Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today I'm finally getting around to checking out invidious new g-force RT extreme use for laptops and that's starting with the RT X 2070 hopefully at some point I'll get around to doing I guess a full performance breakdown of each of the new RT X laptop offerings but have to start somewhere and thanks to gigabyte we're kicking things off with the middle of the pack 2070 in its max Q variant obviously at this point the desktop version of the RT X 2070 has been on the market for a little while and we know exactly how it performs however the laptop variant is interesting because it's not an identical copy of the desktop card and this is where Nvidia's GeForce 20 series begins to be a bit confusing for buyers of laptops used to the Pascal lineup that's been around for a few years now so let's go back to Pascal and check out how the lineup looked the three main offerings were the GTX 1060 the gtx 1070 and the gtx 1080 excluding the max q variants for a moment the remain regular laptop versions were very similar to their desktop counterparts the gtx 1060 for example had the same coup de coeur count and while the base clock was a little lower the rated boost clock was only 38 megahertz or lower than the desktop card for the most part in a good laptop design the laptop gtx 1060 performed like a desktop gtx 1060 then there was the gtx 1080 again same coup de coeur count and even the same boost clock the gtx 1070 was a little different in that the laptop variant had a slight increase to CUDA cores along with the slight decrease in clocks but the end result was that a laptop gtx 1060 again performed around the mark of a desktop gtx 1070 back then times were simple then nvidia introduced max cubits which were under clocked versions of the GPU designed to slot into thin and light systems that perhaps didn't have the cooling capabilities of the usual chunky gaming laptops a lot of people hated on max q but the reality is it did allow for more performance in a given design not the full performance of the labeled GPU but better than the tier below and considering most laptops that had next cue GPS will marketed as such there wasn't a whole lot of confusion there but come the GeForce 20 suits NVIDIA has taken things a step further we still have max-q laptops but it's the regular ngon max-q GPUs that have also received pretty significant clock speed cuts compared to the desktop variants I will go through every variant here but focusing in on the RT X 2070 we can see where the cuts have occurred the GPU still has the same kuduk or count 2,304 quarks which i guess is why nvidia can still call this a 90 X 27 T it's the same physical GPU but clock speeds are significantly law the absolute maximum rated boosts clock you'll see for this laptop variant is 1440 megahertz with a 1215 megahertz base and that's the fully fledged version compare that to the desktop card which has a 14 10 megahertz base clock along with the 16 20 megahertz boost which rose up to 17 10 megahertz so the founders Edition card so with a fully fledged non max QR TX 2070 for laptops the rate of the boost clock is only 30 megahertz higher than the desktop cards base clock this has introduced a situation where once again invidious laptop versions are no longer a direct copy of the desktop GPU within a few percent Pascal laptops were basically copied to the desktop card but with cheering we're looking at clock speed deficits of 200 megahertz or more for the regular RT X 2070 and it gets worse with the max Q model which is an 880 5 megahertz base clock and an 1185 megahertz boost clock max Q clocks yet there have always been lower than the non max Q models and but even the non max Q models are now down clocked compared to the desktop cards so in the gulf between a max q laptop and a desktop with supposedly the same GPU has widened significantly compared to the last few years now there is a reason to all this and it relates to the TDP not a lot of people care about this metric for desktop cards but for laptops it is a crucial figure as the laptop OAM they have to design a cooler that can handle the TDP of the GPU and they have pretty tight space constraints to work with so if Pascal we had the gtx 1070 at 50 watts on the desktop and 115 Watts for laptops in the fully-fledged version but with the ITX 2070 that is now a 175 watt part on the desktop but it's still just a hundred and 15 watts for laptops the only way to hit that TDP with the same GPU a GPU that consumes more power when unleashed is to put in on a leash and lower the clocks and this does pretty much relate to a Nvidia shifting up of priorities that we've seen people talk about in the desktop side the GTX 1060 used to be 120 watts for the RT X between 60 it's now 160 watts which occupies where the gtx 1070 used to sit the RT x between 70 is 175 watts which is more like a GTX 1080 and then the RT X 28 he comes in at 215 once and that's a place where laptops never used to go and with this predicament Nvidia could have gone in one of two directions they could have made our TX laptop GPS equivalent to our TX desktop GPS which would have meant the our TX 2070 replaces the GTX 1080 in designs capable of handling that TVP the our TX 2060 would then replace the GTX 970 and the ITX 2080 well that couldn't really be used but Nvidia didn't want to do that instead they really chose option 2 and that was to down clock the GPUs so that an RT X 2070 can replace a gtx 1070 and so on creating I guess a simple swap in generations it may start laptop versions pretty different to the desktop versions but maybe Nvidia thought no one would notice I've probably spent way too much time talking about all of this but my final point on the matter is that we can video choosing the down clock in real I feel like using the name RTX 2070 for the laptop our TX 2070 is really accurate because it's not the same as the desktop card and this seems to have confused a few people we've seen some comments and a discord chat about people looking to buy RT X laptops thinking that the GPU they're getting is going to be delivering the same performance is the desktop card towards the same physical GPU but it won't deliver the same performance so I feel with this GPU lineup it really should have an M on the end of the names of each of the GPUs so this should be the RT X 2070 M it's not quite the same situation as the GeForce 900 series where the laptop M variants actually also had you know different ku or counts as well so something like the gtx 980m had fewer cuda cores than the gtx 970m desktops but feel the clock speed differences with these true in GPUs is different enough to warrant a new name anyway you probably said can be talking about clock speed steady pace and names and just want to see the performance numbers I'll get to that in a moment after a few other important notes so like with the desktop card the our Tex 2070 flat tops uses 8 gigabytes of gddr5 it's for second in cording to envious specs that means 14 gigabits per second for the fully fledged version and 12 gigabits per second for max-q same 256 bit bus we also still have our TX functionality so the tensor and RT cos is still there but due to the GPU being down clocked performance isn't quite the same Nvidia cites up to 38 Tara RTX ops and 5 degrees per second for the laptop our TX 2070 compared to 42 our TX ops and 6 gig arrays for the reference our TX 27 a desktop con today's review is focused on the max-q variant of the artex 2070 simply because well that's what I have on hand right now and what tends to be I guess the most popular in the thin and light laptop category I hope to revisit this look at the ITX 2070 when I have the fully fledged version on hand but as you might know it's a slow process to get these laptops in it for review out of a RTX laptop so I'm looking at haven't been released yet so as they trickle in we'll have to do a full performance breakdown for each of them in case you're wondering as max-q laptops ship with an unchangeable power limit they cannot be overclocked to the full level of an RT X 2070 you can do some basic core and memory clock overclocking but the power limit is the main limitation here so yeah unfortunately I can't just magic this laptop into a non max Q moral and neither can buyers the good news is getting the ITX 2070 max Q on hand provides an excellent apples to apples comparison opportunity which with laptops and their various configurations isn't always possible this opportunity is thanks to gigabyte with their arrow 50 in line the new model I'm testing today is the arrow 15 X 9 which packs the r-tx 2070 max Q however I also have the last gen arrow 15 X on hand with the gtx 1070 max Q inside because both laptops use the same design as well as large do the same hardware in cooler this makes comparing the r-tx 2070 to the gtx 1070 pretty easy the gigabyte over 15 x9 i used also packs intel 6 core core i7 8750 H which is the go-to choice for gaming laptops which you'll also see used for most of the other laptops in our comparison my review unit was killed out with 32 gigabytes of dual-channel ddr2 in the air a 15 X with the gtx 1070 the testing here has focused on 1080p gaming I was planning to do some high resolution testing but that has been cut for time constraints unfortunately hopefully I'll cover that in future content it's also key to note that the Aero 15 x9 was tested with the fan mode set to gaming this does deliver noticeably better performance than the quieter bounce mode and I used this exact same gaming fan mode with the washing or a 15 X as well so both laptops were as loud as each other which again cuts out a further variable when comparing the Arctic's 2070 to the gtx 1070 in terms of clock speeds this is where I guess the data starts to come in finally for you guys have been sitting through a lot of this discussion so far while the r-tx 2070 max-q has a rated boost clock of just 1185 megahertz thanks for invidious GPU boost actual clock speeds in games or more rounded 1250 213 50 megahertz mark so typically that's at least a hundred megahertz or lower than the fully fledged laptop RTX 20 70s boost clock then of course the full version will also boost a bit higher this is basically the same behavior as the gtx 1070 max-q which has a rated boost of 1379 megahertz but sits more around the 1500 to 1600 megahertz mark in games you should expect these results from any laptop with decent cooling however those with poor cores will down clock more aggressively and result in worse performance memory clocks they also don't change and here the GDD r6 with the max Coover that's 8 gigabytes in this case is stuck at 12 gigabits per second so we're going to kick things off with a look at battlefield 1 probably been superseded by battlefield 5 these days but a lot of our existing testing delivers for battlefield 1 so we'll start with that here the are texts we 70 max-q clocks in at just 7 faster than the gtx 1070 max-q offering a slight performance gain on the non max cube very and this is an okay start but ideally you'd want to see larger gains here we know Wolfenstein 2 is one of the most favorable games to in videos nuturing GPU architecture at least when comparing to pascal so here the ITX between 70 max q commands a decent 15 percent performance lead over the gtx 1070 max q however the game is also one that heavily favors the fully fledged GPUs for some reason so the regular old gtx 1017 is still faster here when looking at average performance far cry 5 is a well optimized title and one that we like to benchmark with extensively in this game you can expect the r-tx 2070 to come in with a nine percent performance lead over the gtx 1070 when comparing max q versions that does increase to a 15% lead in 1% lows though which is nice to see when comparing the max Q 2070 to the full gtx 1070 performance is about equal in star wars battlefront to the RT x 2070 is around 10% faster than the GTX 970 again comparing max two versions the new attorney GPU also holds a small advantage over the full gtx 1070 which seems to be typical for this new max q model we've only gone through four games so far but in those games the usual result is the max Q 2070 delivering the same performance as the non max to 1070 within the same design constraints so with the same cooler do it for is one of the most favorable games to the RT X 2070 max you hear the new GPU is 18% faster on average and 11% fast in 1% those relative to the gtx 1070 max q it's also a small amount faster than the standard gtx 1070 not every game you'll play on a laptop though will be GPU limited at 1080p a great example of that is prey which runs at around 100 FPS on modern laptops but there's not a lot of difference between most higher-end GPUs the RT x 20 max q he is only three percent faster than the GTX 970 max Q and holds one of the smallest margins over the GTX 1066 gigabyte and just 16% I believe this is more of a memory bottleneck issue than a CPU bottleneck either Middle Earth shadow war is another game that is favorable to Turing here the r-tx 2070 is 16% faster on average compared to the GTX 970 of course looking at max cube variants it's also 6% faster than the regular gtx 1070 which is one of the larger margins for this GPU watchdogs 2 is in a similar situation to pray in that the game is quite demanding on the cpu I spotted a 4% gain to average performance when comparing the RT x 2070 max Q to the gtx 1070 max q but no gain in terms of 1% low performance unlike with desktops where you might pair the RT x between 70 with a much more powerful CPU the 45 watt CPUs you're stuck with in most laptops can limit the GPU especially at 1080p a couple more games I wanted to focus on here Deus Ex mankind divided is an older title but it's still very GPU limited here the RT X 2070 max Q is 18% faster than the GTX 1070 max Q and that's a big gain from the videos nuturing architecture compared to the average result this is a bit of an outlier but nonetheless it's impressive finally we have a game that not many people liked Mass Effect Andromeda a decent performance gain here for the RT X 2070 max Q coming in 13% faster than the GTX 970 mxq it's also a decent 7% faster than the fully fledged jtx 1070 looking at a full performance summary here across 18 games we can see that on average the ITX 2070 max Q is 11% faster than the gtx 1070 max cute it replaces you can spot a couple of newer games in here such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey which performs remarkably poorly on laptop hardware along with another largely CPU limited game in hitman 2 plus two other new titles that deliver good gains in battlefield 5 and Resident Evil 2 in general though you can expect performance gains up to around 18% typically but as low as 3 to 4% in games that aren't as GPU limited and as we're talking about laptops here there are more instances where you will run into bottlenecks than a typical gaming desktop built and this is an important consideration when comparing desktop and laptop GPUs comparing the ITX 2070 mxq to the regular gtx 1070 is a bit of a mixed bag on the one hand this new max-q GPU is now delivering the performance of the last gen fully fledged model but in smaller thinner and whiter systems with weaker cooling solutions well not always the case gtx 1070 laptops tended to be on the larger end of the scale however with the Ardex 2070 max-q we can expect to see that GPU in true thin and light gaming machines on the other hand the desktop RTX 2070 is 27% faster than the GTX 970 on average so it's pretty obvious how far behind the r-tx twin 70 max Q is for laptops in comparison to the desktop equivalent I expect the full non max Q model to be faster but it won't close this gap entirely the max Q to max Q margin was 11% so I'd expect the full versions will have a similar sort of margin not the 27 percent margin like with the desktop cards and then of course in video clocking the laptop version a lot lower will do that a couple of other comparisons to go here we have the RT X 2070 max Q compared to the GTX 1066 gigabyte a very popular laptop GPU and a GPU that used to be the maximum for thin and light laptops the RT X 2070 max Q is 35 percent faster here on average which shows the progress that has been made in this sort of portable form factor of course our TX 2070 max Q laptops are a lot more expensive but purely from a technical standpoint it is impressive to say this level of performance gained within the same available space for cooling and power delivery the RT XY 70 max Q is still slower than the GTX 1080 max Q though to the tune of roughly 6% the GTX 1080 max Q is the next step above the gtx 1070 and with the RT x 2070 max q performing around gtx 1070 level it still makes sense that the gtx 280 max Q is faster of course you'll be wondering how rate racing performs with the artex 2070 max Q and the good news is that it works I actually wasn't expecting to see write racing in the laptop versions due to the TDP constraints but into there even with the max Q variants however the RT X 2070 max Q is only rated for 4 Giga rays per second lower than the desktop x26 tea so naturally it won't be as good for ray-tracing in our standard battlefield 5 benchmark run which does have reflective surfaces that activate the game's DXR reflections even using just the low rate racing mode caused a pretty significant performance drop in our standard battlefield 5 benchmark run with ultra settings which does have reflective surfaces that activate becames decks our reflections even using just the low rate racing mode caused a pretty significant performance drop with that DXi we were achieving an average of 86 FPS through the run turning on DX are too low dropped that to 54 FPS so we're talking about a sub 60 FPS experience at 1080p here turning our TX up to ultra and yeah that drops even further to just a 44 FPS average I don't think many people will want to play a game like battlefield 5 at below 60 FPS even at 1080p when they could be playing at upwards of 80 FPS so to me this seems like a bit of a bust even on the lowest rate racing settings so when thinking about how I was going to wrap up this one there were a lot of thoughts going through my head well in videos RTX line has been actually disappointing on the desktop side laptops are an entirely different story with different price points categories and considerations to me so I want to break this down into a few sections firstly the naming scheme to me is still very disappointing one of the key issues that I have here the ITX 2070 max-q is really nowhere near the performance of a desktop RTX 2070 and with Nvidia also down clocking the regular r-tx 2070 for laptops these GPUs no longer direct equivalents for their desktop counterparts like there were with Pascal this is frustrating to me and I think to avoid confusion I wish they'd use a different name something like RT X between 70 M I feel would be appropriate as for performance we're getting 10% more out of the RT X 2070 max cube compared to the gtx 1070 max Q so for the same product category which means the same type of laptop with a similar design size weight and cooler we can expect a modest 10% gain that's ok it's fine it's nothing amazing but it is faster in the same category the good news is it seems laptops are also around the same price as well comparing launch price to launch price portable gtx 1070 max-q laptops launched in the 2200 to 2400 US dollar range and that's where our TX 2070 max-q laptops have launched with similar hardware configurations however right now with you no discounts because it's an end-of-life product you can get gtx 1070 max-q laptops for about $200 less for any equivalent configuration so while the launch prices are similar today you'll have to pay about 10% more and you'll get about 10% more performance in return at least while old stock for previous gen products is still around so yeah like the desktop GPUs looking at today's pricing there's not much progress on value here that said with the desktop cards the r-tx 2070 came in at $120 higher than the launch price of the gtx 1070 and that doesn't seem to be the case with the laptops and of course it's much harder to comment about pricing with these sorts of products because they set by partners not Nvidia they can change a fair bit it depends on the laptop etc but in general launch prices is similar while today's gtx 1070 max-q laptops have been discounted to why I feel is an appropriate price relative to new RTX 27 miles without being amazing of course for some people RTX GPUs like the RT X 2070 max-q will bring additional benefits like ray tracing and DL SS depending on how much stock you place on their importance neither a widespread technologies right now and in our opinion it's not really something worth considering with your purchase especially considering how battlefield 5 performs with ray tracing with this particular GPU on the surface this launch is somewhat disappointing Morris performance gains no improvement value and few additional features of limited use but at the same time I feel that perhaps expectations were set a bit too high with a laptop GPUs in particular while on the desktop it's all about raw performance and bang for buck but with laptops there's the additional factor of performance per watt or how much you can get out of a given cooler design as truing is built on 12 nanometers compared to 16 nanometers of a pascal there hasn't been a significant uptick in that department so realistically we're in never gonna see a large jumping performance within a given form-factor that said I do feel like the naming scheme of these particular products is led people to believe that they were going to get you know the performance of the desktop-class products in the laptops but as I said realistically that was probably not going to happen given those constraints of cooler's in you know similar sized laptops laptop upgrade cycles also very different to on the desktop most people buying an RT X laptop aren't just getting a new GPU they'll likely also be upgrading the CPU the memory storage display and even the design which can all add value to a purchase so are the generation on generation gains are only 10% here for the RT X 2070 max q a large number of buyers will see actual gains far higher than this with their upgrade especially when factoring in you know a bunch of other components getting faster as well and that just about does it for this review it's been lovely but I think I've covered it pretty thoroughly I'm hoping to at some point don't really know when but I want to get hands-on time with the other five r-tx GPU variants for laptops and put them through their paces but at least I've said a lot of groundwork here for what to expect with those other GPUs and I certainly don't but you spent as much time on the naming scheme with these laptops in in future videos I think I've done that point to death now and yeah I really I really wish that Nvidia had given these laptop teepees a different name so that people you know didn't confuse them with the desktop parts but anyway I've sent that point a few times now as always you can subscribe for more content give it a like if you enjoyed the review consider supporting us on patreon to access our discord community and other perks and I'll catch you in the next one