Early listings for Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series laptops give us an insight into what you’ll need to pay for the gaming notebooks. Costing a pretty penny, you’ll need at least $1,719 in your bank account for the pleasure.
While RTX 5070 Ti kicks the proceeds off at just short of two grand, there’s always the possibility that a mobile RTX 5070 will crop up in the future to lower the bar. Meanwhile, RTX 5090 gaming laptops cost anywhere between $3,129 and $6,199 depending on what you pair the flagship card with. Go for broke with the luxurious Evoc X5801D with its 200Hz screen and 256GB of RAM and it’ll cost half the price of a brand-new 2024 Nissan Versa at $8,979 – but such is the way with portable workstation powerhouses.
As usual, these laptop GPUs share a name with their desktop counterparts but you’ll want to adjust your performance expectations accordingly. Nvidia always cuts down the chip to scale with the limited space, cooling, and power budgets inside a notebook chassis. After all, there’s no way you’ll keep a full-fat RTX 5090 satisfied in ~1.5in housing without decimating the battery life in minutes.
RTX 5090 Mobile packs 10,496 CUDA cores, which is less than half of its desktop counterpart, putting it more in the ballpark of desktop RTX 5080, which houses 10,752 CUDA cores. Early tests indicate you’ll get similar performance, marking a 15-30% boost over RTX 4080 Mobile and sometimes a 20% boost over RTX 4090 Mobile on a lower power budget.
Just like with their desktop counterparts, the emphasis is less on native uplifts and more about spotlighting its swanky DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation upscaling. As divisive as artificial frames are among gamers these days, there’s no denying that extra performance with the ability to prolong battery life isn’t worth its weight in gold in the laptop segment, particularly when high-end models usually last no more than two hours unplugged.
RTX 5090 Mobile will still be rich for some people’s blood, especially given the prices at the top end, but that’s nothing new. Surround it with enthusiast-level components and even RTX 4090 Mobile baseline ran into several thousand.
