huge thanks to Gigabyte for sponsoring this video and sending us the first
batch of laptops that we can use to actually test the all-new rtx 3000
series mobile graphics cards right here we've got an aorus 15g rocking an rtx
3080 with max q design and an aero 15
with an rtx 3070 with max q design armed
with these we can finally answer the question
after a string of not so great rumors is
rtx 3000 mobile any good
short answer yes long answer it is
way more complicated than that so strap in and let's get into it
the NVIDIA rtx 3080 mobile is the fastest gaming GPU that you can get in a
laptop and there is an rtx 3080 mobile
in this laptop right here the Gigabyte ars 15g
but the aorus 15g is not going to be the
fastest gaming laptop available today that is because of a branding concept
NVIDIA introduced back in 2017 with max
q design is a designation that was originally created to describe gaming
laptop designs that offered great performance but without compromising on
portability or on noise but
in the real world there's no such thing as
no compromises and truth be told thicker
laptops with beefier cooling always have
performed better and they still do so we
started hearing manufacturers throwing around the term max p to describe mobile
gpus that were geared toward maximum performance rather than maximum
quietness got it good because it just
got a lot more complicated and we'll get into that but first i need to explain
why this is happening designing a fast laptop is a monumental challenge because
of two things heat and power to illustrate this point i
present exhibit a the aorus extreme rtx
3080 graphics card it is a whopping
191 percent thicker than the thickest part of this 3080 laptop and guess what
guys more surface area equals more
cooling so unless the aorus 15g could have the prop of a tbm 500 pointed
directly at it all other things being equal it can not
be cooled as well as this desktop graphics card which means it cannot go
as fast power is also a huge problem in laptops
this GPU alone consumes 320 watts
this laptop has a 230 watt power brick and that's to
handle the CPU display RAM storage and
the GPU so unless you want this to light
on fire there's no way that we can power this with this
Gigabyte cares about your house not burning down also the battery life would
be atrocious instead of the rated eight hours on these guys what i'm getting at
here is that our rtx 3080 with max q
design is slower than the desktop version to be precise in v-ray it's 25.7
slower but hold off on the pitchforks here guys
we're not actually mad that NVIDIA and Gigabyte couldn't break fundamental laws
of physics and on the other side of this coin is the fact that our ars15g was
also 65.8 percent faster than a mobile rtx
2080 super the previous flagship so yeah
this is not this but it was never going to be and it's still one heck of a GPU
so then what exactly has NVIDIA done to
put an rtx 3080 into a laptop well to
start with they kind of didn't
while our rtx 3080 with max q design does use the same ga102 die the desktop
version of the card gets 8704 cuda cores enabled while the mobile
version has 6144
that's still more than a desktop 3070
but not by a whole lot this has the potential to be very confusing for
consumers who shop only by the numbers but it's also not entirely unprecedented
up until pascal which was the gtx 1000 series laptop and desktop gpus were not
identically equipped for example the gtx 980m had
significantly fewer cuda cores than the gtx 980 and before that time it was
typical for a completely different mid-range desktop GPU to be rebranded as
a flagship mobile one and cuda cores
aren't the only change our aorus 15 g's
GPU is a 90 watt variant giving it a 780
megahertz base clock and 12 45 megahertz boost that is so much slower than a
reference desktop board that i was concerned we'd be looking at an entirely
different class of performance in reality though the discrepancy isn't
nearly as bad as i feared in games the rtx 3080 in the aorus here was clocked
between 1400 and 1500 megahertz likely
because in games the CPU was only drawing about 20 watts thanks to a
feature called dynamic boost 2.0 now in the laptops of yesteryear the CPU and
GPU were each given a certain power budget for instance in the ars15g the
CPU might get 45 watts and the GPU might
get 90. the thing is there are very few use cases particularly on mobile where
both the CPU and GPU are going to be going full tilt at the same time so it
makes sense to be able to dynamically boost the power of one or the other as
needed let's say you fire up csgo and you want over 300 FPS for your high
refresh rate panel your GPU is going to handle that easily cs go graphics are
hardly cutting edge but your CPU is going to struggle so it makes sense to
take some of that 90 watts from the GPU and give them over to the CPU allowing
the Intel core i7 10850h to get closer to its max turbo of 5.1 gigahertz that's
dynamic boost 2.0 and it works the other way too if you load up cyberpunk with
ray tracing the CPU will sacrifice most of its power budget consuming like 15
watts or so and running at or below three gigahertz while the GPU is going
to get maximum juice just like you can get maximum juice from this 40 ounce
bottle lttstore.com my concern in all of this
however is that there seems to be very little way for consumers to tell
just how fast any individual rtx 3000
mobile chip will go our ars 15g and arrow 15 for that matter
both managed very impressive thermal results likely helped along by NVIDIA's
claimed doubling of power efficiency the extra efficiency along with what seems
like a pretty generous power budget is what allowed our finger quotes 1245
megahertz GPU to actually clock up to around 1500 megahertz in real games
so like good job Gigabyte but i could definitely
see someone else slapping this exact same GPU in a laptop that has way less
cooling capacity only to have somebody buy it expecting results like we're
showing here and then get extremely disappointed
remember guys this 90 watt GPU is still
in spec at just 780 megahertz on top of
this there is such a wide range of tgps available for each 3000 series mobile
card that i could easily see a situation where a well-cooled rtx 3070 could
noticeably outperform a poorly cooled 3080. tldr then because of the current
marketing and branding strategy it is not enough to shop based on specs alone
so you need to make sure that you find independent reviews of the exact 30
series laptop you want to buy before you pull the trigger on it we do have plans
by the way to do a much deeper dive into 3000 series mobile performance as we get
more laptops arriving in the office so make sure that you're subscribed like we
would have loved to do it today but the reality of it is we can't tell that
story until we have way more devices
as for the performance of these units though if you plan on playing at 1080p
without raytracing you probably don't need a 3080. shadow of the tomb raider
running at the highest settings without rtx has the 2080 super 3070 and 3080 all
performing basically the same as each other with our mobile core i7 holding
back the 3080 significantly to be clear this is not entirely the
core i7 10870h's fault even on a desktop
games are going to run up against a CPU bottleneck long before an rtx 3080 is
out of performance at 1080p it's just that this card is clearly designed with
higher resolutions in mind which isn't to say that the rs15g wastes
its power with the built-in 1080p display it runs at 240 hertz so wherever
the CPU can keep up you'll need graphics grunts to keep up with that and it's got
HDMI 2.1 to make connecting to a high refresh rate 4k monitor a breeze and ah
that's more like the performance difference we expected see you later rtx
2080 super another option would be to just get a laptop with a higher
resolution display this is the first time that mobile gpus
have seriously been able to handle 4k gaming without needing to down sample
and the aero 15's 4k OLED display is
very impressive you do give up the high refresh rate so i wouldn't use it for
competitive games but you gain super deep blacks high contrast and HDR 400
support the ar-15 is kind of the original creator laptop from Gigabyte
which is basically to say that it's a gaming laptop without the spaceship
styling or well at least depending on what you do with
the RGB settings you can also configure the arrow 15 with up to a core i9 10980
hk if that 5.3 gigahertz turbo sounds
tempting so huge thanks to Gigabyte for getting us our first rtx 3000 series
laptops and for sponsoring this video the rs15g that we have here comes in at
1999 us while the arrow 15 with the OLED
screen is 21.99 both laptops feature Intel 10th gen cpus with 8 cores Intel
wi-fi 6 for those times when you can't use the Ethernet jacks and Thunderbolt 3
for loads of high-speed connectivity and we're just scratching the surface here
guys and we're looking forward to learning more about rtx 3000 mobile as
we go oh i guess that's the end of the video make sure you're subscribed oh and if
you're looking for another video to watch maybe check out our look into rtx
3090s running an sli i i would have
recommended watching like a desktop 3080 review but come on it's more fun to
watch a video about something you shouldn't buy instead of something you
want but can't buy right 390 sli huh