RTX 4090 laptop guide | WePC

RTX 4090 laptop GPUs are sure to be the most powerful graphics cards of the next laptop generation, but what do we know about these devices? It wasn’t even clear until recently that RTX 4090 gaming laptops would even exist, but it does appear they are on the horizon based on recent leaks from trusted sources. We break down everything we know about the new, top-end Nvidia RTX 40 series laptop devices.

As we get more information about these upcoming laptops, we’ll be listing it all here; and once the first review copies become available, we’ll be turning this page into a guide to the best RTX 4090 laptops available to help you pick the right one for your needs.

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Will there be RTX 4090 laptops?

Although there hasn’t yet been official confirmation of RTX 4090 laptops from Nvidia, there have been a couple of recent leaks which strongly suggest their existence. Whilst leaks and rumors should always be taken with a pinch of salt, these look to be the real deal. Read below for the details of the latest RTX 4090 laptop leaks.

The latest RTX 4090 mobile leaks

Korean leaker @harukaze5719 posted the following Tweet on the 22nd of October, expanding upon the @hw_reveal post the same day, detailing the 40-series Mobile GPUs, their associated graphics cards, and talking about the power limits of several of them.

This points to the existence of an RTX 4090 laptop graphics card, with an AD103 GPU and a TGP of up to 175W, which is the same as the TGP of the most powerful RTX 3080 Ti laptops, specifically models like the XMG Neo 15 E22 and MSI GE76 Raider.

It can be assumed however that the 40-series laptops will have improved clock speeds, memory clocks, and core counts over the high-end 30-series laptop GPUs, as the desktop variants of the 40-series do over their predecessors.

When is the likely RTX 4090 laptop release date?

It’s expected that the first RTX 40-series laptops will be revealed at CES 2023, which is scheduled to take place this year between 5th-8th January. We don’t know for sure if we’ll see any RTX 4090 laptops revealed then, it could be that other SKUs take the limelight instead and the RTX 4090 reveal is pushed back until later.

The first RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 laptops were released (as in, were available to buy) from the 26th January onwards after being unveiled at CES. If the RTX 4090 mobile graphics card is released at the same conference we can expect a similar late Jan – February roll out. If not, it could be as late as Q2 2023 when we see the first models.

Will RTX 4090 laptops be any good?

There’s been some debate as to whether or not RTX 4090 laptop graphics cards will even be a good thing. The whole reason that we never saw any RTX 3090 laptops was that the power draw of this high-end card was deemed to great for it to be worth making a laptop version of.

If power supply and cooling technology constraints are putting a hard cap on the maximum TGP (which still appears to be 175W, as it was with the 30-series laptops), then is there any point upgrading? We won’t know for sure until testing is done on these devices, but the below informaiton can give us some idea.

RTX 4090 desktop vs RTX 4090 laptop

The chips of all 40-series variants will be made from TSMC’s 4nm process (as opposed to the 8nm Samsung process on the 30s-series GPUs) and utilise the new Ada Lovelace architecture

The RTX 4090 laptop variant will come with an AD103 GPU, rather than the AD102 GPU in the desktop RTX 4090. For those who don’t know, the ‘GPU’ as properly defined is the brain of the graphics card, even though it is often used as shorthand to describe the entire graphics card. In terms of Nvidia’s naming conventions, in this instance the lower the number in the GPU name, the more CUDA cores the it has and the more powerful it is.

The AD103 is the same GPU used by the RTX 4080 desktop version, although we don’t know how it will compare in core count, speed, and the rest of it. We do know that the TGP will be substantially lower than both in the RTX 4090 mobile (as suspected). See the table below for everything we know so far.

RTX 4090 laptop vs RTX 3090 desktop

The TGP of laptop GPUs is often around 50% lower than that of their desktop variants, meaning substantially less performance, as the constraints of the laptop chassis mean less power supply and inferior cooling compared to a desktop. However, there are rumors that the RTX 4090 mobile version may compete with a desktop RTX 3090 of the previous gen, as, despite the lower TGP (as seen in the table above) it has increased power efficiency through the Ada Lovelace architecture. Only time will tell whether or not this is true.

RTX 4090 laptop FAQs