Should you buy a laptop with Nvidia’s 1070 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 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 1070, while the other laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with Max-q
design.
The specs between these two graphics cards are slightly different.
The main difference is that the max-q 1070 has lower base and boost clock speeds, these
are the ranges that Nvidia list on their website, and they state 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, so that’s worth keeping in mind.
I didn’t have any thermal throttling in either laptop, so I don’t believe that was
a limitation here.
As the regular 1070 has higher base and boost clock speeds, it also uses more power, meaning
it will run hotter and require more cooling, resulting in more noise, and this is what
max-q graphics aim to reduce.
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 presets.
Overwatch shows a fair improvement at max settings, although the difference gets much
larger as you drop down in settings, personally I thought it was nice and smooth even at epic
settings on the Max-Q 1070, as even the 1% lows are above 60 FPS, and on average over
all setting levels the 1070 is performing around 34% better than the Max-Q 1070.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was tested using the built in benchmark with Direct X 12, and again
we’re seeing a larger difference at the lower setting levels and even at max settings
where the difference is the lowest we’re seeing a 34% improvement with the 1070.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was tested with the latest 1.0 version using the replay
feature, and this game showed the lowest difference between the two graphics cards, possibly because
it just doesn’t seem to be very well optimized.
In my test the 1070 is only performing 4% better than the Max-Q version, but of course
these results can vary quite a bit depending on what’s going on in game.
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 1070 is performing around 34% better than the Max-Q 1070 here.
Ghost Recon was tested with the built in benchmark tool and is another resource intensive game.
We’re not getting great results at max settings but it runs fairly well at very high or lower,
and the 1070 performs around 21% better than the Max-Q 1070.
In the Witcher 3 we’re almost able to average 60 FPS even at max settings with the Max-Q
1070, and this game doesn’t even really need a high frame rate to enjoy.
On average over all setting levels the 1070 is performing 27% better than the Max-Q version
in this game.
Shadow of War using the built in benchmark showed a fair improvement of around 31% on
average between the two graphics cards, although we’re able to average over 60 FPS at ultra
settings even with the Max-Q 1070, so both are performing good.
I’ve found Battlefield 1 to run quite well on most hardware, and even at max settings
it ran smoothly on both laptops, as shown by the fairly high 1% lows.
Once again we can see the gap between the two get larger as the settings drop down,
even at max settings the 1070 is performing 38% better than the Max-Q 1070.
CS:GO was also quite interesting, there was a huge difference between the two with the
1070 performing 95% better on average.
I ran these tests multiple times and can only presume that this is a well optimized game.
Dota 2 ran well on both laptops, although I’m testing with a fairly intensive replay
here.
We can see there’s quite a nice performance increase when running with the 1070, around
37% better than the Max-Q 1070.
Doom is another game that usually performs pretty well regardless of graphics power,
and I’ve tested it using Vulkan.
Although there’s not too much of a change between the setting levels, again the 1070
is performing around 37% better than the Max-Q version.
Before we get into the benchmarking tools I’ll just quickly note that so far the performance
improvement over the games tested is a 32% increase for the 1070 over the Max-Q 1070,
a pretty good result, and I didn’t actually include the CS:GO test as I’m still a bit
unsure about that 95% improvement, 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.
In the Heaven benchmark the difference between the two graphics cards is fairly similar at
all setting levels, whereas in Valley benchmark the differences between the two are much closer
together, with the Max-Q 1070 actually coming out slightly ahead at high settings.
I’ve also tested the latest Superposition benchmark from Unigine, and again there’s
a similar increase.
Finally I’ve tested Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarks from 3DMark, which showed a
similar increase.
On average from these benchmark tools the 1070 is performing just under 12% better than
the Max-Q 1070, so not actually that much of a difference compared to the real world
gaming results which was interesting, usually the difference is much bigger.
As expected the 1070 came out ahead of the Max-Q 1070 in just about every test, performing
over 28% percent better on average in the games and benchmark tools shown here, a much
bigger difference than I expected.
To be honest I thought the results would be closer, as the 1060 only showed an 8% improvement
over the Max-Q 1060, it seems like it may be fairer to compare the Max-Q 1070 with a
1060, so make sure to subscribe for that one.
If you’ve already got a laptop with the Max-Q 1070 is it worth upgrading to the full
1070?
Although the performance difference is a fair amount, I’d generally say no unless you
really need it, as in most cases this 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, realistically both
offer a great experience at 1080p.
Personally I play most of the games tested earlier, so I’d lean towards the 1070 especially
if I was playing on monitor above 60Hz for the better experience at higher settings,
but if you’re playing less demanding games or have no issues dropping the settings down
a little the Max-Q 1070 still gives a great experience.
The 1070 with Max-Q should use less power and produce less noise, however as both of
the laptops I’ve tested are completely different in terms of overall form factor as they’re
from different companies it wouldn’t really be a fair comparison, ideally I’d need two
laptops of the same brand and model to do that justice.
With that said, the Max-Q 1070 ran at around the sampe temps as the 1070, however it’s
also in a thinner body compared to the 1070 laptop, so in my case I’ve got a thinner
laptop but the trade off is that the temps and system volume aren’t much different
over the regular 1070 laptop.
I hope that these benchmarks have shown you the real world differences in performance
between the Nvidia 1070 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 on the video if you found the information useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this