Since June, PC enthusiasts have been enthralled with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 10 series and the earth-shattering performance they offer that’s over twice that of the previous generation’s top cards. Now, these monster cards go on the move: Gigabyte and Aorus have announced eight notebooks sporting NVIDIA’s new 10-series graphics cards.
Before we check out the notebooks, let’s talk about NVIDIA’s mobile GPUs.
Graphics cards for notebooks have typically been relatively under-powered in comparison to their desktop counterparts. So it’s with interest that we note NVIDIA seems to be hedging its bets on these new 10-series cards because, as you’ll notice, there is no “M” suffix to the parts that will appear in these new notebooks.
In the past, that little “M” served as a way for you and I to recognise the presence of notebook-specific cards. The dropping of that “M” then might be confusing. Then again, it might not because looking at the specifications, there isn’t all that much that separates the GTX 10 notebook series from the desktop series.
GeForce GTX 10 series (Notebook) specifications
| GTX 1080 Notebook | GTX 1070 Notebook | GTX 1060 Notebook | |
| Cuda Cores | 2560 | 2048 | 1280 |
| Base Clock | 1556 | 1442 | 1404 |
| Boost Clock | 1733 | 1645 | 1670 |
| Memory speed (Gbps) | 10 | 8 | 8 |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5 | up to 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 320 | 256 | 192 |
| VR Ready | Yes | Yes | Yes |
GeForce GTX 10 series (Desktop) specifications
| GTX 1080 Desktop | GTX 1070 Desktop | GTX 1060 Desktop | |
| Cuda Cores | 2560 | 1920 | 1280 |
| Base Clock (MHz) | 1607 | 1506 | 1506 |
| Boost Clock (MHz) | 1733 | 1683 | 1708 |
| Memory speed (Gbps) | 10 | 8 | 8 |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 320 | 256 | 192 |
| VR Ready | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Looking at those two tables you’ll notice that besides a lower base clock speed (presumably to keep performance up without generating too much heat), these cards seem like carbon copies of the desktop counterparts.
This is good news for anybody looking for a portable gaming solution; very good news indeed.
The notebooks housing the beasts
The first notebooks to sport these GPUs are from the Gigabyte and Aorus stables.
In the Gigabyte corner will be an update to the 15.6-inch P55 notebook which will house a GTX 1060. There will be a choice of a GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 for the P57 and the GTX 1070 will feature in both the P35 and P37 notebooks.
For Aorus, the X3 Plus v6 will have the lower spec’d GTX 1060. The X5 v6 and X7 v6 will both house a GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080 will only feature in the X7 DT v6 for now.
Another notebook that is rumoured to house a GTX 1080 is the MSI GT83VR. What’s interesting about this notebook is that, according to enthusiast website Videocardz, is that it will have two GTX 1080 GPUs in SLI. This would essentially be MSI’s update to the beastly GT80 Titan.
There is no word just yet on when these notebooks will land in the country but if you’re looking for a portable gaming rig that offers crazy performance, NVIDIA’s new cards might just be able to make that happen for you.
It will likely be worth your while to wait until they land due to the performance on offer, as these new cards make the ludiscrously-fast previous-gen 900-series cards look slow by comparison.
[Source – NVIDIA] []Image – Aorus]
