 AMD. That's what this is. Just AMD. Okay, sure. Asus put it together, so they get to put their logo on the lid. But under the hood, it's got an AMD Ryzen 5900HX 8-core processor, an AMD chipset, and an AMD Radeon RX 6800M GPU with an AMD chosen FreeSync premium panel running it up to 300Hz. Also, it's got AMD Smart Access memory technology, allowing the CPU to access all of the GPU's memory, and AMD Smart Shift technology, which dynamically allocates power between the CPU and GPU, depending on the load. That's a lot of AMD. But how does it all come together? And can they truly make Team Red a viable option for gamers on the go? Like, who go to school, or have divorced parents, or need to carry their computer around with them for some other reason? Reasons like our sponsor, Crucial. Crucial has been making high-quality RAM and SSDs for over 20 years, and with their Crucial system scanner tool, finding the perfect parts for your system is now easier than ever. Check out Crucial at the link in the video description. AMD's big message today is around their AMD Advantage design framework initiative, which is a technical way of saying that while AMD doesn't appear to have a formal certification process, they will collaborate with laptop brands to ensure that their product meets certain guidelines. So a laptop branded this way should have a high-end Zen 3 CPU, an RDNA 2 mobile GPU, support for AMD Smart Shift and Smart Access memory enabled by default, a 144Hz IPS or OLED display with FreeSync premium, and eMe storage, and over 10 hours of battery life during video playback. You can think of it kind of like Intel's Ultrabook platform back in the day, except for it's for Chungus gaming laptops instead. And the ASUS G513 Advantage Edition is one of the first laptops to roll out of the program, which is all fine and good, but the big news here is like, what? A competitive high-end mobile AMD GPU? Yup, this puppy packs a Radeon RX 6800M, which would theoretically make this capable of 4K 60FPS gaming, if we bought into the marketing. You see, like Nvidia, whose GeForce mobile GPUs are generally beefed up versions of a tier lower than their model number would suggest, AMD is playing things relatively fast and loose, and their specs aren't quite the same as their desktop namesakes. So on paper at least, the RX 6800M with its 40 compute units is more comparable to a desktop RX 6700 XT than to a desktop 6800. And then there's the RX 6700M and 6600M with 36 and 28 compute units respectively. And neither of those look like anything we've seen from AMD to date. Probably because they didn't bother launching the low-end desktop cards that they had planned for those GPU cores because of the ongoing silicon shortage, though AMD would neither confirm nor deny. The 6600M in particular looks a little anemic, but then we've also seen the 6700 XT perform surprisingly well on the desktop despite its compute unit deficit. So maybe there's more to the story, and there almost certainly is. You might recall us mentioning that Nvidia's RTX 30 series mobile GPUs are actually misleading in their own way. The thing is, an RTX 3080 can have all the CUDA cores in the world, but if the clock speeds are limited by a power or thermal constraint, performance is going to suffer. And the sheer number of laptops out there with TDPs that were well below what the 3080 needs to stretch its legs created so much confusion in the marketplace that Nvidia yielded and started amending the rated TDP of the GPU to their laptop spec sheets. So then AMD might use lower tier chips, but they're also making a big deal out of setting firmer power guidelines by explicitly stating that the RX 6800M, for instance, is 145 watts and above. Though with that said, what the heck is this up to nonsense on the 6700M and the 6600M? AMD, please! You can't just do better than Nvidia for one skew. You got to be consistently better, like our quality products at lttstore.com. We got CPU shits. Now to be fair to AMD, they're relying on implicit support between their Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and Radeon 6000M GPUs for SmartShift, which allows for power and thermal budgets to be dynamically allocated to the CPU or the GPU depending on the load on each. So in a nutshell, what this could look like is a CPU-bound game favoring the CPU, while a GPU-bound game will pump more juice into the GPU. So it's the same overall power and thermal output, but it gets divvied up wherever it makes the biggest difference. That makes sense, and Nvidia actually has a similar technology, except it needs explicit support from laptop manufacturers rather than just being a given. That is a major advantage of AMD being so vertically integrated. Unfortunately though, we only have one all-AMD laptop here today, and it's equipped with the Radeon RX 6800M, so we can't dig any deeper into that for now. In order to keep our testing simple, we grabbed the ROG Strix G733Q, which is equipped with the same CPU, but with an RTX 3080 Mobile GPU. Now bear in mind that this isn't a full in-depth review of Radeon 6000M even, we're going to cover it in more detail later, so get subscribed. But for now, we want to taste the performance, and we want to see if AMD's numbers hold water. Now Metro Exodus may be an older title now, but it just got an enhanced upgrade, so it's a great candidate to test both rasterized and ray-traced performance. At 1080p Ultra, the Radeon ends up neck and neck with the RTX 3080, while with ray-traced global illumination enabled, we're seeing Nvidia's more mature ray-tracing cores work their magic. Still though, we're within about 13%, so it's not like this is a catastrophic loss for Team Red. It does get a little worse in the enhanced edition, but for an exploration-heavy game like this, it is still plenty playable. Something we couldn't have said about a high-end AMD laptop ever. The faster-paced Forza Horizon 4, meanwhile, well, again, it's not a bad experience, but we're down as far as 25% slower in minimum FPS versus Nvidia, which isn't really what we were expecting given the strong rasterization performance we saw earlier. As for a much lighter title, CS GO, well, it provides Nvidia with another lead, but the difference is in the 10 to 18% range, so not game-changing, but certainly not terrible. Of course, performance is only one part of the equation, and AMD is claiming that they have significantly better performance characteristics on battery than the competition. So we pulled the power adapter and set the laptops to performance mode to see what happens. Again, Metro Exodus gives us pretty much identical performance between AMD and Nvidia in traditional rendering, but the performance difference when turning on ray-tracing seems to be much smaller than before. As for the enhanced version, which has ray-tracing locked on, Nvidia loses frames as expected, and AMD loses them harder. Forza gives AMD a slightly better loss than its previous 25%, and again, it's still quite playable, and the situation in CS GO actually looks a little better for AMD on battery than not, meaning that we might be seeing SmartShift doing its thing here, though it's still hardly a victory. Now, to be clear, we're not calling AMD's performance claims BS, we just had a very limited amount of time to try to find games where they were actually able to pull off an advantage, and honestly, I am excited enough to see a return to competition in this market that it's easy to overlook some words. Moving on, this may be a gaming-oriented laptop with a gaming-oriented GPU, but you might sometimes want to do, I don't know, rendering or something like that, and for that, it looks like it's fine, but not amazing. It consistently comes in around 60 to 80% of Nvidia's results in standalone render benchmarks, and as for spec-view perf, well, we saw some hints that it might be a better match than Nvidia for some professional workloads with even performance in 3DS Max and wins in medical and Siemens NX. Now, that energy score looks really bad, but realistically, you're not doing anything like that on a laptop anyway. Now, because our GeForce-equipped Strix G733Q is a 17-inch laptop compared to a 15-inch, so presumably it has larger, beefier coolers, we're not able to read too much into these numbers, but AMD's thermals also seem to be well-controlled, so maybe it's a pretty apples-to-apples comparison. I mean, we didn't see temperatures higher than 77 degrees at full load, which is pretty interesting, given that this is a 145-watt TDP GPU, but that only drew 116 watts at peak. Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 mobile variant that it was up against was a 130-watt card, but that drew over 140 watts peak. This is likely down to Nvidia's opportunistic boost behavior and explains why the thermal output was roughly the same. Interestingly, though, AMD's core clocks were solid throughout, so it doesn't seem like it was limited in any way. So in conclusion, while power consumption looks good, it's a little disappointing that performance wasn't chart-topping next to Nvidia's best mobile GPU in our test suite. With that said, I don't think it's the real story here anyway. The real story is that there is finally another contender at the top end, and that means that you are more likely to be able to find a laptop that fits your needs in this seemingly endless chip shortage. So while past Linus, and maybe future Linus for that matter, might say, don't bother with this, just by GeForce, present Linus is more likely to say, hey, look, they're objectively not terrible, even if they're not super competitive, and depending on the price you find them at, they may even be good bang for the buck. So there you have it. The age of the all-AMD gaming laptop is back, or here for the first time ever. For the first time ever. And I'm ready for it. Just like I'm ready to tell you about our sponsor, Setapp. Thanks to Setapp for sponsoring this video. Are you using your Mac to its full potential? Your Mac can do tons of cool stuff that you probably didn't know about, like recognizing and copying text from images, recovering important files after you formatted your SD card by mistake, retrieving what you copied to your clipboard months ago. So unlock and discover these features and more with Setapp. It provides access to a collection of paid productivity-focused apps for your Mac, and every app on Setapp is curated to provide a boost to your productivity. Just type what you need in the search box and find the right tool immediately. There are hundreds of apps to choose from like Luminar, a modern AI photo editor, the famous CleanMyMac, and much more. So don't wait, supercharge your Mac by downloading Setapp at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you want to watch something else that's disrupting the laptop scene, go check out our video on the Sensel touchpad that's being integrated into some laptops now. Seriously, that thing is way more of a game changer than you could possibly imagine a touchpad being.