Nvidia’s Max-Q Will Make Your Gaming Laptops Incredibly Slim

Most gaming laptops are bulky beasts, but soon that may no longer be the case. Today at its press conference at Computex, Nvidia announced its new design approach, Max-Q, which is meant to make gaming laptops thinner, faster and quieter. You’ll be able to find Max-Q designed laptops with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs from major vendors starting on June 27th.

The goal was to make gaming notebooks that are up to 3 times thinner with 3 times more performance than existing laptops. Now, they can be as slim as 0.7-inches, Nvidia says, with up to 70 percent more performance than before. These laptops will come from manufacturers including Acer, Alienware, Asus, Clevo, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, Maingear, MSI, Origin and more. This is all still based on Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, also known as the 10-series GPUs. But now, it’s all precision engineered from the laptop down to the electrical components to make sure everything is as efficient as possible.

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Those optimizations include low-voltage clock curves for cards like the GTX 1080 to squeeze out performance while reducing power; better Game Ready drivers to increase efficiency and thermal solutions for laptops to keep them cooler, allowing for higher gaming performance. Gaming laptops designed for Max-Q are are ready for anything GeForce related from G-Sync screens to VR and 4K gaming.

Earlier, Nvidia showed us some laptops from MSI, Clevo and Asus that used Max-Q, and I was wowed by just how thin these notebooks were. They still maintained all of the ports I expected and played games like Tekken 7, Mass Effect Andromeda at Overwatch at high frame rates with crisp graphics. We can’t wait to test them when they show up.

Additionally, Nvidia announced its new WhisperMode tech, which lets laptops run more quietly while playing games. It configures graphics settings and frame rates to favor power efficiency, which should make laptops, well, whisper quiet. All Pascal-based laptops will get this update soon via a software update in GeForce Experience.

Photos: Andrew E. Freedman / Laptop Mag