The AMD Radeon RX 7900M has been tested in the upcoming Alienware m18 R1 gaming laptop and looks to be a promising alternative. For some years now gaming laptops have primarily only had one choice when it comes to the top of the product stack with NVIDIA GPUs but that could be changing soon. The AMD Radeon RX 7900M appears to be a strong competitor to NVIDIA’s mobile GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, which uses a version of the same AD104 die inside the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. With 16 GB GDDR6 vs. 12 GB GDDR6, it has 33% more memory, and depending on the configuration, has a TDP of up to 180W vs up to 175W (including +25 Watt dynamic boost) of the mobile RTX 4080. Notebookcheck pitted the two against each other in its review of the new gaming laptop.
Alienware m18 R1 AMD Basic Specs (as tested):
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX 16 x 2.5 – 5.4 GHz, 159 W PL2 / Short Burst, 148 W PL1 / Sustained, Dragon Range-HX (Zen 4)
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 7900M (16 GB GDDR6, 2250 Mhz), Core: Clock 2000 MHz, 180 W TDP, 31.0.22023.1014, AMD SmartAccess Graphics
- Memory: 32 GB (2x 16), Samsung DDR5-5600, Timings (42-42-42-84)
- Display: 18″ 16:10, 1920 x 1200 @ 480 Hz, 100% DCI-P3, IPS
- Storage: Kioxia XG8 KXG80ZNV1T02, 1 TB
- Soundcard: AMD Zen – Audio Processor – HD Audio Controller
- Battery: 97 Wh Lithium-Polymer
- Price: $2,300
Benchmark scores:
The first scores are reported by AMD for the AMD Radeon RX 7900M in its 1440p testing while the second chart represents comparisons to similar gaming laptops at 1080p as seen by Notebookcheck. More gaming benchmarks for the AMD GPU can be found here. Ultimately the GPU with RNDA3 architecture fares well in rasterization and synthetic benchmarks but does fall behind in ray tracing. Currently, NVIDIA still dominates in this area, especially for games that support DLSS while AMD’s FSR 3 is still in an early adoption phase. It’s likely, however, that as more games add support for FSR 3 the AMD Radeon RX 7900M will climb further up the testing charts. The reviewer also notes that currently a lack of support for productivity software but that too could change down the road.
Per Notebookcheck:
“The 3DMark results translate well into actual gaming performance. Frame rates when testing Cyberpunk 2077 or F1 22 would be within single-digit percentage points of the mobile RTX 4080 in most scenarios. If enabling RT, however, the performance drop will still be steeper when compared to the competing Nvidia GPU. For example, our Alienware would run 15 and 35 percent slower than the mobile RTX 4080 when enabling RT in F1 22 and Cyberpunk 2077, respectively, even though the two GPUs are otherwise very close when RT is disabled.”
As AMD’s first Radeon x900 mobile GPU based on NAVI 31 it does make a positive 1st appearance but the reviewer also notes a number of concerning issues with the Alienware laptop. Issues ranged from unusual power consumption when idle, additional displays needing to be reset, and more. Hopefully, Alienware will get them sorted before the M18 R1 series launches so as to not tarnish what could otherwise be a good debut for the AMD Radeon RX 7900M. The M18 R1 series is also a rarity in that potential buyers have the option of mix-matching AMD and Intel CPUs with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. The tested unit was roughly $700 lower in cost compared to the RTX 4080 version and around $1200 lower than one with an RTX 4090.