Specialized media and tech bloggers received various laptop models for testing, equipped with powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 discrete graphics cards, announced at CES 2023 in early January. One of these reviewers was the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel, which got the opportunity to test the most expensive laptop with a mobile GeForce RTX 4090, the MSI Titan GT77HX.
Image Source: Hardware Unboxed
This laptop model is of interest not only by the insane price tag of $5300 for the maximum configuration, but also by the fact that the GeForce RTX 4090 video card used here has a maximum declared power consumption (TGP) of 150 W, and can also use an additional 25 W of power thanks to the technology Dynamic Boost, which redistributes power between the CPU and GPU, depending on a particular scenario. Thus, the accelerator is capable of demonstrating the maximum performance potential laid down by the manufacturer, which cannot be achieved, for example, by limiting the TGP of a video card to 125 or even to 80 W. And on sale there will be laptop models with such a feature. That is why, when choosing them, you should pay attention to the power indicator of the video card declared by the manufacturer.
It should be said right away that the performance of the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 is lower than that of the desktop GeForce RTX 4090. Moreover, the mobile flagship is also not able to compare even with the desktop GeForce RTX 4080, although both use the same AD103 GPU with 9728 CUDA cores and support for the same bus width memory in 256 bits. The desktop GeForce RTX 4080 chip runs at a significantly higher frequency of 2505 MHz, while the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is clocked at 2040 MHz. In addition, the mobile graphics card uses slower GDDR6 memory (18 Gb / s), while the desktop GeForce RTX 4080 received faster GDDR6X (22.4 Gb / s). As a result, the memory bandwidth of the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 is 576 GB / s, while that of the desktop is 717 GB / s.
And yet, the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 is the fastest, obviously, mobile graphics accelerator of the current generation. The novelty easily bypasses the flagship mobile graphics card GeForce RTX 3080 Ti of the previous generation on the Ampere architecture with the same power consumption value. At the same time, the difference in favor of the GeForce RTX 4090 increases with increasing resolution in games.
At 4K resolution, the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 is on average 58% faster than the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
In 1440p games, the new card is on average 48% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. And the maximum difference in performance in favor of the novelty in the Hardware Unboxed tests was an impressive 77%.
In games at 1080p resolution, the difference between generations becomes less significant. However, the new card still demonstrates its superiority. On average, it is 29% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
In ray tracing games, the mobile GeForce RTX 4090 was up to 68% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. The novelty demonstrated such a difference, for example, in Cyberpunk 2077, where it showed an average of 44 frames per second at a resolution of 1440p. For comparison, the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 Ti produces 26 frames per second under the same conditions. When using 1080p resolution in the same game, the new GeForce RTX 4090 averaged 71 fps, while the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti averaged 42 fps.
Obviously, the $5,300 MSI Titan GT77HX is not the only laptop to offer a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. There will be more affordable models. True, it should be borne in mind that the recommended cost of laptops with GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics in any case starts at $1999.
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