AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q

AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 Mobile is a professional workstation graphics card for laptops. It is based on the consumer Radeon RX 550 and therefore uses the same Polaris 12 chip (codename Lexa). The 640 shaders (10 compute units = CUs) are clocked at 1082 MHz.

The AMD Radeon Pro (formerly known as FirePro) is the counterpart to the Quadro series from Nvidia and offers certified drivers for professional 3D applications (CAD and DCC).

The WX3200 uses the Polaris architecture (4. generation of GCN) that was introduced in 2016 with the RX 400 series. For more information on the features and specifications of the Polaris architecture, visit our in depth article here.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with the Max-Q design is a mobile high-end GPU from the Pascal series. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1070 for laptops based on the cooling capabilities. The base frequency (1101-1215 MHz) is also much lower than on the regular GTX 1070 (1433 MHz, at least -10%) and the Boost (1265-1379 MHz) is also much lower compared to 1645 MHz (at least -6%) for the regular GTX 1070. The memory clock, however, is identical.

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1070 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

The GP104 chip is manufactured in 16nm FinFET process at TSMC and offers a range of new features. DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP), improved H.265 video en- and decoders (for PlayReady 3.0) are only some of the improvements. See our detailed Pascal architecture article for more details.

The power consumption of the Max-Q design is notably lower than the normal GTX 1070 for laptops and ranges between 80 and 90 Watt (TGP) according to Nvidia.