacts the overall accuracy of the method, with the first comparison pointing out the error in choosing an additional plane wave basis for the interatomic domains and the second benchmark determining the introduced error by augmenting the basis set with local Gaussians for the atomic regions. For both assessments, we examined ground-state energies and forces, the first three singlet and triplet vertical energies as well as the forces associated with the first singlet and triplet excited states. The former two properties were already benchmarked in Refs. ) and are considered here additionally to enable a comparison of ground-state and excited-state forces and to emphasize consistency. As benchmark systems, we have chosen the molecular test set of Budzak et al., comprising 35 small molecules containing main-group elements from the first and second rows of the periodic table, as well as sulfur, selenium, chlorine, and bromine. The initial molecular geometries were adopted from our prior work, wherein we optimized ground-state geometries using the PBE0 functional and the def2-QZVPP basis set 41 within the Turbomole program package. For the sake of convenience, our examination of vertical excitation energies is throughout confined to a direct comparison of the first three vertical excitation energies, with states solely identified based on the corresponding electronic structure energy. Furthermore, only non-zero x, y and z components of the ground-state or excited-state forces were considered for statistical analysis.