Four newly leaked Asus gaming laptops may have revealed some unannounced chipsets from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. Though unconfirmed by Asus, the TUF Gaming and ROG Zephyrus-branded notebooks show what these chipmakers have in store for their processor and GPU lineups in 2021, including AMD’s Ryzen 5000 mobile family, Intel’s Tiger Lake-H processors, and Nvidia’s latest RTX 3000 series graphics cards for laptops.
According to a report from Wccftech, these notebooks are expected in the first half of 2021, which suggests that the laptop CPUs and GPUs will likely be announced at around the same time.
AMD APU-powered gaming with Nvidia RTX
The first Asus laptop to leak is the Asus TUF Gaming A17 notebook, a laptop that features a 17.3-inch display that is said to be powered by the Ryzen 7 5800H processor. Asus’ return to AMD for the TUF isn’t all too surprising, given the company had made heavy bets on AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile processors with the release of a variety of laptop models supporting that silicon. Going with a Ryzen 5000 processor in 2021 would give the TUF Gaming A17 an eight-core processor with 16 threads with a maximum clock speed of 4.30 GHz on boost.
Specifications for the processor suggest that AMD will equip its 5800H with 16MB of L3 cache and 4MB of L2 cache. The chip’s TDP is expected to be 35 to 45W.
And even though AMD’s mobile processors come with integrated Vega graphics, Asus is expected to turn to Nvidia for better graphics performance with a discrete GPU. The TUF A17 will likely utilize Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, an unannounced mobile GPU. Most recently, in the RTX 3060 family, Nvidia only announced the desktop version of the RTX 3060 Ti. The RTX 3060 mobile is expected to join the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 on laptops, and this specific graphics chip is listed with 6GB of GDDR6 video memory.
Other features of the laptop include a screen with a matte coating and FHD resolution along with a 144Hz refresh rate. The screen is described as achieving 250 nits of brightness. The laptop is also expected to ship with 8GB of GDDR4 memory that is upgradable to 32GB along with a single 512GB solid state drive that is expandable to 1TB.
Based on pricing for the TUF A17 featuring Ryzen 4000 processors, we expect the new TUF A17 to retail between $1,500 and $2,000, depending on configuration.
Intel Tiger Lake mobile gaming
In addition to supporting AMD silicon, a second gaming notebook from Asus is expected to support Intel’s 11th-Gen Tiger Lake-H processor. It’s unclear what specific Intel chipset that ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE will feature, but given that the company is positioning this laptop at the high-end market segment, we can expect either a Core i7 or Core i9 configuration alongside a more premium RTX 3000 series graphics.
Unlike the TUF laptop, details about the Zephyrus Duo are more vague. The laptop is said to have 48GB of RAM, and it’s unclear if that amount is solely dedicated to system memory, or if the leaker, Harukazew 5719, combined both system memory and VRAM. If it’s the latter, the RTX 3080 mobile GPU is expected to feature 16GB of GDDR6X RAM, which would mean the laptop comes with 32GB of DDR4 memory.
The Zephyrus Duo is expected to retail above $2,000 in the U.S., and depending on configuration, pricing could be closer to $3,000. The laptop will likely continue Asus’ trend of using a secondary display just above the keyboard to give mobile gamers more controls. Gamers can choose from various configurations for screen resolution, refresh rates, storage capacity, and various silicon options.
In addition to the Zephyrus Duo, Asus also submitted the unannounced ROG Strix G713QY and ROG Strix G553Q laptops for approval with a South Korean regulatory agency. It’s unclear when the Strix models will land.
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