7 ms·

GeForce GTX 980 Comes to Notebooks

43 points by richardboegli 11y ago

mdorazio 11y ago
What I'd like to see is a return to single slot video cards for desktop PCs, which should be entirely possible if they're cramming a 980 into a laptop. The monstrosities that AMD and Nvidia keep cranking out every year are just absurd at this point, especially if you care about form factor or power consumption.
- maaku 11y ago
  You can find single-slot cards on the market.
  - CarVac 11y ago
    Hardly. Mostly they're low-spec professional cards. No single slot cooler will handle a 250 watt chip without making a racket.
    - richardboegli 11y ago
      AMD Radeon R9 Nano was specifically designed for this [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9621/the-amd-radeon-r9-nano-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/9621/the-amd-radeon-r9-nano-re...
richardboegli 11y ago
This is AWESOME.
hspak 11y ago
I feel like overclockability is the last thing Nvidia should be focusing on for laptops. The trade-off for overclocking is heat generation which is undesirable for laptops by far. These cards generate a lot of heat as is.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  I don't think people are expecting these to be laptops, exactly. More like very portable "desktops". I know a lot of people in the VR community are going bonkers over this announcement. It's going to make setting up demos a hell of a lot easier. Nvidia's Optimus technology (don't ask me what it was for, I could never keep it straight) was a serious impediment to achieve low tracking latency, to the point of being downright impossible. I even once returned a laptop with a 980M the same day I got it after I found out Optimus basically made it useless to use with my DK2. I probably won't buy one of these. I'll probably just stuff my desktop into an aluminum case suitcase. But you could pull the battery out and throw it away for all the VR folks care. This will get setup on a table at conferences by a lot of people.
some-guy 11y ago
While this may be a great engineering feat, I would rather see mass-market external GPU enclosures become the norm once/if Thunderbolt 3 becomes mainstream. It would be really nice for instance dual-boot a Macbook Pro for work during the day, then come home and plug in an external GPU for gaming.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Some of us have been waiting for external GPUs for nearly a decade. I'm not sure a critical mass of demand exists for this type of interface. Value gamers stick to mainstream ATX PCs, and often do their own work, as components can be much cheaper and the labor is free (supplemented by a few internet build guides). High-end gamers often do their own work so they can ensure quality throughout the build and verify every component. Those that don't usually only buy completed systems, and replace these very frequently. Almost all use cases where an external card device would be useful are already served by having a desktop instead of a laptop, where the discrete GPU is almost external, an ever-increasing stack of chips, fans, and radiators sticking out of a motherboard slot.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Note that Intel is explicitly supporting external GPUs this time with Thunderbolt 3. I don't think that was the case in previous versions. It sounds more likely to happen this cycle, though as you point out it's a small market, so I don't expect it to be cheap. http://liliputing.com/2015/08/intel-says-thunderbolt-3-will-bring-external-graphics-to-laptops.html http://liliputing.com/2015/08/intel-says-thunderbolt-3-will-... http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/msi-preps-external-graphics-solutions-with-thunderbolt-3-interface/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...
    - richardboegli 11y ago
      There is a limitation on the width of the bus though. I recall reading this when it first was announced and it is referenced in the linked article that you reference [1]: 40Gb/s of bandwidth – or about 5GB/s – provided by Thunderbolt 3 is tremendously lower than 15.75GB/s offered by a fully-fledged PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot. [1] http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/msi-preps-external-graphics-solutions-with-thunderbolt-3-interface/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...
monochromatic 11y ago
Any word on what the power consumption is? This seems like a great way to get a painfully hot laptop with awful battery life.
sgoraya 11y ago
I spoke with a laptop reseller a few minutes ago and according to him, the 980 will only fit in laptops thicker than 1" - so it will not be available in a slimmer, lighter gaming laptops like the MSI Ghost series.
- bd 11y ago
  Thinnest notebook from GTX 980 launch lineup is Aorus X7 DT: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-980-for-notebooks.150756.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98... While it's not yet listed on Aorus site, it's quite likely chassis would be same/similar to its older sibling Aorus X7 Pro: http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X7%20Pro-SYNC http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X7%20Pro-SYNC This was 2x GTX 970M SLI model, pretty slim at ~23 mm with 3 kg weight. I wonder though how well cooling will work with GTX 980. All previous Aorus models kinda struggled with cooling, and that was with less powerful GPUs (albeit SLI). Out of announced notebooks, the least weird ones are MSI GT72 and Clevo P775DM: http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc2/GTX_980_Press_Deck_1442606447_page_022_4.jpg http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc2/G... Pity they didn't include also 15" sibling of that Clevo chassis (P750DM). That one would be pretty awesome.
  - richardboegli 11y ago
    From your reference: The first notebooks with the GTX 980 GPU will come by the end of this month. [1] [1]: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-980-for-notebooks.150756.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98...
technotony 11y ago
Doesn't this mean that the Oculus Rift can now run on notebooks? that's a pretty big deal and means they might sell a lot of these! [1] Oculus Rift specs http://www.slashgear.com/final-oculus-rift-specs-revealed-for-2016-consumer-model-11387922/ http://www.slashgear.com/final-oculus-rift-specs-revealed-fo... [2] GeForce GTX 980 outperforms GTX 970: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980-vs-GeForce-GTX-970 http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980-vs-GeForce-GTX-970
- mmastrac 11y ago
  I think that has been specifically mentioned in some of the articles as the 970 is the minimum required GPU.
- corysama 11y ago
  "The new GTX 980 notebook offers a great portable option for the Oculus #Rift. We're excited to see high-performance notebooks powering #VR!" https://twitter.com/oculus/status/646348068594413568 https://twitter.com/oculus/status/646348068594413568
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  latency is still terrible on nvidia, using proprietary (as always) nvidia API you get usual no tricks AMD latency
monocasa 11y ago
I wonder what the thermal budget looks like. I can't imagine that it can run at full crank for an extended period of time.
- nacs 11y ago
  Agreed. Also, unless they've managed to massively cut down on the power requirements, the 980 would burn through your battery rapidly.
vegabook 11y ago
This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself makes more fan speed than a 747. I personally own a Gigabyte Brix Pro i7 and it gets hot and throttled as soon as you load the 8 cores, and this is a 65 watt TDP. Sure, this monster-chip-in-a-notebook pitch sounds great in the press release. It's not going to be a good piece of engineering. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/21 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-re...
- kevingadd 11y ago
  The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP. Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.) One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.
  - vegabook 11y ago
    Point taken on the total system power, but it's still 165 watt TDP. Agreed for "burst" workflows it'll be fine. But how many people have "burst" workflows that need a mobile 980? This thing is for gamers and they'll be maxing it for hours at a time, or (I personally) would be maxing it for GPU compute. I just think it's being done for publicity and that this is not really a serious use case for a chip like this. Indeed this whole "my chip number is bigger than yours" game is not seeing increases in real life performance because of aggressive throttling. I'm seeing lower-power chips beating throttled higher-power chips in small form factor computers. You know how merciless gamers can be. Nvidia better be sure that the systems sporting this chip can achieve 980-style expectations, because otherwise these guys will light up the forums with criticism.
josu 11y ago
This is great, but I was expecting notebook gaming to go the streaming way. What's stopping game streaming from becoming mainstream? Latency?
- TillE 11y ago
  OnLive tried that. They're gone. Yes, latency is the biggest problem. The absolute best case scenario is that you have a direct fiber connection to your ISP, which is hosting servers locally. Then it would probably be acceptable. Realistically, with a standard consumer broadband connection you're adding tens of milliseconds on top of everything else, which completely ruins a lot of action games. However! If you've got a desktop gaming PC at home, you can now play games from your laptop (or TV) with Steam in-home streaming. They don't even have to be Steam games. Over a wired LAN it's fantastic, and on WiFi it's still pretty good.
matthew-wegner 11y ago
There are a few comments on external GPUs/form factor/heat here. The thing is, this laptop is nowhere near a laptop form factor: https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zQi8qkv6X9tGfH4lsA6QsZ8lU5U=/1020x0/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4022492/asusgx700handson1_1020.0.jpg https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zQi8qkv6X9tGfH4lsA6QsZ8lU5U... From: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9251275/asus-gx700-water-cooled-gaming-laptop-ifa-2015-video http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9251275/asus-gx700-water-co... (It's basically an external enclosure bolted on to a laptop...)
wonjun 11y ago
When is this available for purchase?

43 points by richardboegli 11y ago

What I'd like to see is a return to single slot video cards for desktop PCs, which should be entirely possible if they're cramming a 980 into a laptop. The monstrosities that AMD and Nvidia keep cranking out every year are just absurd at this point, especially if you care about form factor or power consumption.

maaku 11y ago
You can find single-slot cards on the market.
- CarVac 11y ago
  Hardly. Mostly they're low-spec professional cards. No single slot cooler will handle a 250 watt chip without making a racket.
  - richardboegli 11y ago
    AMD Radeon R9 Nano was specifically designed for this [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9621/the-amd-radeon-r9-nano-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/9621/the-amd-radeon-r9-nano-re...

richardboegli 11y ago

This is AWESOME.

hspak 11y ago

I feel like overclockability is the last thing Nvidia should be focusing on for laptops. The trade-off for overclocking is heat generation which is undesirable for laptops by far. These cards generate a lot of heat as is.

moron4hire 11y ago
I don't think people are expecting these to be laptops, exactly. More like very portable "desktops". I know a lot of people in the VR community are going bonkers over this announcement. It's going to make setting up demos a hell of a lot easier. Nvidia's Optimus technology (don't ask me what it was for, I could never keep it straight) was a serious impediment to achieve low tracking latency, to the point of being downright impossible. I even once returned a laptop with a 980M the same day I got it after I found out Optimus basically made it useless to use with my DK2. I probably won't buy one of these. I'll probably just stuff my desktop into an aluminum case suitcase. But you could pull the battery out and throw it away for all the VR folks care. This will get setup on a table at conferences by a lot of people.

some-guy 11y ago

While this may be a great engineering feat, I would rather see mass-market external GPU enclosures become the norm once/if Thunderbolt 3 becomes mainstream. It would be really nice for instance dual-boot a Macbook Pro for work during the day, then come home and plug in an external GPU for gaming.

stephengillie 11y ago
Some of us have been waiting for external GPUs for nearly a decade. I'm not sure a critical mass of demand exists for this type of interface. Value gamers stick to mainstream ATX PCs, and often do their own work, as components can be much cheaper and the labor is free (supplemented by a few internet build guides). High-end gamers often do their own work so they can ensure quality throughout the build and verify every component. Those that don't usually only buy completed systems, and replace these very frequently. Almost all use cases where an external card device would be useful are already served by having a desktop instead of a laptop, where the discrete GPU is almost external, an ever-increasing stack of chips, fans, and radiators sticking out of a motherboard slot.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Note that Intel is explicitly supporting external GPUs this time with Thunderbolt 3. I don't think that was the case in previous versions. It sounds more likely to happen this cycle, though as you point out it's a small market, so I don't expect it to be cheap. http://liliputing.com/2015/08/intel-says-thunderbolt-3-will-bring-external-graphics-to-laptops.html http://liliputing.com/2015/08/intel-says-thunderbolt-3-will-... http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/msi-preps-external-graphics-solutions-with-thunderbolt-3-interface/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...
  - richardboegli 11y ago
    There is a limitation on the width of the bus though. I recall reading this when it first was announced and it is referenced in the linked article that you reference [1]: 40Gb/s of bandwidth – or about 5GB/s – provided by Thunderbolt 3 is tremendously lower than 15.75GB/s offered by a fully-fledged PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot. [1] http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/msi-preps-external-graphics-solutions-with-thunderbolt-3-interface/ http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...

monochromatic 11y ago

Any word on what the power consumption is? This seems like a great way to get a painfully hot laptop with awful battery life.

sgoraya 11y ago

I spoke with a laptop reseller a few minutes ago and according to him, the 980 will only fit in laptops thicker than 1" - so it will not be available in a slimmer, lighter gaming laptops like the MSI Ghost series.

bd 11y ago
Thinnest notebook from GTX 980 launch lineup is Aorus X7 DT: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-980-for-notebooks.150756.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98... While it's not yet listed on Aorus site, it's quite likely chassis would be same/similar to its older sibling Aorus X7 Pro: http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X7%20Pro-SYNC http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X7%20Pro-SYNC This was 2x GTX 970M SLI model, pretty slim at ~23 mm with 3 kg weight. I wonder though how well cooling will work with GTX 980. All previous Aorus models kinda struggled with cooling, and that was with less powerful GPUs (albeit SLI). Out of announced notebooks, the least weird ones are MSI GT72 and Clevo P775DM: http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc2/GTX_980_Press_Deck_1442606447_page_022_4.jpg http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc2/G... Pity they didn't include also 15" sibling of that Clevo chassis (P750DM). That one would be pretty awesome.
- richardboegli 11y ago
  From your reference: The first notebooks with the GTX 980 GPU will come by the end of this month. [1] [1]: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-980-for-notebooks.150756.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-announces-GeForce-GTX-98...

technotony 11y ago

Doesn't this mean that the Oculus Rift can now run on notebooks? that's a pretty big deal and means they might sell a lot of these! [1] Oculus Rift specs http://www.slashgear.com/final-oculus-rift-specs-revealed-for-2016-consumer-model-11387922/ http://www.slashgear.com/final-oculus-rift-specs-revealed-fo... [2] GeForce GTX 980 outperforms GTX 970: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980-vs-GeForce-GTX-970 http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-980-vs-GeForce-GTX-970

mmastrac 11y ago
I think that has been specifically mentioned in some of the articles as the 970 is the minimum required GPU.
corysama 11y ago
"The new GTX 980 notebook offers a great portable option for the Oculus #Rift. We're excited to see high-performance notebooks powering #VR!" https://twitter.com/oculus/status/646348068594413568 https://twitter.com/oculus/status/646348068594413568
rasz_pl 11y ago
latency is still terrible on nvidia, using proprietary (as always) nvidia API you get usual no tricks AMD latency

monocasa 11y ago

I wonder what the thermal budget looks like. I can't imagine that it can run at full crank for an extended period of time.

nacs 11y ago
Agreed. Also, unless they've managed to massively cut down on the power requirements, the 980 would burn through your battery rapidly.

vegabook 11y ago

This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself makes more fan speed than a 747. I personally own a Gigabyte Brix Pro i7 and it gets hot and throttled as soon as you load the 8 cores, and this is a 65 watt TDP. Sure, this monster-chip-in-a-notebook pitch sounds great in the press release. It's not going to be a good piece of engineering. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/21 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-re...

kevingadd 11y ago
The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP. Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.) One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.
- vegabook 11y ago
  Point taken on the total system power, but it's still 165 watt TDP. Agreed for "burst" workflows it'll be fine. But how many people have "burst" workflows that need a mobile 980? This thing is for gamers and they'll be maxing it for hours at a time, or (I personally) would be maxing it for GPU compute. I just think it's being done for publicity and that this is not really a serious use case for a chip like this. Indeed this whole "my chip number is bigger than yours" game is not seeing increases in real life performance because of aggressive throttling. I'm seeing lower-power chips beating throttled higher-power chips in small form factor computers. You know how merciless gamers can be. Nvidia better be sure that the systems sporting this chip can achieve 980-style expectations, because otherwise these guys will light up the forums with criticism.

josu 11y ago

This is great, but I was expecting notebook gaming to go the streaming way. What's stopping game streaming from becoming mainstream? Latency?

TillE 11y ago
OnLive tried that. They're gone. Yes, latency is the biggest problem. The absolute best case scenario is that you have a direct fiber connection to your ISP, which is hosting servers locally. Then it would probably be acceptable. Realistically, with a standard consumer broadband connection you're adding tens of milliseconds on top of everything else, which completely ruins a lot of action games. However! If you've got a desktop gaming PC at home, you can now play games from your laptop (or TV) with Steam in-home streaming. They don't even have to be Steam games. Over a wired LAN it's fantastic, and on WiFi it's still pretty good.

matthew-wegner 11y ago

There are a few comments on external GPUs/form factor/heat here. The thing is, this laptop is nowhere near a laptop form factor: https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zQi8qkv6X9tGfH4lsA6QsZ8lU5U=/1020x0/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4022492/asusgx700handson1_1020.0.jpg https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zQi8qkv6X9tGfH4lsA6QsZ8lU5U... From: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9251275/asus-gx700-water-cooled-gaming-laptop-ifa-2015-video http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/9251275/asus-gx700-water-co... (It's basically an external enclosure bolted on to a laptop...)

wonjun 11y ago

When is this available for purchase?