A new leak by Videocardz confirms that NVIDIA will be releasing a Max-Q Variant of the GTX 1050 Ti. The GTX 1050 Max-Q could also come out, and the 1050 Max-Q would be the last GPU in the GTX 10 Series lineup to feature the Max-Q Design. The leak was confirmed by NVIDIA including support for a GPU called “GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q Design” in their new driver update for Linux x86, version 384.111 – here’s an image (image credits go to Videocardz).
What is Max-Q, and Specifications of GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q
Max-Q Designed GPUs consume way less power than their normal models but are also slightly slower. The Max-Q Variants of GeForce GTX Gaming GPUs are used in Portable Gaming Laptops. The reason is that Max-Q Designed GPUs consume way less power as said before hence they require lesser amounts of cooling, so they can be used in a thinner body. Max-Q GPUs feature the best balance of power consumption and performance.
Clock Speeds of the GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q are expected to be 1417MHz to 1450MHz, translating to a graphical performance score of 2.18TFLOPs. This puts it near Intel’s Kaby Lake G’s Vega M GL GPU levels of performance, but the Vega M GL has higher power (only on paper). Still, AMD & NVIDIA Architectures are not directly comparable and according to many observations made in the past year, NVIDIA still offers better performance having lower FP32 Performance.
Radeon RX Vega M GL Details
The RX Vega M GL Graphics Chip is to be featured on Intel’s 8th generation Kaby Lake G Processors, as a full CPU+GPU Module. The RX Vega M GL features 20 CUs (equaling to 1280 Stream Processors), 80 Texture Units and 32 ROPs. The base clock speed is 931MHz, and the boost clock is 1011MHz. For Memory, all the RX Vega M GPUs feature 4GB of HBM2 Memory with 1.4Gbps of Memory Speed in case of the Vega M GL and 1.6Gbps in case of the Vega M GH.
This Graphics Chip will be included in the i5 8350G, i7 8705G, and i7 8706G. The TDP of these processors is 65W for all of them, which is phenomenal to see as they offer amazing performance considering their power consumption. The other CPUs – i7 8709G and i7 8809G feature the Vega M GH with higher power.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q could be a massive hit and will surely give RX Vega M GL some competition. The Max-Q Design has previously been seen with many very appealing notebooks like ASUS Zephyrus GX501, Alienware 15, Acer Predator Triton 700, Gigabyte AUROS X5 MD, and some others. Max-Q GPUs made laptop gaming more sensible than ever before and many were surprised to see such great levels of performance on portable laptops.
