Asus may have accidentally leaked details about an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU coming to laptops. The GPU model is mentioned in the tech specs for one of Asus’s latest laptops, the TUF Dash F15, which went on sale last month.
The product’s web page originally listed a mysterious “GN20-P0” chip under the graphics options you could buy for the laptop. But on Friday, Twitter user “@momomo_us" noticed the tech specs had been updated to explicitly state the name RTX 3050 Ti.
Based on the web page, the 3050 Ti will feature 4GBs of GDDR6 RAM, which is down from the 6GBs found in the laptop-based RTX 3060.
Asus did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But if the 3050 Ti is real, the GPU will probably be packed in laptops under $1,000, opening the door for more affordable PC gaming with the latest graphics technology. Currently, the TUF Dash F15 with the RTX 3060 is being sold for $1,099 via Best Buy.
In January, Nvidia announced the first trio of RTX 3000 GPUs for laptops with the RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080. PC vendors including Alienware, Gigabyte, and Razer have all begun to incorporate them into their gaming laptops at prices from $1,000 to $2,000 plus.
The GPUs also provide an alternative for anyone struggling to buy the desktop graphics cards in the RTX 3000 series, which continue to sell out in minutes at all the major retailers.
However, if you decide to buy a laptop with an RTX 3000 GPU, we’d advise you to first check out reviews of the specific product model. PCMag recently tested the laptop-based RTX 3070, including on the Asus TUF Dash F15, and we noticed that performance can vary depending on how the GPU is implemented on the hardware. It's also important to note GPUs built for laptops usually pack less performance than the desktop versions.