Nvidia’s RTX 4090 laptop GPU was revealed at CES 2023, but if you want this power-packed graphics card, how much will it cost you? The unsurprising answer is a small fortune, going by the price of an upgrade to the RTX 4090 on an XMG gaming laptop.
VideoCardz spotted that in a YouTube video from Jarrod’sTech, pricing is listed for the various RTX 40 Series graphics card options that buyers can choose from when purchasing XMG’s Neo 16, an incoming gaming portable packing Intel’s Core i9-13900HX Raptor Lake CPU (and a whole load of other high-end goodies).
The base model of the Neo 16 comes with the RTX 4060, retailing at €2,199 (around $2,360, £1,940, AU$3,420). If you want to upgrade that to the RTX 4090, the cost is a whopping €1,687 (around $1,810, £1,490, AU$2,630).
XMG’s prices for other Nvidia Lovelace GPUs come to a relatively palatable €375 (around $400, £330, AU$580) for the RTX 4070, but then the RTX 4080 is pitched at €1,050 (around $1,130, £930, AU$1,640).
The Neo 16, and other RTX 40 Series laptops, will be out in February.
Analysis: Pushing the boundaries of pricing (again)
Nvidia’s newly revealed GPUs are pricey, you say? Well, who’d have believed it…
Of course, the fact that the RTX 4090 is expensive in its laptop incarnation is hardly a shock, and again looking at the desktop pricing, the RTX 4080 also being a big financial ask is similarly predictable.
If we consider the total cost of the RTX 4090 going by XMG’s pricing, the cost of the upgrade is almost €1,700 as mentioned, but for the total theoretical price, we must also consider that you’re already paying for the RTX 4060 in the entry-level model’s price tag – so we can bung that on top.
Meaning that the RTX 4090 laptop GPU must come close to two grand in Euros, and that’s about the asking price for the a desktop RTX 4090 (at major German retailer MindFactory, at the time of writing). So, one way to look at this is the laptop version of this GPU is just as expensive as the desktop incarnation’s eye-watering price tag.
And of course, the laptop take on the Lovelace flagship isn’t nearly as performant as the desktop card – it draws a lot less wattage, of course, at 150W TGP (plus a 25W dynamic boost) – but what you’re paying for here is the ability to fit as much power as possible into a relatively small case (a laptop chassis).
Still, the question remains – do you really want to fork out that much for a notebook graphics card? One that has the same CUDA Core count as the RTX 4080 desktop, and likely similar performance to that card (in a best-case scenario, it’s perhaps a bit slower in the main). You can bet there are folks out there already reaching for their wallets, though…
