GET RTXED: 20-SERIES GAMING LAPTOP ROUNDUP

Nvidia wants to show you the light with its new 20-series cards.

Nvidia’s new RTX cards have finally made their way to the gaming laptop space and what better way to welcome the new generation than with a gladiatorial battle where they’re all pitted against one another. We have three units from each of the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 categories this year, giving us a good indication of the various graphical capabilities of each. Nvidia’s big selling point for its 20-series graphics cards is the addition of a game rendering technique called ray tracing, and while there are only a handful of tests you can run for ray tracing performance we pegged a couple of the important ones here.

There’s very little CPU diversity in the 2019 RTX offerings and every unit bar three came with a 15.6-inch 144Hz IPS display (Lenovo, Gigabyte and MSI’s offerings had G-Sync, UHD or 17.3-inch panels, respectively). This means that the main variation we saw was in the storage offering, where many of the more forward-looking units were seeking to put in bigger PCIe connected SSDs, with some even using faster NVMe drives, and using them in RAID 0 configurations for 3000+MB/s read and write speeds.

While Nvidia’s Max-Q is pushing the company towards better efficiencies and lower thermals, this was many of the laptop’s second time using an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU (or even the third) and all of them were keen to push the limits of this chip meaning CPU max temperatures were generally above 970C.

In other words the competition was hot and there’s plenty to dig into in this year’s RTX laptop offerings.