[PLUS] Seven new gaming notebooks in the test

With “HX” nothing changes

Very little has happened this year in terms of notebooks. Here’s a refresh of the RTX GPUs, there’s a Ryzen 6000 announcement. Intel’s HX CPUs are a touch faster than the H CPUs and the Ti graphics units are just as slightly faster than those without. That was expected and also happened – there were no surprises, positive or negative, so far. But what also failed to materialize is the wide availability of many a model that has been announced. The Ryzen 7 6800U is AMD’s new efficiency miracle in the flyweight class. The first tests of the only known model so far, Asus’ Zenbook S 13, were published a month ago (see PCGH 08/2022) – but there is still no sign of it on the market.

Announced last year, the Radeon RX 6000 notebook GPUs are all on the market now, with the S series even the refresh, but compared to the mass of models with Nvidia RTX they are few and far between. It is now also known that an RX 6800M (or -S) cannot hold a candle to the direct competition of an RTX 3080 (Ti) and is more on the level of an RTX 3070 (Ti). Because of the wide range of TGP configurations on the part of the Nvidia GPUs, this can only be formulated quite vaguely. An RTX 3080, for example, has between 80 and 150 watts TGP depending on the model. The respective power scales almost directly proportionally with it. The Max-Q designation, which always stigmatized the GPU as a back burner configuration, has been abolished by Nvidia with the Ampere generation. But not the principle itself, so the TGP specification for the GPU is all the more important. The power consumption of the Radeon GPUs for notebooks does not vary quite as much, probably because there are far fewer notebooks with them – only about a handful per GPU. The Radeon RX 6600 does well compared to the competition. At least if you exclude ray tracing, which shouldn’t be an issue in this performance region anyway, the AMD GPU is usually ahead of a Geforce RTX 3060. Usually even with a slightly lower power consumption. The price-performance ratio of the few models is also relatively good, so that the Radeon RX 6600M is a good, competitive Full HD graphics unit because it is often cheaper than the RTX 3060.

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