Should you buy a gaming laptop with Nvidia’s 1060 graphics, or a 1070 with Max-Q?
We’re going to benchmark two laptops in a number of games to see the performance differences
between them to help you decide which you should get.
The two laptops that I’m testing here are very close to being the same in terms of specs.
Both have an Intel 7700HQ quad core CPU with 16GB of DDR4 memory and use an SSD for the
primary hard drive, which is running Windows 10 with all available updates to date applied.
No manual overclocking was performed for any of these tests, and G-Sync was disabled.
The main difference between the two laptops is of course that one is running your standard
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, while the other laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with Max-Q
design.
The specs between these two graphics cards are a little different, with the main differences
being that the Max-Q 1070 has more cuda cores than the 1060, but it also runs at lower clock
speeds which is how it is able to run cooler and quieter.
Nvidia note that the base and boost clocks depend on the particular laptops thermal and
electrical system design, so essentially one laptop with a max-q graphics card may perform
differently to another laptop that also has max-q graphics.
With that in mind let’s take a look at our benchmarks and find out how each of these
cards perform!
We’ll cover both real world gaming benchmarks first, then the results of some benchmarking
tools.
All games were tested with a 1080p resolution using all available setting levels.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was tested using the built in benchmark with Direct X 12, the differences
between the two are much larger at higher settings, with the Max-Q 1070 performing around
20% better than the 1060 at max settings, but just 5% better at minimum settings.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was tested with the latest 1.0 version using the replay
feature, the 1060 was actually coming out slightly ahead in all settings except ultra
where the Max-Q 1070 was performing about 14% better.
Battlefield 1 showed similar results, where the Max-Q 1070 was only ahead at ultra settings
while the 1060 moves up as we drop down in settings.
Watchdogs 2 is a fairly resource intensive game, but it doesn’t really need a high
frame rate to enjoy and ran well even at max settings with either laptop.
On average the Max-Q 1070 is only performing around 3% better, so not much difference at
all.
Ghost Recon was tested with the built in benchmark tool and is another resource intensive game,
and the Max-Q 1070 is performing around 17% better than the 1060 here.
In the Witcher 3 the Max-Q 1070 is needed if you want 60 FPS at max settings, but this
game runs great even without high frame rates, and the Max-Q 1070 will give you a 24% improvement
over the 1060 here.
Shadow of War using the built in benchmark showed a fair improvement of around 28% at
max settings, however this drops down at lower setting levels, resulting in a 12% improvement
if we consider all level averages.
Overwatch was quite interesting, in my testing the 1060 actually performed a fair bit better
than the Max-Q 1070, this seems to happen in the other esports titles I’ve tested
too, so I’m thinking these games must really prefer the higher clock speed of the 1060.
CS:GO is another example where the the 1060 was ahead again, although not quite as much
this time around, however the 1% lows were better with the Max-Q 1070.
Dota 2 ran well on both laptops, although I’m testing with a fairly intensive replay
here, and once again the 1060 was slightly ahead of the Max-Q 1070 as we saw in Overwatch
and CS:GO, although less so of a difference here.
Doom usually performs pretty well regardless of graphics power, and I’ve tested it using
Vulkan.
At max settings the Max-Q 1070 performs around 23% better than the 1060, although at low
settings there’s only a 3% difference.
Before we get into the benchmarking tools I’ll just quickly note that so far the performance
improvement over the games tested is a 5% increase for the Max-Q 1070 over the 1060,
but if we don’t include those esports titles which seem to favour the 1060 then the Max-Q
1070 performs just under 12% better, so the difference isn’t really that big, but it
really seems to depend on the game.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming tests previously shown as synthetic tests
seem to scale much better than real games.
In the Heaven benchmark the difference between the two graphics cards is a fair big bigger
compared to the games, it’s the same in Valley benchmark although the differences
are a little closer together.
I’ve also tested the latest Superposition benchmark from Unigine, and again there’s
a similar increase with the Max-Q 1070.
Finally I’ve tested Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarks from 3DMark, which showed a
similar increase.
On average from these benchmark tools the Max-Q 1070 is performing around 25% better
than the 1060, so a fair bit higher than the actual games.
As expected the Max-Q 1070 came out ahead of the 1060 in the majority of tests, however
there were some interesting cases where the 1060 came out ahead either at lower settings,
or all settings in the esports titles.
During testing I noticed that the Max-Q 1070 in the laptop I was testing sat at around
1250MHz regardless of the temperature, so a little under the advertised boost clock
speeds despite running somewhat cool at 70 degrees, so just something important to note
which could be a result of the specific laptop I tested with, as higher clock speeds would
likely increase the results and push the Max-Q 1070 a bit further ahead of the 1060, however
as mentioned previously not all Max-Q laptops are equal so without having more laptops to
test with and get an average this is the best I can do.
If you’ve already got a laptop with the 1060 is it worth upgrading to the a Max-Q
1070?
Although the performance seems to depend greatly on what you’ll actually be playing, I’d
generally say no as depending on the game they trade blows pretty often, and upgrading
would involve buying a completely new laptop, a fairly expensive process.
If you’re looking at buying a new laptop and trying to decide between either of these,
then it depends more on the games you’re wanting to play with them, however the Max-Q
1070 seems to be available in thinner and lighter laptops.
Now let’s talk about the battery life, system noise levels, and thermals.
Both laptops had a 4 cell 55 Watt hour battery and the same cooling system, so we should
be able to compare these fairly accurately.
As for the battery life while playing the Witcher 3 at medium settings with both laptops
capped to 30 FPS with Nvidia’s battery boost the Max-Q 1070 lasted just a couple of minutes
longer than the 1060 laptop.
Under full load both laptops total system noise sat at around 50 decibels, and the 1060
was actually a little warmer, so the Max-Q 1070 in general is performing a bit better
at slightly better temps while making about the same amount of fan noise, but this will
depend on the laptop so take these results with a grain of salt.
I hope that these benchmarks have shown you the real world differences in performance
between the Nvidia 1060 and 1070 with max-q laptop graphics cards, and helped you choose
between them.
Let me know down in the comments which graphics card you’ll be getting in your next laptop
and why, and leave a like if you found the information useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.