5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Buy an RTX Laptop Now

Extremely limited Ray Tracing games

There are only a few Ray Tracing games available, most notably Battlefield V. This means you will most likely not be able to enjoy any benefits of an RTX card even after splurging on one.

Poor RTX Performance

Turning Ray Tracing on causes a massive performance hit in games that support it. If you’re gaming on 1440p you’ll most likely get unplayable frame rates.

Cut down Ray Tracing performance

The Max Q version of the RTX cards are performing so scandalously low that they should have the “M” for mobile moniker behind its name. It has cut down performance (lower Gigarays/sec) which will impact Ray Tracing performance. Turning on Ray Tracing itself causes a noticeable FPS drop, especially on MAX Q versions that are clocked substantially lower than their desktop counterparts by as much as 20-30%.

Little or no overclocking abilities

The RTX Max Q laptops have a built in power limits, severely limiting any OC potential you’d hope to squeeze out of your expensive RTX cards.

Older gen cards provide more value

GTX 1060 and 1070 cards still perform admirably well. The GTX 1080 Max Q is also extremely great value if you can find one. Most vendors will be clearing stock to make way for next gen GTX cards like the 1660Ti. It’s a great time to pick up older gen laptops on the cheap.

Our Recommendation – Skip & Wait

If you’re out looking for a brand new laptop with price to performance in mind, stay clear of the 2080 and 2070 Max Q variants. The chip is so cut down that it doesn’t warrant the exorbitant price to pay. Couple that with limited use of Ray Tracing at this time, makes these laptops extremely hard to recommend.

We’d go so far as to say stay clear of all RTX laptops at this point, until the technology matures, due to its absurd price to performance value proposition.

With most laptop manufacturers looking to clear old stock of their non-RTX models like the previous gen GTX 1060 or 1070, we’d recommend those if you can find a good bargain. Make sure you drive a great bargain as laptop manufacturers will have no choice but to clear previous gen GTX 1060 and 1070s for the incoming yet to be released GTX (not RTX) cards!

We hope you like our little tech tidbits – we plan to have more of these in the future so if you like it do let us know!

Other resources:
GizmoSlipTech
Dave2D
RTX Comparisons
HardwareUnboxed