5070 Ti laptops that Nvidia’s been pretty quiet about. And it all has to do with this chart right here. This is a power/performance curve. It shows the performance of a GPU as you increase its wattage. And as you’d expect, more watts equals more performance. And then this is the curve for the laptop 5080. This is the one for the laptop 5070. And then this is the one for the 5070 Ti. And if you’ll notice, the shape of this curve is unlike the others. So, typically once you increase the wattage to a GPU enough, it gets to a point where you start to hit diminishing returns where as you increase the wattage more and more, the performance gains you get from that increase are less and less. So, a good example of these diminishing returns was seen in the 4050, the 4060, and the 4070 laptops. Once those devices hit like 100, maybe 105 watts of power, they would hit a performance ceiling, and giving them any more wattage was pretty much a waste. Now, the 5070 has a similar kind of performance ceiling. It starts to flatten out at around 100 watts, but the 5070Ti does not. This has a very steep performance curve, which is awesome to see on a gaming laptop, right? It just means that this GPU scales really well with higher wattages. And as a result, the 5070Ti laptops get fantastic frame rates without needing crazy amounts of energy to do it. They’re comparable to a laptop 4080, but it does it with better energy efficiency. And the 50 series is better for all the new DLSS stuff if you’re interested in. Now, the 5070 laptops are better than the 4070s by like 10 to maybe 12%. It still only has 8 gigs of VRAM. So, you want to stick to 1080p gaming, but it is more energy efficient. Like, if you take a 5070 laptop and run it at 85 90 watts, you can match the performance of a 4070 running full blast at 140 watts. It’s a huge difference in energy consumption. So, the 5070, the energy efficiency is really nice because you get thermal systems that are cheaper, thinner, lighter, all of that. And that’s always a nice thing when it comes to laptops. Uh, the takeaway though for the 5070 Ti, at least the simple takeaway is that it loves wattage. So, if you can afford a higher wattage 5070Ti system, go for it. So, if that was the whole message, that’d be good, right? It seems like a really great GPU and, you know, if you can get it for good price, thumbs up. However, for the keen eyed viewers out there, if you’ve been looking at these charts, something might have seemed off. If you look at the tail end of the 5070Ti curve, it’s quite clear that there’s a lot of runway left. As in, that line hasn’t plateaued or hit a ceiling yet. It’s still climbing up. And chances are, if you fed that GPU higher and higher wattages, it would probably get better and better performance. But you can’t because Nvidia caps it at 140 watts. Now, we’ve seen steep performance curves like that on the 4090 and 5090 laptop GPUs, and those get cut off at 175 watts because that’s kind of like the thermal limit when it comes to laptop designs. In order to go beyond that for cooling, you have to have like very specialized cooling, like really loud fans or like water cooling on laptops. It’s doable, but not a lot of companies chase for that. But on the 5070 Ti, there are so many devices that have that chip in it that can easily cool beyond 140. And you’re just basically running a neutered chip inside a device like this. So this is the MSI Vector device. This has the 5070 Ti. This could probably cool another 20 30 watts. And if the 5070Ti could go to like 160 or 175 watts with some modified V BIOS, it would be an awesome chip. it would probably be the best value when it came to laptop GPUs in a really long time. But we don’t have that. So, here’s what I think happened. I think Nvidia saw this performance data very early on in their development cycle and they thought, “God damn, this chip is awesome. This is like a really good chip.” But hold on, it’s too good. It’s too close to the performance of the 5080 if we run it at the regular wattages. like we got to do something about this or else if we let this out without some kind of limitation. No one’s going to buy an RTX 580 device on the laptops. Those are just like $600 $700 more expensive at the minimum. So, we got to do something to make sure that those 5080s and 5090s can sell. We got to keep farming our customers. So, let’s cap the wattage on this thing and hamstring it so that it’s just so much worse than it could be. I mean, it just seems so obvious to me that if they gave this thing more wattage, it would be amazing. It would just fly. But nope, we don’t have that. It’s just Nvidia doing Nvidia things. Uh, so, and speaking of Nvidia doing Nvidia things, the 5070Ti has 12 gigs of VRAM. The 5070 has 8 gigs of VRAM. So, the simple way to look at it is this. If you plan on getting a device that has a 1440p panel or higher, like QHD Plus, that kind of stuff, you absolutely need the 5070Ti. it a 5070 device with 8 gigs of RAM running on a high resolution panel is just going to be problems. It will absolutely be something you regret down the line. So yeah, I do think like the silver lining is that because the 5070 only has 8 gigs of RAM, I imagine the sales pricing for that stuff will be more aggressive down the line. That’s just my theory on it. Now, in terms of pricing, the launch pricing of these devices were $1,600 for the 5070Ti and $1,300 for the 5070. As of right now, there are some sales that seem to be able to hit that kind of pricing, which is great. I do think that that 5070Ti in particular is a very fair price for the kind of performance you get. Uh, this one in particular, I saw it on sale $1599. I think at that pricing it’s pretty solid, especially because the 12 gigs of RAM is going to carry you uh probably four or five years comfortably down the road, especially at that resolution. Okay, there you have it. The 5070Ti I think is it’s a good chip, but god damn, it could have been so much better.