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NVIDIA's most expensive laptops are a terrible value — Here's what you should buy instead
Apr 4, 2025
NVIDIA's mobile RTX 5090 fails to impress, especially when compared directly to the mobile RTX 5080. Here's what you need to know before you buy.
Laptops with NVIDIA's RTX 50-series mobile GPUs are officially on the market, but the high-end models aren't exactly blowing anyone away.
Comparing raw specs, it's easy to see why. The mobile RTX 5090 and the desktop RTX 5080 share the same GB203 GPU, and the rest of the stats are quite close.
The mobile 5090 does, of course, have a boosted 24GB of VRAM compared to 16GB in the desktop 5080.
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GPU
RTX 5090 Laptop
RTX 5090 Desktop
RTX 5080 Desktop
GPU name
GB203
GB202
GB203
CUDA cores
10,496
21,760
10,752
RT cores
82
170
84
Tensor cores
328
680
336
ROPs
112
176
112
VRAM
24GB
32GB
16GB
Memory bandwidth
890GB/s
1.79TB/s
960GB/s
Memory bus
256-bit
512-bit
256-bit
TGP
175W
575W
360W
Laptop versions of GPUs are always slower than their desktop counterparts. That's unsurprising. By how much is what everyone was interested in before the new laptops launched.
Overall, the mobile RTX 5090 is about 50% slower than the desktop version in real-world PC gaming performance and in synthetic benchmarks.
Those findings came from Notebookcheck's Allen Ngo, and he's now returned with more information.
NVIDIA's mobile RTX 5080 is only about 10% slower than the 5090
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