 Huge thanks to Gigabyte for sponsoring this video and sending us the first batch of laptops that we can use to actually test the all-new RTX 3000 series mobile graphics cards. Right here, we've got an Aorus 15G rocking an RTX 3080 with Max-Q design, and an Aero 15 with an RTX 3070 with Max-Q design. Armed with these, we can finally answer the question. After a string of not-so-great rumors, is RTX 3000 mobile any good? Short answer, yes. Long answer, it is way more complicated than that. So strap in, and let's get into it. INTRO MUSIC The Nvidia RTX 3080 mobile is the fastest gaming GPU that you can get in a laptop. And there is an RTX 3080 mobile in this laptop right here, the Gigabyte Aorus 15G. But the Aorus 15G is not going to be the fastest gaming laptop available today. That is because of a branding concept Nvidia introduced back in 2017. With Max-Q design is a designation that was originally created to describe gaming laptop designs that offered great performance, but without compromising on portability or on noise. But in the real world, there's no such thing as no compromises. And truth be told, thicker laptops with beefier cooling always have performed better, and they still do. So we started hearing manufacturers throwing around the term Max-P to describe mobile GPUs that were geared toward maximum performance rather than maximum quietness. Got it? Good, because it just got a lot more complicated. And we'll get into that, but first I need to explain why this is happening. Designing a fast laptop is a monumental challenge because of two things, heat and power. To illustrate this point, I present Exhibit A, the Aorus Extreme RTX 3080 graphics card. It is a whopping 191% thicker than the thickest part of this 3080 laptop. And guess what, guys? More surface area equals more cooling. So unless the Aorus 15G could have the prop of a TBM 500 pointed directly at it, all other things being equal, it cannot be cooled as well as this desktop graphics card, which means it cannot go as fast. Power is also a huge problem in laptops. This GPU alone consumes 320 watts. This laptop has a 230 watt power brick, and that's to handle the CPU, display, RAM, storage, and the GPU. So unless you want this to light on fire, there's no way that we can power this with this. Gigabyte cares about your house not burning down. Also, the battery life would be atrocious instead of the rated eight hours on these guys. What I'm getting at here is that our RTX 3080 with Max-Q design is slower than the desktop version. To be precise, in V-Ray, it's 25.7% slower. But hold off on the pitchforks here, guys. We're not actually mad that Nvidia and Gigabyte couldn't break fundamental laws of physics. And on the other side of this coin is the fact that our Aorus 15G was also 65.8% faster than a mobile RTX 2080 Super, the previous flagship. So yeah, this is not this, but it was never going to be, and it's still one heck of a GPU. So then what exactly has Nvidia done to put an RTX 3080 into a laptop? Well, to start with, they kind of didn't. While our RTX 3080 with Max-Q design does use the same GA102 die, the desktop version of the card gets 8,704 CUDA cores enabled, while the mobile version has 6,144. That's still more than a desktop 3070, but not by a whole lot. This has the potential to be very confusing for consumers who shop only by the numbers, but it's also not entirely unprecedented. Up until Pascal, which was the GTX 1000 series, laptop and desktop GPUs were not identically equipped. For example, the GTX 980M had significantly fewer CUDA cores than the GTX 980. And before that time, it was typical for a completely different mid-range desktop GPU to be rebranded as a flagship mobile one. And CUDA cores aren't the only change. ARIORS 15G's GPU is a 90-watt variant, giving it a 780MHz base clock and 1245MHz boost. That is so much slower than a reference desktop board that I was concerned we'd be looking at an entirely different class of performance. In reality, though, the discrepancy isn't nearly as bad as I feared. In games, the RTX 3080 and the ARIORS here was clocked between 1400 and 1500MHz, likely because in games, the CPU was only drawing about 20 watts, thanks to a feature called Dynamic Boost 2.0. Now, in the laptops of yesteryear, the CPU and GPU were each given a certain power budget. For instance, in the ARIORS 15G, the CPU might get 45 watts and the GPU might get 90. The thing is, there are very few use cases, particularly on mobile, where both the CPU and GPU are going to be going full tilt at the same time. So it makes sense to be able to dynamically boost the power of one or the other as needed. Let's say you fire up CSGO and you want over 300 FPS for your high refresh rate panel. Your GPU is going to handle that easily. CSGO graphics are hardly cutting edge, but your CPU is going to struggle. So it makes sense to take some of that 90 watts from the GPU and give them over to the CPU, allowing the Intel Core i7-10850H to get closer to its max turbo of 5.1 GHz. That's Dynamic Boost 2.0, and it works the other way, too. If you load up Cyberpunk with ray tracing, the CPU will sacrifice most of its power budget, consuming like 15 watts or so and running at or below 3 GHz, while the GPU is going to get maximum juice, just like you can get maximum juice from this 40 ounce bottle, LTTstore.com. My concern in all of this, however, is that there seems to be very little way for consumers to tell just how fast any individual RTX 3000 mobile chip will go. Aero 15, for that matter, both managed very impressive thermal results, likely helped along by Nvidia's claimed doubling of power efficiency. The extra efficiency, along with what seems like a pretty generous power budget, is what allowed our finger quotes 1245 MHz GPU to actually clock up to around 1500 MHz in real games. So like, good job Gigabyte, but I could definitely see someone else slapping this exact same GPU in a laptop that has way less cooling capacity, only to have somebody buy it expecting results like we're showing here and then get extremely disappointed. Remember, guys, this 90 watt GPU is still in spec at just 780 MHz. On top of this, there is such a wide range of TGPs available for each 3000 series mobile card that I could easily see a situation where a well-cooled RTX 3070 could noticeably outperform a poorly cooled 3080. TLDR then, because of the current marketing and branding strategy, it is not enough to shop based on specs alone. So you need to make sure that you find independent reviews of the exact 30 series laptop you want to buy before you pull the trigger on it. We do have plans, by the way, to do a much deeper dive into 3000 series mobile performance as we get more laptops arriving in the office. So make sure that you're subscribed. I like we would have loved to do it today, but the reality of it is we can't tell that story until we have way more devices. As for the performance of these units, though, if you plan on playing at 1080p without ray tracing, you probably don't need a 3080. Shadow of the Tomb Raider running at the highest settings without RTX has the 2080 Super, 3070, and 3080 all performing basically the same as each other, with our mobile Core i7 holding back the 3080 significantly. To be clear, this is not entirely the Core i7-10870H's fault. Even on a desktop, games are going to run up against a CPU bottleneck long before an RTX 3080 is out of performance at 1080p. It's just that this card is clearly designed with higher resolutions in mind, which isn't to say that the RS15G wastes its power with the built-in 1080p display. It runs at 240Hz, so wherever the CPU can keep up, you'll need graphics grunts to keep up with that. And it's got HDMI 2.1 to make connecting to a high refresh rate 4K monitor a breeze. And ah, that's more like the performance difference we expected. See you later, RTX 2080 Super. Another option would be to just get a laptop with a higher resolution display. This is the first time that mobile GPUs have seriously been able to handle 4K gaming without needing to downsample. And the Aero 15's 4K OLED display is very impressive. You do give up the high refresh rate, so I wouldn't use it for competitive games, but you gain super deep blacks, high contrast, and HDR 400 support. The Aero 15 is kind of the original creator laptop from Gigabyte, which is basically to say that it's a gaming laptop without the spaceship styling. Er, well, at least depending on what you do with the RGB settings. You can also configure the Aero 15 with up to a Core i9-10980HK, if that 5.3GHz turbo sounds tempting. So huge thanks to Gigabyte for getting us our first RTX 3000 series laptops and for sponsoring this video. The RS15G that we have here comes in at $1999 US, while the Aero 15 with the OLED screen is $2199. Both laptops feature Intel 10th Gen CPUs with 8 cores, Intel Wi-Fi 6 for those times when you can't use the Ethernet jacks, and Thunderbolt 3 for loads of high-speed connectivity. And we're just scratching the surface here, guys, and we're looking forward to learning more about RTX 3000 Mobile as we go. Oh, I guess that's the end of the video. Make sure you're subscribed. Oh, and if you're looking for another video to watch, maybe check out our look into RTX 3090s running in SLI. I would have recommended watching like a desktop 3080 review, but come on. It's more fun to watch a video about something you shouldn't buy instead of something you want but can't buy, right? 3090 SLI? Yeah? Yeah? Don't do it.