Romanian retailer lists GeForce RTX 3070 and Ryzen 7 5800H-powered ASUS TUF laptop at sub-US$1700 price point

Romanian retailer Altex recently listed an ASUS TUF Gaming A17 laptop, configured with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and the Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800H for 6649 Lei, (approximately US$1700). The listing has since been taken down. However, WCCFTech managed to save a screen-cap. NVIDIA is expected to announce Ampere mobile parts very soon. Based on current leaks, they look set to deliver a solid performance boost over mobile Turing. 

However, we might not see top-end parts based on the GA102 GPU, since a 320W-plus power limit simply doesn’t make sense in a laptop form factor. While the upcoming mobile GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 are expected to perform significantly worse than their desktop counterparts, we will likely see the GeForce RTX 3070 outperform top-end mobile Turing offerings like the GeForce RTX 2080. If Altex’s pricing isn’t too far from the norm, this could mean serious gaming performance in the sub-$2000 segment.  

While this is good news for laptop buyers looking for an Ampere upgrade, AMD could complicate things if and when it brings RDNA2 to mobile. The 7nm architecture offers significant power efficiency gains over Ampere, and the Radeon RX 6800 - a GPU that’s up to 20 percent faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti - has a TDP of 250W. Mobile RDNA2 parts that offer GeForce RTX 2080 Ti levels of performance could offer mobile Ampere a significant challenge in the months to come.