AMD has just quietly unveiled its newest laptop GPU, the Radeon RX 7800M, and despite it having specs that should make anyone interested in a gaming laptop sit up and pay attention, AMD apparently didn’t tell anyone. Instead, the new AMD gaming laptop GPU just appeared on its website.
The best gaming laptops live and die by their choice of GPU, with frame rates, battery life, and system temperatures all being hugely influenced by this choice of component, and balancing all these factors remains a tricky act. That’s why, on the face of it, AMD‘s new chip would seem well-placed to be a tempting option.
The crucial factor here is the mid-range specs of the new GPU. While existing AMD laptop GPUs have either been a choice of the very powerful RX 7900M, based on the Navi 31 GPU die, or the much less powerful RX 7700 and RX 7600 variants using the Navi 33 die, the new RX 7800M sits nicely between these two.
Specifically, while the Navi 31 chip can house up to 72 compute units (CUs) and the Navi 33 chip can house up to 32 CUs, the new Navi 32 houses 60 CUs. That should mean it can offer a lot more performance than the likes of the RX 7700M XT and RX 7600M without needing quite such a bulky chassis as RX 7900M laptops.
What’s more, recent leaks of the RX 7800M performance have shown that it can out-pace the laptop Nvidia RTX 4070, which is a hugely popular choice for mid-size laptops, such as the Alienware M16 R2 that tops our best laptop chart.
That said, the total graphics power (TGP) of the chip is 180W, which is the same as the lower 180-200W range of the RX 7900M, so this is still a GPU that will require plenty of cooling power. In comparison, the RX 7600M XT is rated to just 75-120W TGP. Still, we would hope laptop manufacturers could find a way of making some machines that are slightly more portable, power-sipping, and cooler using this new GPU.
Looking at its other stats the RX 7800M’s game frequency clock speed is rated to 2,145MHz, which compares to 2,090MHz for the RX 7900M and 2,456MHz for the RX 7600M XT. The GPU is also equipped with a healthy 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is a marked step up from the 8GB of lower-tier GPUs but below the 16GB of the RX 7900M.
As ever with laptop GPUs, it won’t be until we can actually test this new GPU in a finished laptop that we’ll truly get a sense of whether it strikes that ideal balance. In the meantime, you can find out what we make of AMD’s most recent GPU by reading our Radeon RX 7900 GRE review, which is one of our favorites of its lineup.