Asus Publishes List of Mobile RTX 3000 Configs

Responding to an inquiry from Dutch hardware site Tweakers, Asus has recently made public a detailed list of its different laptops for 2021, which GPUs they will use and what the clock speeds and TGPs are for each.

That’s big news, since even though CES 2021 left us knowing that Ampere would be coming to mobile this year --  we’ve reviewed a few RTX 30 series laptops already -- the specs for Nvidia’s next generation of mobile GPUs is still confusing. Part of that’s due to shifts in Nvidia’s branding, as it’s been inconsistent in assigning the Max-Q title to Ampere. But more importantly, we also still didn’t know specifics regarding how many clock speed and TGP configurations there would be for mobile RTX 3060, 3070 and 3080 cards until very recently.

On January 26th, German hardware site Computer Base leaked a list of mobile Ampere configurations that supposedly matches what Nvidia sends to its OEM. This list had 28 total configurations, with 11 configs each for both the RTX 3060 and RTX 3080 and 6 configs for the RTX 3070. This leak caused Tweakers to reach out to Asus for more detailed and official information, to which the company responded with a full table of the laptops it’s releasing this year plus their GPU configurations.

Tweakers is a well-known source, but it seems Asus has also taken this opportunity to update its own website with these specifics as well.

Other manufacturers such as Lenovo and Gigabyte have yet to follow suit, but according to Asus’ list, it seems as if we can expect mobile Ampere cards to hover between 80 and 150 Watts depending on product and SKU. Similarly, boost clock speeds vary between 1345MHz and 1810 MHz. Interestingly, the Alienware m17 R4 we just reviewed has an RTX 3080 with 165W TGP, 15 watts higher than the highest Asus.

Asus’ list only details 11 unique GPUs, 4 for RTX 3060, 4 for RTX 3070 and 3 for RTX 3080. It also includes the GTX 1650 line a few times, though the only laptop on the list that exclusively uses it, the ROG Flow X13, can also be hooked up to an external mobile RTX 3080 for additional power. The list Asus provided to Tweakers also mentions Max-Q technology a few times, but it seems as if the listings on Asus' store pages don't mention Max-Q in the names of its mobile Ampere cards, which follows Nvidia's lead regarding branding.

This ultimately leaves plenty of configs left to confirm, if Computer Base’s leak is to be believed. But it’s a good place to start.