Intel not needed — Ryzen Zen+ and Nvidia GTX 1660 Turing gaming laptops are a real possibility

When the Ryzen U-series launched for laptops, the processors proved to be neck-to-neck with Intel Kaby Lake-R and even Whiskey Lake-U in terms of CPU performance. Users finally had a handful of respectable AMD Ultrabooks to choose from like the Honor MagicBook, HP Envy x360 15, or Acer Swift 3 instead of the usual costlier Intel models. Now that the Ryzen Zen+ H-series is available to directly tackle the Intel Coffee Lake-H series, there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be seeing gaming laptops coming soon with Zen+ processors paired with Nvidia Pascal or Turing graphics.

Such a move would make the most sense from the perspective of AMD. Its first Zen+ gaming laptop launched just last week which pairs the brand new quad-core Ryzen 5 3550H CPU with a Radeon RX 560X GPU. The only problem, however, is that this aging GPU will be two generations old once Navi hits the market later in the year. Since AMD has no immediate mobile Vega or Navi solution, laptop makers would have to turn to Nvidia GPUs instead.

Some of the biggest AMD partners at the moment are Asus, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Should these OEMs decide to launch budget-mainstream gaming laptops equipped with Ryzen Zen+ CPUs and mid-range GeForce GTX GPUs, then these models would seriously undercut Intel's dominance in the gaming laptop space when it comes to cost and performance-per-Watt. It would make for more exciting comparisons as well instead of the routine head-to-head battles between similarly equipped laptops.