Nvidia is putting desktop-caliber GTX 980 GPUs in laptops

When Nvidia launched the 980M last October, it claimed that the laptop GPU could hit 75-80% of the performance of the desktop card. That was impressive compared to the mobile GPUs of a generation or two back, but not as impressive as what Nvidia’s done now: fit the entire, uncompromised desktop 980 GPU into gaming laptops. Starting early October with six laptops from MSI, Gigabyte, Asus and Clevo, the GTX 980 is making its way into laptops, with all 2048 CUDA cores intact. And it’s overclockable.

To show off the full-on 980 doing its thing in laptops, Nvidia demoed several laptops side-by-side with desktop machines to compare benchmarks. In Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, and a couple other benchmarks, the laptop system was able to turn in nearly identical scores—at worst, about 5% off what the desktop machine delivered. In those cases, it wasn’t even quite a fair fight, since a laptop CPU was up against a more powerful desktop CPU. Some of the laptops were actually equipped with desktop parts and delivered dead even performance. In one case, 3DMark actually turned in identical scores down to the point.

The GTX 980 will be able to deliver 7 Gbps of memory bandwidth compared to the 980M’s 5 Gbps. Whereas the mobile 980s previously only had 3 phase PSUs, the new cards will be outfitted with 4-8 phase power supplies, which will vary by laptop. Every system that ships with a 980 will have a custom-tuned fan curve to keep the card cool, but it’ll also ship with some sort of overclocking tool, like MSI Afterburner or Gigabyte’s OC Guru.

How overclockable the 980 will be will naturally vary from laptop to laptop, as different systems will have different thermal constraints. You can bet that the Asus GX700, that watercooled beast of a laptop we wrote about last week, will be able to push the 980 to its limits.

All of this performance requires the laptop be plugged into AC power, however. Without the extra juice from the wall socket, the 980 will deliver roughly equal performance to the 980M.

We don’t have pricing information or exact release dates on the laptops launching with the 980, but here are the ones coming in the near future:

Asus GX700
Clevo P775DM-G
Clevo P870DM-G
Gigabyte Auros RX7Y4
MSI GT72
MSI GT80

Nvidia also told us that like with the 980M, there will be SLI configurations of the full-size 980 in laptops, too. That’s likely as much GPU muscle as you’re going to find in a laptop until sometime in 2016, when Nvidia has a new generation of cards to roll out.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).