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New Gaming Laptops: Nvidia 5080, 5090 and Intel Arrow Lake 275HX
March 31, 2025
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RTX 5090 & 5080 - Is It Worth It?
Summary
Here are the highlights of our findings on these new gaming laptops. For our full review with Gamer's Nexus, check out the YouTube video linked on this article.
Table of contents:
Summary: A Step Forward, but Not a Huge One
First, let's take a look at how Intel and Nvidia stacked up against their prior generations in laptops. This is comparing the older i9-14900HX CPU and RTX 4090 GPU to the newest Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and RTX 5090 GPU. We used both the XMG Neo 16 and Strix Scar 18 to test the older hardware, as they perform very similarly. Both of these laptops were pitted against the newest XMG Neo 16 with the updated hardware.
As you can see above, a lot of these improvements were incremental for both Intel and Nvidia in isolated benchmarks. Considering many of these new laptops are seeing a price increase of 10-15%, you're getting about the same performance per dollar for a variety of representative tasks outside of gaming.
You see a bit more gains in benchmarks from the 4080 to the 5080, shown here.
Efficiency is Very Improved
Something the benchmarks don't show, however, is how much more efficient Intel's new chip is than their prior one. This is not surprising as we saw a similar shift in Arrow Lake for desktop, but it becomes much more relevant with the limited power supply in this form factor. Here is a chart showing Cinebench performance by power draw for different chips currently available from Intel, AMD, and even Apple.
Apple always keeps the efficiency crown, but Intel still does well here, especially at lower power draws below 90 watts. We see a 37% increase in performance from the i9-14900HX to the 275HX around 70 watts. This graph helps us answer the question of why the real world gaming gains are so much higher than everything else. The CPU doesn't require as much power to perform well, which means the GPU is able to run at full bore without hindering CPU performance as much.
We have not yet received a laptop with AMD's competitor to the 275HX, the 9955HX3D, but we are meant to very soon. Stay tuned for that.
Real World Gaming Results
In these real world gaming tests, we played a repeatable story section or quest from these games, or sometimes a basic multiplayer mode like "Zero Build: Battle Royale" in Fortnite. Keep in mind that gaming like this is somewhat unpredictable compared to benchmarks, but there is a trend that starts to emerge where the 1% lows are much improved.
All three of the above captures show us a few things, not the least of which is the fact that the 4080 and 4090 laptops perform quite similar to each other. The major takeaway is that your FPS improves with these new laptops, yes, but your 1% lows are much better. Where this did not hold true, however, was in Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. Here, we saw a worse performance from the new hardware. Again, real gaming is unpredictable and this game or the Nvidia drivers could need an update before we see any improvements. Or, it's very possible the game you want to play may simply not see better performance due to the way it's been developed, which engine it runs on, etc. We still have more testing to do, and we certainly can't claim that these increases are always present.
Conclusion
Overall, the performance gains of this new hardware in isolation are pretty incremental and a bit disappointing. As a total package in these laptops, however, we are seeing some positive trends in our captured FPS numbers that we'd like to flesh out more in our coming reviews. Either way, the MSRP of some of these laptops with the new hardware is pretty atrocious when you realize you could buy a desktop AND a laptop for the same price.
We feel that finding last year's model on sale instead is a very valid choice here, and we hope our website can help you do that. Keep an eye on our gaming laptop list where we will be tracking good deals on the new or old laptops. Thanks for reading and we will catch you later!
