Chinese BiliBili creator Qiong Shuma CHANNEL (roughly, "Budget Tech Channel") put up a video this weekend titled "RTX 4080 for Just 2,300 Yuan? Unfortunately, It's the Mobile Version." The premise is exactly what you think, but there's a twist: rather than comparing the GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop inside a laptop, he's using one of these AD104 GPUs soldered to a graphics card. We already gave away the conclusion in the headline, but it's an interesting comparison nonetheless.

Presenter 杰某 (literally "Jie Mou" but basically meaning "some guy named Jie") explains that these cards became popular back in early 2024 after the Biden administration banned the sale of the GeForce RTX 4090 (among many other GPUs) to China. Small independent shops take scrapped laptops, defective products, and recovered chips and solder them down to custom PCBs with similarly recovered GDDR7 chips and then hack NVIDIA's driver installer so that it will actually install. So it goes that you have many graphics cards in China with mobile GPUs on them.

Qiong Shuma Channel showing many similar cards for sale in China.

As 杰某 explains, these cards are really not recommended unless you can get a great price. You don't get a warranty unless it's from the shop that built it, and you don't get regular driver updates, because the standard NVIDIA drivers won't install. In fact, he only bought the card specifically because his audience expressed interest in seeing this testing. He explicitly advises users to go buy a regular GeForce RTX 5060 or Radeon RX 9070 GRE for about the same or a little more money as these cards go for (around 2300 yuan, or about $340.)

The card apparently rarely goes over 100W power consumption.

Still, he bought the card, so he tested it directly against the Radeon RX 9070 GRE. And the results are... well, actually pretty interesting. See, 杰某 couldn't get the card to boost much above 100W; he shows a peak value of 115W as monitored by HWiNFO. That implies that the card is likely firmware limited to that value even though the RTX 4080 Laptop (or "4080M") can support a power limit of 150W. The actual power delivery is down to the graphics card itself, and it's quite possible that the cheap board made by whoever in whereever can't supply the needed 150W reliably.

It performs exceptionally well in PUBG for whatever reason.

That does limit performance. Yet, in PUBG, for whatever reason, the GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop absolutely destroys the Radeon RX 9070 GRE, with the former card pulling down nearly 400 FPS while the RTX 9070 GRE limps behind at around 250 FPS. (Oh no, only 250 FPS.) As he tests more games, though, this looks more like a problem with PUBG on the Radeon RX 9070 than like the real performance of the two GPUs. In Delta Force they provide nearly identical performance, and in Shadow of the Tomb Raider the performance is fairly similar, with the RTX 4080M turning in a 96 FPS average at 4K while the Radeon RX 9070 GRE put up 107 FPS at the same settings.

However, in most other games, it trails the RX 9070 GRE. (click for big)

The real differences in favor of the Radeon came in Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 6. Testing Cyberpunk at 4K, the Radeon RX 9070 GRE beat the mobile GeForce card by a factor of 53%, with 76.44 FPS averaged versus 49.8 on the GeForce. In Forza it was similar; the Radeon RX 9070 GRE put up 297 FPS average while the GeForce GPU rendered 214 frames. This isn't some case of inflated averages, either; the 1% lows for the cards show similar gulfs. You can probably expect similar results from most AAA games, we'd expect.

Ada Lovelace is remarkably power-efficient, which we already knew.

杰某 concludes the video by recommending against the card in general. It clearly works, and is a valid option if you come across one for a good price, but the lack of official driver support is a downer. However, he notes that it could be a good option for small form-factor builds given the low power consumption; in many cases the RTX 4080M is drawing just 75 or 85 watts where the RX 9070 GRE is pulling 140. With that kind of power draw, someone could even make one that's slot-powered. Remember slot-powered GPUs? HotHardware remembers.