Dell XPS 17 70 W vs. 130 W GeForce RTX 3060: How much slower is it, really?

The mobile GeForce RTX 3060 comes in a wide range of TGP targets from 70 W up to 130 W. The thicker the laptop, the higher the TGP target generally speaking. Extreme examples from both ends include the 19.5 mm thick Dell XPS 17 9710 with its 70 W RTX 3060 and the 30.1 mm thick Schenker XMG Core 17 with its 130 W RTX 3060. The Schenker system is expected to offer faster graphics performance, but we're here to see just how much of a difference users can actually expect.

It's important to remember that even though the 70 W RTX 3060 is targeting a 46 percent lower TGP than the 130 W version, it's nowhere near 46 percent slower. This was observed during the Pascal and Turing generations as well where the Max-Q GPUs would only be around 10 to 15 percent slower than their non Max-Q counterparts despite their much lower TGP targets. Our 3DMark comparisons below reveal that the fastest 130 W RTX 3060 laptop in our database is only about 20 to 25 percent faster than the XPS 17 with the slowest 70 W version. When averaging all the GeForce RYX 3060 laptops we've tested thus far, the XPS 17 is only about 10 percent slower.

Interestingly, the XPS 17 appears to perform much closer to the average RTX 3060 laptop when running real-world games. Of the six games we've tested, our Dell unit would return average frame rates that are within just a few percentage points lower or sometimes even higher. We suspect that its newer 11th gen Intel Tiger Lake-H Core i7 CPU and spacious 32 GB of RAM are helping the system close the gap between it and other RTX 3060 laptops where 10th gen Comet Lake-H CPUs and 16 GB of RAM are much more common.

If you're considering "settling" for a laptop with a lower TGP target like the Dell XPS 17 or MSI GF65 Thin 10UE, then you can still boost gaming performance to be closer to most other RTX 3060 laptops by opting for a newer generation Intel CPU or increasing RAM capacity.