DESKTOP GAMING POWER ON A LAPTOP

For real, this time, as Ben Mansill discovered at Nvidia’s Pascal unveiling

When Nvidia debuted the Pascal GPU series it shifted to the smaller 16nm finFET process. That enabled far higher frequencies for similar power consumption, and meant that GPU designers no longer had to depend on cramming more cores onto the die to achieve enough of a gain over the previous generation to make it worthwhile. The end result is that Pascal GPUs offer a sizeable increase in performance over Maxwell. Even the lowend GTX 1060 from the new range is roughly equal to the GTX 980 – which until now was the premium card to have. And, because these new mobile GPUs are almost identical to the desktop parts, whenever you read about a new Pascalbased gaming laptop you won’t have to do any mental adjustments to take into account marketing fudgery of the past – for example, the previousgen mobile GTX 980M delivered about the same performance as the desktop GTX 970.

The new mobile Pascal GPUs are identical to the desktop parts – with the exception of the midrange GTX 1070. This one is ever so slightly different in spec, with 2048 CUDA cores compared to 1920 in the desktop part, but it runs at a boost frequency of 1645MHz compared to a slightly higher 1683MHz for the desktop GPU. So, a few more cores, and a minor reduction in frequency means that overall performance is virtually the same. The GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 mobile GPUs are like for like identical to their desktop brethren.

POWER CONSUMPTION

Power consumption is also improved – at least in terms of performance per watt, with the GTX 1060 in particular likely to see very wide adoption thanks to its performance superiority over the 980M, yet is drawing around 120W. Nvidia are also claiming that a single GTX 1080 draws the same power as a GTX 980 SLI rig.

Temperatures look to be acceptable, but I had little opportunity to test that at the launch event. Nevertheless I was able to monitor Overwatch running at 40fps at 4k resolution on an EVGA SC17 laptop, and temps hovered around 78 degrees.

PERFORMANCE

Not only is a single GTX 1080 more powerefficient than SLI GTX 980 – it’s faster. On an Intel i7 6700hq laptop, running a GTX 1080, these were the results:

Overclocking also presents some tempting possibilities. Thanks to the 16nm finFET design, far higher frequencies than Maxwell are possible – as any owner of a desktop Pascal GPU will cheerfully tell you. Nvidia even told us that overclocks in the region of 300MHz should be achievable! For a company to make that claim to a room full of tech journos for a product like this is unprecedented. Of course, power consumption and temps will need to be monitored far more studiously than when running a desktop card, but with the new breed of 4k gaming laptops as well as those running refresh rates as high as 144Hz many gamers will surely be tempted to push things higher. I played Doom on a 1080equiped laptop that had been overclocked to a rather remarkable 2050MHz – when the stock part runs at a standard boost of 1735Mhz. Amazing.