At CES 2020, AMD came out swinging with a group of GPUs, like the Radeon RX 5700M, for laptops that should see it compete in the market for the first time in years. However, Nvidia's not going to take that lying down.
We've seen a leaked Geekbench result, spotted by renowned leaker Tum Apisak, that suggests that we'll be getting a Max-Q Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super in the near future – however there are some details that are suspect.
GeForce RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Designhttps://t.co/JYQVFe9jUEJanuary 20, 2020
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The specs reported in the Geekbench leak are a little fishy, which we'll get into later, but it could just be due to early drivers and misreported system information. This isn't the first time we've heard rumors suggesting that Nvidia could be working on a GeForce RTX Super mobility lineup, so this just helps paint a picture of what the lineup could look like.
At the end of the day, we won't know whether or not these leaks are accurate until Nvidia deems it necessary to actually announce its Super Mobility lineup – if it ever does. Until then, all we can do is take these leaks and tear them apart to see what we can potentially learn.
Getting our hands dirty
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q appears in a laptop equipped with an Intel Core i9-10980HK. But, the 10980HK in this Geekbench result only has a maximum frequency of 4.92GHz, short of the 5GHz promised at CES 2020. We did see a leak from Tum Apisak earlier that suggested that the maximum frequency is 4.8GHz, so the sample in this leak is the slowest one we've seen – which suggests it may not be real.
The specs for the actual graphics processor seem legit, however. With 48 streaming processors, it matches the spec of the desktop-class RTX 2080 Super. Clock speeds see a massive dip, however, which is to be expected: down to 1.23GHz boost from the 1.815GHz that the desktop card features.
That's only to be expected – because of the power constraints of the thin-and-light gaming laptops that Max-Q graphics are found in, GPUs simply cannot reach the same clock speeds, and thus result in lower performance overall.
If this mobile GPU is actually real, it should lead to improved performance over the vanilla RTX 2080, though if it mirrors the bump seen when we moved from the RTX 2080 to the RTX 2080 Super on the desktop side, it'll be a very minor upgrade.
Until Nvidia actually details what the RTX 2080 Super Max-Q can do (if it actually exists), we're just going to have to keep digging into these leaks. As it stands, because today's information features hardware that's either unannounced or is announced with no specific specs, it's hard to actually trust these leaks.
Either way, because the RTX 2080 Super was such a slight upgrade over the original card when it launched back in July 2019, if you're looking to buy a high-end gaming laptop, we'd just jump on it now. If real, the RTX 2080 Super will be faster, but it likely won't be so much faster that waiting a few months will be worth it.
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