- 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.
(upbeat music)
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 Aorus 15G.
But, the Auros 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% 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 cannot 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 Aorus 15G was also 65.8% 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 GA 102 die,
the desktop version of the card gets
8,704 CUDA cores enabled,
while the mobile version has 6,144.
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 15G's GPU is a 90 Watt variant,
giving it a 780 megahertz base clock
and 1245 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 Aorus 15G,
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 gonna 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 "CS Go"
and you want over 300 FPS for your high refresh rate panel.
Your GPU is gonna 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 gonna get maximum juice.
Just like you can get maximum juice
from this 40 ounce bottle.
LTT store.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 Aorus 15G, and Aero 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.
TL;DR 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 wanna 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 so that 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 ray tracing,
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 gonna 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 Aorus 15G
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 downsample.
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 Aero 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.
Well, at least depending on what you do
with the RGB settings.
You can also configure the Aero 15
with up to a Core i9 10980HK,
if that 5.3 gigahertz turbo sounds tempting.
So a huge thanks to Gigabyte
for getting us our first RTX 3000 series laptops.
And for sponsoring this video.
The Aorus 15G that we have here comes in at 1999 US,
while the Aero 15 with the OLED screen is 2199.
Both laptops feature Intel 10th gen CPU with eight cores,
Intel Wifi Six for those times
when you can't use the ethernet jacks,
and Thunderbolt Three 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 in SLI.
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?
3090 SLI, eh?
(mumbling)