Videos for Feb 6th - 12th

Things are not going too well in terms of testing with the new RTX 40 laptops. Long story short, there might be just one video this week when the embargo ends comparing the RTX 3080 Ti with RTX 4080, as that's about all I can do right now and it will be a struggle to get it done in time.

I have 6 laptops here right now, 5 from XMG and a Razer Blade 18. The Blade has some strange flickering issue with optimus on, not sure if Intel drivers or what, I updated it fully but it persists. They want to send another unit so I can see that it must be some issue with the first early one, so it will be good to confirm, but it delays the review of the Blade 18.

With the XMG laptops, the first 4090 one is currently dead after a bad BIOS update was provided. The 4060/4070 can't be tested for a few weeks as the driver for those isn't available yet, so we can put those to the side for now.

I actually got a replacement 4090 laptop really fast from XMG, however it and the 4080 seem to have abnormal thermal behavior on the CPU, which is currently being investigated by them. For now though, it means I have not been able to properly run tests on these laptops.

Basically at 1080p in games, the 4080 and 4090 can get beaten by 3070 Ti/3080 Ti laptops, and my Blade 18 with 4080 is far ahead, clearly a problem. The GPUs look fine, 1440p and 4K data is about where I'd expect. I'll save the specifics, but there might be a firmware fix coming to help, though this unexpected delay pushes the testing timeline back a bit. All part of testing early hardware I suppose :)

My original plan was to start out with a 4090 laptop vs desktop comparison, then the same for 4080, then maybe a 4080 vs 4090 laptop comparison, but all that's on hold for now. I've already tested 25 games at 4K, 1440p and 1080p on the desktop GPUs, so that data is ready to go, though depending on game updates and how long the laptop issue takes to resolve, there's a chance I might have to redo some.

All of those early issues aside, the performance from the Blade 18 looks fine, so we've started the game testing on it today. I'm just about done testing the 25 games on the Legion 7i with 12900HX and 3080 Ti, so will use that to compare against the 13950HX + 4080 in the first game comparison video, up around the middle of this week. Depending on what Razer are doing with sending a new Blade 18 so I can check the screen issue isn't widespread, the review of that may be next.