That's what this is, just AMD.

Okay, sure, ASUS put it together,

so they get to put their logo on the lid.

But under the hood,

it's got an AMD Ryzen 5900 HX 8-core processor

an AMD Chipset and an AMD Radeon RX 6800M GPU

with an AMD chosen FreeSync premium panel

running at up to 300 Hertz.

Also it's got AMD smart access memory technology

allowing the CPU to access all of the GPU's memory

and AMD SmartShift technology

which dynamically allocates power between the CPU and GPU

depending on the load.

That's a lot of AMD.

But how does it all come together?

And can they truly make team red

a viable option for gamers on the go?

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(upbeat music)

- AMD's big message today is around

their AMD advantage design framework initiative.

Which is a technical way of saying that

while AMD doesn't appear to have

a formal certification process,

they will collaborate with laptop brands to ensure

that their product meets certain guidelines.

So a laptop branded this way should have a high-end

Zen 3 CPU and RDNA 2 mobile GPU,

support for AMD SmartShift

and smart access memory enabled by default,

A 144 Hertz IPS or OLED display with FreeSync premium

and DME storage, and over 10 hours of battery life

during video playback.

You can think of it kind of like

Intel's Ultrabook platform back in the day,

except for, it's for Tungus' gaming laptops instead.

And the ASUS G513 Advantage Edition

is one of the first laptops to roll out of the program.

Which is all fine and good,

but the big news here is like.. What?

A competitive high-end mobile AMD GPU.

Yup, this puppy packs a Radeon RX 6800M,

which would theoretically make this capable

of 4K 60 FPS gaming,

if we bought into the marketing.

You see, like Nvidia,

whose GeForce mobile GPUs are generally beefed-up versions

of a tier lower than their model number would suggest,

AMD is playing things relatively fast and loose

and their specs aren't quite the same

as their desktop namesakes.

So, on paper at least, the RX 6800M

with its 40 compute units is more comparable

to a desktop RX 6700 XT than to a desktop 6800.

And then, there's the RX 6700M and 6600M

with 36 and 28 compute units, respectively.

And neither of those look like anything we've seen

from AMD to date.

Probably because they didn't bother launching

the low-end desktop cards that they had planned

for those GPU cores because of the ongoing Silicon shortage.

Though AMD would neither confirm, nor deny.

The 6600M in particular looks a little anemic,

but then we've also seen the 6700 XT

perform surprisingly well on the desktop,

despite its compute unit deficit.

So, maybe there's more to the story.

And, there almost certainly is.

You might recall us mentioning that Nvidia's RTX 30 series

mobile GPU's are actually misleading in their own way.

The thing is, an RTX 3080

can have all the CUDA Cores in the world,

but if the clock speeds are limited

by a power or thermal constraint,

performance is going to suffer.

And the sheer number of laptops out there

with TDP's that were well below

what the 3080 needs to stretch its legs

created so much confusion in the marketplace

that Nvidia yielded and started amending

the rated TDP of the GPU to their laptop spec sheets.

So, then AMD might use lower tier chips

but they're also making a big deal

out of setting firmer power guidelines

by explicitly stating that the RX 6800M

for instance is 145 Watts and above.

Though, with that said,

what the heck is this up to nonsense

on the 6700M and the 6600M.

AMD please.

You can't just do better than Nvidia for one skew.

You gotta be consistently better.

Like, our quality products at ltdstore.com.

Got CPU shirts.

Now to be fair to AMD,

they're relying on implicit support

between their Ryzen 5000 series CPU's

and Radeon 6000M GPU's for SmartShift,

which allows for power and thermal budgets

to be dynamically allocated to the CPU or the GPU

depending on the load on each.

So, in a nutshell, what this could look like

is a CPU bound game, favoring the CPU

while a GPU bound game will pump more juice into the GPU.

So it's the same overall power and thermal output

but it gets divvied up wherever it makes

the biggest difference.

That makes sense.

And Nvidia actually has a similar technology

except it needs explicit support

from laptop manufacturers rather than just being a given.

That is a major advantage

of AMD being so vertically integrated.

Unfortunately though, we only have one

all AMD laptop here today

and it's equipped with the Radeon RX 6800M.

So, we can't dig any deeper into that for now.

In order to keep our testing simple,

we grabbed the ROG STRIX G733Q,

which is equipped with the same CPU

but with an RTX 3080 mobile GPU.

Now, bear in mind that this isn't a full in-depth review

of Radeon 6000M even.

We're to cover it in more detail later, so get subscribed.

But for now we want to taste the performance

and we want to see if AMD's numbers, hold water.

Now, Metro Exodus may be an older title now

but it just got an enhanced upgrade.

So it's a great candidate to test both rasterized

and ray traced performance.

At 1080P UltraP, the Radeon ends up neck and neck

with the RTX 3080.

While with ray traced global illumination enabled,

we're seeing Nvidia's more mature ray tracing cores

work their magic.

Still though, we're within about 13%

so, it's not like this is a catastrophic loss for team red.

It does get a little worse in the enhanced edition

but for an exploration heavy game like this,

it is still plenty playable,

something we couldn't have said about

at high-end AMD laptop.. Ever.

The faster paced Forza Horizon 4, meanwhile,

well, again, it's not a bad experience

but we're down as far as 25% slower in minimum FPS

versus Nvidia, which isn't really what we were expecting

given the strong rasterization performance we saw earlier.

As for a much lighter title,

CSGO, well, it provides Nvidia with another lead

but the difference is in the 10 to 18% range.

So, not game-changing, but certainly not terrible.

Of course, performance is only one part of the equation

and AMD is claiming that they have significantly

better performance characteristics

on battery than the competition.

So we pulled the power adapter

and set the laptops to performance mode to see what happens.

Again, Metro Exodus gives us pretty much

identical performance between AMD and Nvidia

in traditional rendering but the performance difference

when turning on ray tracings

seems to be much smaller than before.

As for the enhanced version,

which has ray tracing locked on,

Nvidia loses frames as expected

and AMD loses them harder.

Forza gives AMD a slightly better loss

than its previous twenty-five percent.

And again, it's still quite playable.

And the situation in CSGO actually

looks a little better for AMD on-battery than not.

Meaning that we might be seeing SmartShift

doing its thing here.

Though, it's still hardly a victory.

Now, to be clear we're not calling

AMD's performance claims BS,

we just have a very limited amount of time

to try to find games where they were actually able

to pull off an advantage.

And honestly, I am excited enough to see a return

to competition in this market

that it's easy to overlook some boards.

Moving on, this may be a gaming oriented laptop

with a gaming oriented GPU,

but you might sometimes want to do,

I don't know, rendering or something like that.

And for that, it looks like it's fine, but not amazing.

It consistently comes in around 60 to 80%

of Nvidia's results in standalone render benchmarks

and as for SPECviewperf, well,

we saw some hints that it might be a better match

than Nvidia for some professional workloads

with even performance in 3DS max and wins in medical

and Siemens NX.

Now, that energy score looks really bad,

but realistically you're not doing anything

like that on a laptop anyway.

Now, because our GeForce equipped STRIX G733Q

is a 17 inch laptop compared to a 15 inch,

so, presumably it has larger beefier coolers.

We're not able to read too much into these numbers

but AMD's thermals also seem to be well-controlled.

So maybe it's a pretty apples-to-apples comparison.

I mean, we didn't see temperatures higher than 77 degrees

at full load, which is pretty interesting

Given that this is 145 watt TDP GPU,

but that only drew 116 watts at peak.

Meanwhile, the RTX 3080 mobile variant

that it was up against was a 130 watt card,

but that drew over 140 watts peak.

This is likely down to Nvidia's opportunistic boost behavior

and explains why the thermal output was roughly the same.

Interestingly though,

AMD's core clocks were solid throughout.

So, it doesn't seem like it was limited in any way.

So, in conclusion, while power consumption looks good,

it's a little disappointing

that performance wasn't chart topping

next to Nvidia's best mobile GPU in our test suite.

With that said,

I don't think it's the real story here anyway.

The real story is that there is finally another contender

at the top end, and that means that you are more likely

to be able to find a laptop that fits your needs

in this seemingly endless chip shortage.

So, while past Linus and maybe future Linus

for that matter might say, don't bother with this.

Just buy GeForce.

Present Linus is more likely to say,

"Hey, look, they're objectively, not terrible,

even if they're not super competitive

and depending on the price you find them at

they may even be good bang for the buck."

So, there you have it.

The age of the all AMD gaming laptop is back.

Or, here for the first time ever.

(chuckles)

And I'm ready for it.

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