Earlier this month, we covered Asus’insane water-cooled laptop and the appearance of a new Nvidia GPU that looked for all the world like a GTX 980 desktop chip in a mobile form factor. Today, Nvidia is taking the lid off that particular project — and it’s even crazier than we thought it was. Putting a GTX 980 in a notebook chassis is a bit nuts, even if these systems are only portable in the same way that a five-gallon bucket is portable.
The handful of laptops now shipping with full-size GTX 980 graphics cards in them will allow those cards to be overclocked, opening up still more performance alongside the unlocked Intel Skylake-K chips that Chipzilla is now shipping in mobile as well. None of the specs are skimped on — the GPU’s core clock is 1126MHz base, identical to the standard desktop, while its GDDR5 memory bus is clocked at an effective 7Gbps. Max clock frequencies could supposedly hit an additional 200MHz, though that’s going to depend a great deal on the cooling solution of the system.
Other features coming to these new systems include variable fan controls, 17-inch 1080p panels, and 4-8 phase power supplies with higher peak currents. The end result should be some truly amazing notebooks from the likes of Asus, MSI, and Clevo. MSI even intends to introduce an SLI version of the laptop with an 18.4-inch screen.
Of notebooks and cooling
It’s worth pausing for a moment and considering the throttling situation in modern notebooks. If you’ve never owned a high-end boutique laptop or had occasion to test one, it’s easy to think that these are the systems you buy when you want maximum performance with minimal-to-zero throttling. You might think that — but in many cases, you’d be wrong. While I haven’t reviewed every high-end laptop ever built, it’s been my observation that systems that can handle their own heat output are few and far between. Systems that can handle their heat output without either turning into banshee-possessed wind tunnels or melting whatever surface you happen to set them on are even rarer.
Asus’ upcoming water-cooled system
The problem many boutique builders face is that high-end consumers want the fastest-sounding processor without any regard for what will happen if you try to run that particular chip in a chassis for more than 60-120 seconds. Sure, a high-end CPU core may burst to 3.7GHz initially, but once the chip overheats, you’ll be back in 2.5GHz territory. These kinds of issues are why Intel’s lowest-end Core M processors were measured outperforming the highest-end Core M chips earlier this year.
When I say that boutique systems typically throttle, I don’t mean that they throttle in Prime95 + FurMark when left sitting on a bed for an hour. I mean they tend to throttle within minutes to a greater or lesser degree. Not every laptop has this problem (I’ve been very pleased with the performance of Asus’ recent offerings), but many do, including those from major brands. It’s caused by a boutique manufacturer being willing to slam their foot down on the gas pedal, even when doing so will harm the customer’s experience.
That doesn’t mean that vendors like MSI, Asus, and Alienware can’t build great gaming laptops, even with this hardware — but I’d definitely read reviews, when they eventually appear, with a careful eye.
One final note: This GPU is apparently being called the GTX 980 for mobile as opposed to the GTX 980M, or any kind of Titan branding, as we originally theorized. If you go looking for it, make sure you pick the appropriate GPU. We reached out to Nvidia, who told us that this GTX 980 mobile card will also allow for higher operating temperatures then what we’ve seen with mobile GPUs in the past — presumably that means 90-95C as opposed to the 70C that most mobile GPUs seem to target.
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