A gaming laptop sporting unreleased and unannounced CPU and GPU hardware temporarily popped up on a German retail site this week, which in effect served as a delightful teaser of what is to come.
The laptop in question is an upcoming Acer Nitro 5 configuration (model AN517-41-R9S5), and for a brief period of time, it appeared at Electronic Partner. It was taken offline after the listing gained some notoriety, but you can still view a cached copy of the product page.
It's a 17.3-inch laptop with an IPS panel featuring a 1920x1080 resolution and fast 144Hz refresh rate, along with 32GB of DDR4 memory and a 1TB SSD. Those are all things we have seen before in the laptop space. However, it is the combination of an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU that stands out in this configuration.
Neither of those parts official exist yet, though both have been the subject of numerous leaks and rumors. Starting with the CPU, the Ryzen 7 5800H is a next-gen mobile CPU based on AMD's latest Zen 3 architecture, the same as what powers its Ryzen 5000 series on the desktop.
Interestingly, rumor has it AMD will mix both Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPU models into its Ryzen 5000H/U mobile series. If that is the case, buyers will want to pay close attention to what they are buying to ensure they are getting a Zen 3 part (if that is what they are after). Zen 2 in mobile form already exists (Ryzen 4000H/U series), and while those are desirable CPUs, Zen 3 is the more exciting and better performing architecture.
Past leaks peg the Ryzen 7 5800H as having eight cores and 16 threads, with a 3.2GHz base clock and around a 4.5GHz max boost clock. It also wields 16MB of L3 cache and eight GPU cores, with a 45W TDP. For comparison, the Ryzen 7 4800H is also an 8-core/16-thread CPU, but with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.2GHz max boost clock, 8MB of L3 cache, and seven GPU cores.
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As for the mobile variant of the GeForce RTX 3080, not much has been leaked, but it so-far appears like it could be an upscaled RTX 3070 GPU, as opposed to a true-to-desktop RTX 3080. However, on the desktop front, Ampere has proven to be a strong GPU architecture. The entire GeForce RTX 30 series on the desktop is hard to find in-stock and priced at MSRP, in part because it is a significant upgrade over the previous generation GeForce RTX 20 series.
Pairing Zen 3 with Ampere in a gaming laptop will undoubtedly be a popular combination, depending on how pricing shakes out. As it relates to that, the Nitro 5 listing was priced at €1,948.61, which works out to around $2,375 in US currency.
Meanwhile, the folks at Videocardz claim Gigabyte is getting ready to launch new gaming laptops of its own based on the latest generation hardware. They include G5 (15.6-inch) and G7 (17.3-inch) models pairing up to an Intel Core i7-10870H CPU with a GeForce RTX 3060 mobile GPU, and an A7 model with a Ryzen 7 5800H CPU and the same GPU.
