Nvidia’s latest and greatest GPU lineup is now in the wild, bringing true desktop performance to notebooks. While getting desktop performance onto notebooks was the push by Nvidia last year with them launching the GXT 980 on notebooks, it was pretty evident that that the lower-end GTX 960 GPUs also have a chance. Well it turns out to be the entire Pascal lineup now!
Also Read: MSI CELEBRATES THEIR 30TH ANNIVERSARY WITH THEIR NEW NVIDIA PASCAL NOTEBOOK LINEUP
On the 16th, this month, we got our hands on MSI’s latest lineup of notebooks, which were based around all the new Pascal GPUs Nvidia launched a while ago for desktops. While the specifications and slightly differ from their desktop counterparts, Nvidia’s latest Pascal GPUs, namely, the GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 are doomed to bring their desktop counterparts at the same level of performance. While the “M’ is being ripped off the new GPUs, these new GPUs, users have lost the ability to tinker with the voltage on the new Pascal GPUs on notebooks.
It’s also worth mentioning that this really seems like the end for the “M”, next to GPU models which previously used to indicate the form factor that GPU was for, at least for Nvidia. With the “M” ripped off the names, I was quite curious if there was some error on MSI’s side of mentioning the specs of the notebooks, and indeed it was the GTX 1060 without the “M” as we found in the Device Manager of the MSI GE72VR Apache Pro.
| NVIDIA GeForce 10 Series | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| MOBILE | GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile | GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile | GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile |
| GPU | GP104 | GP104 | GP106 |
| GPU Configuration | 2560 : 160 : 64 | 2048 : 128 : 64 | 1280 : 80 : 48 |
| GPU Clock | 1556 / 1733 MHz | 1443 / 1645 MHz | 1405 / 1670 MHz |
| Mem. Clock / Effective | 1250 / 10000 MHz | 2002 / 8008 MHz | 2002 / 8008 MHz |
| Memory Type | 8GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5 | Upto 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| DESKTOP | GeForce GTX 1080 Desktop | GeForce GTX 1070 Desktop | GeForce GTX 1060 Desktop |
| GPU | GP104-400 | GP104-200 | GP106-400 |
| GPU Configuration | 2560 : 160 : 64 | 1920 : 120 : 64 | 1280 : 80 : 48 |
| GPU Clock | 1607 / 1733 MHz | 1506 / 1683 MHz | 1506 / 1709 MHz |
| Mem. Clock / Effective | 1251 / 10008 MHz | 2002 / 8008 MHz | 2002 / 8008 MHz |
| Memory Type | 8GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
Table Source: VideoCardz
Taking thermals into account, as of MSI’s notebook lineup, Nvidia’s new Pascal GPUs are proving to be very efficient, however, LinusTechTips on Youtube mentioned that there were no details released about the Power Consumption but should be around the range of their last gen “M” counterparts. Although, these new laptops equipped with Pascal GPUs do require much beefier power phases compared to traditional notebook PCs. Temperatures should be under 80°C on these notebooks.
It also seems pretty evident why Nvidia tried to push Pascal onto notebooks with desktop performance in the first place. Here’s some reasons why Nvidia pushed their Pascal GPUs onto notebooks.
- The rising demand for gaming notebooks, up to 30% increase in the sales of gaming notebooks compared to the traditional gaming consoles such as the Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
- Improvement in power efficiency and thermals, thanks to the 16nm FinFET process.
As of the performance, we weren’t able to tinker with the laptops much at MSI’s launch, however, Nvidia’s release shows us that the notebook GPUs are slightly underclocked while actually boosting the CUDA core count on the notebook variant to 2048 compared to the 1920 CUDA cores on the desktop GTX 1070.
However, specs weren’t dictating everything, Clevo’s notebooks come with desktop Core i7 CPUs. Additionally, thermals will play a hardcore factor in determining the performance of these notebook PCs as well. MSI themselves have implemented quite some beefy solutions to keep the laptop strong under high temps.
Overall, I myself am most interested in how the GTX 1070 or even the GXT 1060 laptops play out since these are the notebooks that would be thin and portable enough. Definitely my eyes are set onto MSI’s GS73VR for it’s performance and size.
As of right now, pricing is the key factors to differentiate PC Gamers to Notebook gamers at the moment. Other than that, it’s all preferences from there on!
