Leak reveals powerful Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU for laptops (along with Max-Q variant)

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Max-Q tech won’t be restricted to the RTX 2070 and 2080, apparently

A new leak has pointed to the existence of a Max-Q spin of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card aimed at laptops, and the alleged spec of this GPU – and the vanilla RTX 2060 Mobility – has been spilled.

This comes from prolific leaker TUM_APISAK, who shared the details on Twitter, after having found them via the 3DMark database of benchmarks, in an entry for a Lenovo 81HE laptop (as spotted by Tom’s Hardware).

Apparently, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 Mobility will run with a base clock of 960MHz, and it will be equipped with 6GB of GDDR6 video memory clocked at 1,750MHz.

As for the RTX 2060 Max-Q variant – which is Nvidia’s tech for optimizing the overall design and power consumption of the GPU to better fit into thin and light laptops – this will up the base clock speed to 975MHz, but the 6GB of memory will be clocked slower at 1,500MHz.

That’s assuming these benchmarks are on the money – as ever, this comes with all the usual caveats related to rumors.

Note that as Tom’s Hardware observes, a previous Geekbench leak has pegged the base clock of the RTX 2060 at a lesser 1,200MHz, but as ever, slightly different figures are often flying around with these pieces of pre-release speculation (what with GPUs being tested, and of course, the possibility of some leaks being fabrications).

3DMark result

At any rate, TUM_APISAK kept the other spec details hidden, but he did let us know that the RTX 2060 hit a score of around 19,000 in the 3DMark 11 benchmark (on Performance), meaning it sits above the GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q, but is slightly slower than the vanilla GTX 1070 for laptops. Apparently a better score was recorded that wasn't shared, so performance could be pretty nippy indeed...

This leak is also interesting because previous speculation has indicated that there wouldn’t be a Max-Q version of the RTX 2060, and that Nvidia would only be going this route with the RTX 2080 and 2070 (although a 2060 Ti has been mentioned in the more distant past).

More options are always welcome, assuming all this is correct. We shouldn’t have long to wait to find out, as Nvidia is expected to reveal these new laptop graphics cards at CES in January.

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Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).