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Nvidia’s RTX 4090 laptop GPU was unveiled at CES 2023, but if you want this powerful graphics card, how much will it cost? The unsurprising answer is a small fortune, at the cost of an upgrade to the RTX 4090 on an XMG gaming laptop.
video cardz (opens in a new tab) spotted this in a YouTube video from Jarrod’sTech (opens in a new tab)prices are shown for the various RTX 40-series graphics card options buyers can choose from when purchasing XMG’s Neo 16, an incoming gaming laptop featuring the Intel Core i9-13900HX Raptor Lake processor (and a whole host of other high-end goodies).
The base Neo 16 model comes with the RTX 4060, priced at €2,199 (about $2,360, £1,940, AU$3,420). If you want to upgrade that to the RTX 4090, the cost is €1,687 (about $1,810, £1,490, AU$2,630).
XMG’s pricing for other Nvidia Lovelace GPUs is €375 (around $400, £330, AU$580) for the RTX 4070, but the RTX 4080 is priced at €1,050 (around $1,130, AU$930). £, AU$1,640).
The Neo 16 and other RTX 40 series laptops will be released in February.
Analysis: Pushing the boundaries of pricing (again)
Nvidia’s newly revealed GPUs are expensive you say? Well, who would have thought…
Of course, the fact that the RTX 4090 is expensive in its laptop incarnation comes as no shock, and again looking at the desktop price, the RTX 4080 also being a big financial ask is just as predictable.
Considering the total cost of the RTX 4090 based on XMG’s price, the upgrade cost is almost $1,700 as mentioned, but for the total theoretical price, you also have to consider that you’re already paying the RTX 4060 in the entry-level model price tag – so we can lock it on the top.
That means the RTX 4090 laptop GPU should be closer to two thousand dollars, and that’s about the asking price for an RTX 4090 desktop (from major German retailer MindFactory, at the time of writing). So one way to look at this is that the laptop version of this GPU is just as expensive as the desktop incarnation’s exorbitant price tag.
And sure enough, the laptop’s take on Lovelace’s flagship isn’t quite as capable as the desktop card – it draws a lot less power, of course, at 150W TGP (plus a 25W dynamic boost) – but what you’re paying for here is the ability to put as much power as possible into a relatively small package (a laptop chassis).
Still, the question remains: do you really want to shell out that much for a laptop graphics card? One that has the same CUDA core count as the desktop RTX 4080, and likely similar performance to that card (best case scenario, maybe a bit slower overall). You can bet there are people out there already looking for their wallets, though…
