NVIDIA made 28 variants of GeForce RTX 30 mobile graphics cards, yet OEMs do list which they are selling

ComputerBase managed to find a list of all Max-Q and Max-P variants of RTX 30 graphics cards.

We have been covering the disappearance of Max-Q branding on GeForce RTX 30 SKUs ever since the news broke. It appears that NVIDIA’s decision to drop Max-Q branding caused a lot of confusion around the already confusing naming of the laptop GPUs.

NVIDIA claims that Max-Q no longer defines the SKU, but rather it describes a technology that notebook manufacturers may or may not use. As a result, they do not list anything that could help determine which GeForce RTX 30 variant the laptop has.

Today the embargo on GeForce RTX 30 Mobile series has expired, and many sites have published their reviews. Most reviews have done a really good job explaining which TGP variant the laptops now have. However, this information is not listed by most notebook manufacturers,  but there are a few exceptions .

Laptop makers have ignored NVIDIA’s request to list TGP values on their websites. As a result, consumers are faced with a lottery of 28 different SKU, from which low-power variants of higher SKU are often slower than high-power models of much cheaper GeForce RTX 30 cards.

How NVIDIA lists RTX 30 Laptop GPUs:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Mobile Specifiactions, Source: NVIDIA

The specifications posted by NVIDIA on the official website are simply put: useless. Now thanks to the ComputerBase article we have a full list of RTX 30 variants. Which one will be used by notebook manufacturers is completely up to them, however, as shown above, they simply chose not to. For this reason, you may find a laptop with GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q which is slower than RTX 3060 Laptop GPU.

Please note that the list compiled by ComputerBase does not list TGP values affected by Dynamic Boost. This technology may add 5 to 20W to the GPU power (which as you might have guessed, makes this list even more confusing).