Nvidia's desktop GeForce GTX 980 is coming to notebooks

Shawn Knight

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Staff member

Nvidia has been systematically bridging the performance gap between its desktop and mobile GPUs over the past half decade or so. With Maxwell, Nvidia managed to shrink the gap to 80 percent of its desktop equivalent and now, it’s doing away with it completely.

The chipmaker on Tuesday unveiled a version of its GeForce GTX 980 for notebooks that offers true 1:1 performance compared to its desktop counterpart. Notice how I shied away from using the term “new” to describe the notebook variant; that’s because it’s the same chip used to power the desktop model.

It’s a significant achievement that required an immense amount of planning to pull off.

For starters, Nvidia is selecting only the highest grade chips through a process known as binning to ensure the notebook-bound chips can hit stock clock speeds and have enough overhead for mild overclocking. Shrinking down the board to fit inside a notebook also took a lot of effort, especially reworking trace routes between the GPU and RAM.

Delivering enough power to push the chip was another major concern. The GTX 980M uses a three-phase power system; the GTX 980 was designed to take advantage of up to eight phases. Kaustubh Sanghani, a general manager with Nvidia, told PCWorld that the new notebook chip has 50 percent more peak current available than the GTX 980M.

The GTX 980 for notebooks will also be able to power virtual reality-based games, a first for a mobile GPU. As mentioned, buyers will have the ability to overclock the GPU although how far a chip can be pushed will depend largely on the notebook manufacturers’ cooling capabilities.

A batch of six notebooks will be the first to receive the desktop GPU transplant and predictably, they’re all high-end units like the watercooled Asus GX700 we saw earlier this month. No word yet on pricing or specific launch dates but Nvidia says we can expect to see availability later this fall.

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Not sure I understand the point of this when the price of the card alone will be of a full microATX tower with i7 & GTX980... and the battery life... forget it!
 
Shoehorning the full fat GTX 980 into a laptop is nice but I'll be very, very impressed if they can manage to SLI 2 of them, complete with custom liquid cooling loop into the same form factor.
 
I'd really want a photo of some guy in an airport plugin his liquid cooling laptop with GTX980.Girls can't lift such a thing.
 
It's not meant to be a portable solution. It's a desktop replacement. State of the art desktop replacement. Take it with you when you are away for a while but dont' take it to class and work daily, it's not meant for that obviously. Amazing the progress they are making. Only a matter of time for them to shrink the laptops down and lower power consumption. Though you expect it to be plugged in for gaming. When it's not plugged in you switch to integrated with a push of a button or two to double battery life. Pretty cool if you ask me. They just need good screens that can produce amazing quality pictures like plasmas with their color accuracy similar to CRT's and their high contrast ratios. Minus the power draw obviously.
 
People need to understand one major thing about this laptop. It was not designed for the average user, but for the serious hardcore game player. It cots too much money, for just having it sitting on your desk.
 
The main thing everyone has to understand about all technologies is that it might not necessarily fit your use case. This definitely fits a user who has to travel for weeks at a time for work and is a gamer. You know how bad it sucks to have to travel for work to a place where you don't know anyone or don't want to see the local sights and only be able to drag a MBP along with you? If you are going to be away from home for days at a time this is a perfect toy to bring along.
 
There are plenty of people who will pay for this... Remember the Alienware 18? Over 6k for a laptop... and people bought it! Imagine having 2 of these SLI'd in a laptop...
 
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