The Nvidia RTX 5070 could be the most popular laptop GPU of this generation

One of the best things about trade shows is seeing products in person, and perhaps playing around with a game or two.

But sometimes we get a peek behind the curtain.

At Computex in Taipei this week, Laptop Mag was able to do some brief benchmarking of an Nvidia RTX 5070 gaming laptop. While the RTX 5070 launched alongside the RTX 5080 and 5090 back in March, we haven’t gotten any review units in with Nvidia’s mid-range GPU.

So, MSI kindly offered up some time with the Crosshair 18 HX, a more budget-friendly MSI gaming rig, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU.

Here’s what we learned.

MSI Crosshair 18 HX benchmarks

MSI provided us with a few benchmarks, including the 3DMark suite and a handful of games, such as Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

While my former lab tester heart would have loved to skip the show floor and run the Crosshair through its paces on all available benchmarks, we didn’t have a whole day to dedicate to benchmarking. So I stuck to 3DMark Time Spy and Cyberpunk 2077.

The Crosshair 18 HX scored a respectable 13,974 on Time Spy.

As for Cyberpunk 2077, I decided to do a few test runs:

• One at our lab test settings (Ray-Tracing: Ultra preset, with DLSS/FSR off)
• One on the Ultra setting with Ray-Tracing off
• One Ray-Tracing: Ultra with DLSS 4 set to Balanced and with Frame Generation enabled

Obviously, we had a massive frame-rate delta between all three runs. At our lab settings, the RTX 5070's pure silicon power scraped by at 1600p with just 16.65 fps.

With Ray Tracing turned off, the Crosshair’s performance jumped up to 58.63.

Finally, leveraging all the power of the RTX 5070’s software support on the Ray-Tracing: Ultra preset at 1600p, the Crosshair benchmarked at 203.91fps.

RTX 5070 compared to RTX 5080

Compared to the RTX 5080 GPU in the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16, the Crosshair 18 HX obviously scores lower in benchmarks, but not by a lot.

We opted for the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 as the RTX 5080 comparison unit here. Both the Crosshair 18 and Aorus Master 16 feature Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPUs, which helps rule out any CPU differences in the benchmarking.

To get an idea of the generation-over-generation performance, we went with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, which features a similar Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor and RTX 4070 laptop GPU.

As you can see below, the RTX 5070 does have some impressive gen-on-gen uplift in 3DMark, but benchmarks about the same as the RTX 4070 in Cyberpunk 2077.

3DMark isn’t quite as demanding of a benchmark, which can explain some of the difference. However, these are just two of the tests our lab runs on all gaming laptops. We currently test with 6 different 3DMark benchmarks and more than 10 games.

Will the RTX 5070 be the most popular laptop GPU this gen?

We'll have to wait until we can bring a system into our testing lab to get a clearer picture of the RTX 5070’s performance.

But for an early look, the Crosshair’s 5070 performance looks promising.

The 18-inch Intel Core Ultra 9 RTX 5070 version is expected to retail at $1,699. That’s a promising amount of power for your dollar, which could make the RTX 5070 the most popular laptop GPU of this generation.

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