AMD Radeon RX 7900M tests well as an RTX 4080 rival

The Dell Alienware m18 G1 gaming laptop featuring AMD’s fastest mobile GPU has been tested. The results show how Team Red is slowly but surely gaining performance with each passing generation. Better yet, the AMD Radeon RX 7900M is enough to take the fight to Nvidia’s portable RTX 4080.

Based on the Navi 31 GPU with 4,608 Stream Processors and 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, the RX 7900M is AMD’s fastest mobile GPU available.  With up to 180W TGP, this chip delivers performance equivalent to, and sometimes surpasses, Nvidia RTX 4080. On Dell’s machine, the GPU comes paired with a Ryzen 9 7945HX processor and 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM. The resulting frames are best suited to a 165Hz QHD display or a much faster 480Hz FHD panel.

Folks at Notebook Check took Dell’s new portable machine for a run and found that in many scenarios, AMD’s offering puts up a fight against the GeForce RTX 4080 Mobile.

At a 180W power configuration, the RX 7900M goes neck in neck with Nvidia’s RTX 4080 mobile at 175W in 3DMark Time Spy. To be exact, it achieves 19,434 points against 19,565, just short of the RTX 4080.

In tasks that probably interest most Alienware owners, the RX 7900M was a smidge slower than the Green Team offering. For example, in F1 22 at 1440p Ultra the Radeon delivered 70fps against 78, while going head-to-head in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p Ultra with 93fps against 95. AMD’s powerful Ryzen CPU also helps the RX 7900M stretch its legs.

Note that depending on CPU power budget, the RTX 4080 can lose to the RX 7900M with a non-negligible amount. However, when ray tracing joins the party, the RTX 4080 takes the cake.

All this performance unfortunately comes at the cost of power draw. The Ryzen 9 7945HX and Radeon RX 7900M combo empties the battery in only 85min instead of 260min using an Intel/Nvidia-based system.

Notebook Check said that idle power consumption was not optimised which contributes to the shorter battery life. For instance, without any active applications running, the laptop was gobbling as high as 101W. And that using the balanced power profile. Even in standby mode, the consumption was still high at 25W, where it should be around 2W. There’s always hope for a firmware update tweaking the power management to improve battery life, but we can’t recommend products on maybes.

If this level of performance tickles your fancy, you can get a system packing a Ryzen 9 7945HX plus Radeon RX 7900M for $2,499.