Nvidia gaming laptop GPU specs leak, but is it really an RTX 3080?

Nvidia GA102 Render
(Image credit: Nvidia)

A solid-looking leak has seemingly confirmed the base specs of the new Nvidia RTX 3080 mobile GPU. With 48 SMs, and therefore 6,144 CUDA cores, it sure looks like we're getting the full GA104 silicon repping as an RTX 3080 in the new gaming laptops.

Some of the most exciting new PC gamery things set to pop up early this year are the new Nvidia RTX 30-series gaming laptops. Seeing the power the green team has dropped into its desktop cards, it's no wonder that we can't wait to see what's going to happen in Ampere mobile trim. It doesn't look like we're going to have to wait long either, as leak upon leak is revealing more about the new GPUs.

This latest leak comes direct from the Geekbench database and was dug up by noted Twitter leaker (Tweaker?), TUM_APISAK. Now, I don't find the Geekbench database entirely reliable when it comes to parsing the potential gaming performance of a particular graphics card, but it does give a pretty robust glimpse at the core specs of the GPUs in question.

The result comes from a test of an Asus ROG Zephyrus GX551QS laptop; a beast of a machine sporting the as-yet-unannounced AMD Ryzen 9 5900H CPU and the Nvidia RTX 3080, and it promises to be one of the most powerful new gaming laptops coming out this year. With a virtual CES 2021 virtually kicking off next week, and both AMD and Nvidia expected to announce their respective mobile parts, I'd expect this Asus machine will be one of the new gaming laptops put front and centre everywhere next week.

The Ryzen 9 5900H is an eight-core, 16-thread CPU, with a max clock speed of 4.54GHz, so it's no slouch. The mobile variant of the RTX 3080 it's paired with comes with 48 SMs, 6,144 CUDA cores, and 16GB of (probably) GDDR6 rather than GDDR6X. 

I'd suggest it's unlikely that Nvidia would cut the GA102 GPU from the full 84 SMs all the way down to 48 SMs for a mobile SKU so, as suggested by Videocardz, it's more likely this is the full GA104 GPU that Nvidia already uses for the desktop Nvidia RTX 3070 cards.

Which means you could argue that the RTX 3080 in the upcoming gaming laptops isn't really an RTX 3080 because it's using an entirely different slice of Ampere silicon, but what's in a name? Wouldn't a mobile GPU with the same performance as a desktop RTX 2080 Ti still smell as sweet?

Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Latest in Graphics Cards
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Group allegedly trying to smuggle Nvidia Blackwell chips stare down bail set at over $1 million
Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card on different backgrounds
AI will be crammed in more of the graphics pipeline as Nvidia and Microsoft are bringing AI shading to a DirectX preview next month
Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards alongside an RTX 4090
Nvidia says it's sold twice as many RTX 50-series cards as RTX 40-series in the first 5 weeks. I'd bloody well hope so given there was essentially just the RTX 4090 for competition
AMD Radeon RX 9070/9070 XT graphics cards with artistic renders of reference design cards circled
Looks like a reference design AMD RX 9070 XT card has shown up in China, but let's not get carried away with thoughts of MBA cards just yet
AMD Radeon Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT graphics card for PC gaming in white colourway
Ranking AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards by their visual design, cuz, you know, I can't buy one for MSRP so have to kill my time somehow
XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Quicksilver graphics card on a blue background with angel wings on either side
XFX is letting you add customisable 3D printed wings to its Quicksilver RX 9070-series graphics cards
Latest in News
Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.
Go ahead and complain the discounts aren't as steep as they used to be, but Steam just had its biggest year ever for seasonal sales
Valve Steam Deck OLED handheld PC
'The future of hardware at Valve is bright': Valve celebrates the success of Steam Deck and Steam OS
Key art of the videogame Lunacid, showing a pale, long haired knight in purple armor contemplating a purple, flaming sword surrounded by the different phases of the moon.
One of my favorite indie RPGs is getting a follow-up made with FromSoftware's 25-year-old Super Mario Maker for first person dungeon crawlers
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 image - Henry riding a pink and blue striped horse while holding a fish
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 now has Steam Workshop support, and of course one of the first mods lets you adjust the 'jiggle physics'
Still image of Bastion holding a bird, taken from Microsoft's Copilot for Gaming reveal trailer
Microsoft unveils Copilot for Gaming, an AI-powered 'ultimate gaming sidekick' that will let you talk to your console so you don't have to talk to your friends
Erenshor - A player and two simulated MMO party members stand on a plateau in front of a yellow landscape
This RuneScape-looking 'simulated MMORPG' has all the nostalgia without the drama because all the other 'players' are NPCs