NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU made in desktop form, benched on 3DMark

NVIDIA's new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture has powered the GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, but the previous-gen Ampere GPUs in the form of the GeForce RTX 30 series graphics solutions are still in plenty of gaming laptops on the market... but now there's a new Laptop GPU made into a desktop GPU... weird.

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Now we're seeing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 being turned into a desktop RTX 3080 Ti, which has now been put through its paces in 3DMark testing in the form of the GeForce RTX 3080m Ti. Why are we seeing this now? Because something was created out of the cryptocurrency mining insanity, some companies -- mostly in Asian markets -- used mobile GPUs and re-purposed them into desktop graphics cards.

But why? Because the laptop graphics cards didn't have NVIDIA's anti-crypto Lite Hash Rate algorithm, they worked well for cryptocurrency mining operations. They were cheap to buy as well, and NVIDIA didn't put any stops in place to slow any of this down.

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Will we see these new GeForce RTX 3080m Ti graphics cards released into the wild? Well, we don't know yet... maybe? Probably not. They're not officially supported GPUs by NVIDIA and act more like a hybrid GPU, made to work on the desktop. There are many driver-related issues that you'd be faced with, and then functional drivers or even drivers that the sellers would provide can be filled with malware... not good, not good at all.

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How does the GeForce RTX 3080m Ti Laptop GPU on Desktop perform? Well, in terms of 3DMark scores:

3DMark TimeSpy benchmark:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile GPU on desktop: 12691
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU: 12963
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti desktop GPU: 19606

The power specification is also different here, with the desktop GeForce RTX 3080 Ti featuring a default Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 350W, while the Laptop GPU variants will see their Total Graphics Power (TGP) set to less than half of that, at 150W.

I wouldn't bother with any of these cards in reality, they're interesting and cool to look at and discuss, but please don't run out looking for one.