Announced at CES 2021, we are finally starting to see NVIDIA Ampere Laptop GPUs coming to the Indian market. Major OEMs have started offering the RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 Laptop GPUs in their updated 2021 lineups. ASUS was the first manufacturer to launch their TUF Dash F15 (2021) with RTX 3070, closely followed by Acer with their updated Nitro 5 (2021) with RTX 3060, which launched on March 11. Since then, ASUS has announced their ROG Strix and Strix SCAR series along with TUF A15 with Ryzen 5800H and RTX 3060.
During CES 2021, we observed a major change in NVIDIA’s Laptop GPU spec sheet. Nvidia announced that the Max-Q branding was dropped and OEMs were free to configure the Total Graphics Power (TGP) depending on their design. OEMs can also pick and choose from the buffet of Max-Q third generation features such as Dynamic Boost 2.0, Whisper Mode 2.0, etc, giving manufacturers a lot of flexibility. However, this creates a lot of confusion for gamers to decide which model is more powerful than the other, because just knowing the GPU model is no longer sufficient to define the graphics performance. Higher models (e.g. RTX 3080) at low TGP can provide similar performance to lower models (e.g RTX 3070) at high TGP values, and the same GPU can perform very differently in different laptops based on their TGP.
Moreover, OEMs do not always mention the TGP values in their spec sheet. For example, Acer hasn’t mentioned the TGP for their Nitro 5 (2021) online. Their sales support insists the RTX 3060 has a max TGP of 115W, but their international version mentions only 85W. So even though this new strategy gives OEM more control, the end-user has to be much more careful in their purchase.
In the sheet below, I have compiled all the laptops with RTX 30 series GPUs launched and coming to India in the near future. More importantly, I have compiled their specifications and especially the TGP values so you can make an informed decision.
The RTX 3000 Laptop GPUs are based on the GA106 Ampere chip and can be configured with TGPs ranging from 60W to 115W, with a Dynamic Boost up to 15W. Currently, the RTX 3060 comes with 3,072 CUDA cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory, the RTX 3070 with 5120 CUDA cores and 8 GB GDDR6 memory, and the RTX 3080 with 6144 CUDA cores and with either 8 GB or 16 GB GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit memory.
Disclaimer: The purchase links in the spreadsheet are affiliate links (using Amazon Associate program and Earnkaro.in) that help me to maintain and update the links in the document
