Friday, March 23rd 2018
NVIDIA Sneaks Less Powerful GeForce MX150 Variant Into Ultrabooks
NVIDIA quietly launched the GeForce MX150 mobile GPU in May of last year. The team at Notebookcheck discovered that there are actually two variants of the GeForce MX150 in the wild - the standard 1D10 variant and the much slower 1D12 variant. Normally, this wouldn't raise any alarms. However, neither NVIDIA or the manufacturer distinguish the two variants from each other. Buyers who purchase an ultrabook or notebook with a GeForce MX150 are basically playing the lottery. They have no idea which variant is inside the product until they run an utility like GPU-Z to find out. But just how significant is the performance difference between the two variants? Let's look at Notebookcheck's findings.
Starting with the GeForce MX150's specifications, the standard 1D10 variant has a 1469 MHz core clock, 1532 MHz boost clock, and 1502 MHz memory clock. Notebookcheck first saw this variant in the MSI PL62 and Asus Zenbook UX430UN. They later discovered the underclocked 1D12 variant in the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S, ZenBook 13 UX331UN, Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air 13.3, HP Envy 13, and ZenBook UX331UA notebooks. The 1D12 variant has a 937 MHz core clock, 1038 MHz boost clock, and 1253 MHZ memory clock. Right off the bat, that's a 36 percent reduction in the core clock alone. According to the 3DMark and 3DMark 11 tests, consumers can expect anywhere from a 20 to 25 percent performance hit with the less powerful variant. The charts don't lie. Of the 13 notebooks tested by Notebookcheck, the five models equipped with the 1D12 variant of the GeForce MX150 are at the bottom of the list. Nvidia's move to sneak the 1D12 variant into thin and light notebooks was probably to meet the 10W TDP envelope as opposed to the original variant's 25W. Luckily, the 1D12 variant has only appeared in 13-inch notebooks.
Source:
Notebookcheck
Starting with the GeForce MX150's specifications, the standard 1D10 variant has a 1469 MHz core clock, 1532 MHz boost clock, and 1502 MHz memory clock. Notebookcheck first saw this variant in the MSI PL62 and Asus Zenbook UX430UN. They later discovered the underclocked 1D12 variant in the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S, ZenBook 13 UX331UN, Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air 13.3, HP Envy 13, and ZenBook UX331UA notebooks. The 1D12 variant has a 937 MHz core clock, 1038 MHz boost clock, and 1253 MHZ memory clock. Right off the bat, that's a 36 percent reduction in the core clock alone. According to the 3DMark and 3DMark 11 tests, consumers can expect anywhere from a 20 to 25 percent performance hit with the less powerful variant. The charts don't lie. Of the 13 notebooks tested by Notebookcheck, the five models equipped with the 1D12 variant of the GeForce MX150 are at the bottom of the list. Nvidia's move to sneak the 1D12 variant into thin and light notebooks was probably to meet the 10W TDP envelope as opposed to the original variant's 25W. Luckily, the 1D12 variant has only appeared in 13-inch notebooks.
95 Comments on NVIDIA Sneaks Less Powerful GeForce MX150 Variant Into Ultrabooks
MX110/130 are old Maxwell cards, only MX150 is Pascal.
1d10 and 1d12 can go head to head...
Talking a 950 to 1330mhz oc get a laptop cooler it will be fine
stock clock 1d12 for this OEM (1d12) is the low model
www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/details/69rwr
I mean, the Lenovo Ideapad 320S-13IKB that everyone is point to to show how bad the performance gap is between the High MX150 and the Low MX150? Yeah, in the review that Notebookcheck got those performance number from, the CPU throttled to 1.5GHz during testing and the GPU throttled to 520MHz! So set the clocks to whatever you want, it ain't going to do a darn thing.
That laptop also isn't not representitive of the actual performance of the Lower MX150. The laptop just throttles so bad because of heat, and that is on Lenovo for their absolute shit cooling design, not nVidia's fault.
The same thing is true with the HP Envy 13-ad006ng, the GPU doesn't actually thermal throttle, but the CPU does. The CPU throttles to 1.4GHz, but the GPU doesn't mange to stay at its boost clock and runs at 975MHz.
The Zenbook UX3311UA? Same, GPU throttles to 800MHz.
All these bad scores are on laptops that are already hitting their thermal limit. And that is why the sores are so bad, the fact that they have a weaker version of the MX150 actually doesn't matter, and overclocking it won't help either since they are already automatically lowering the clocks because of heat.
it took comparing the specs on the nvidia site to the OEM/AIBs to know what you were getting; a really PITA.
Sure, if they put it in a laptop that could handle it, it could be overclocked to match the higher one.
Just look at the full size discrete cards that are used in mITX builds. They are set on a small board with a single fan. How do they handle the reduced thermal capacity? They reduce clocks. However, the card still has the ability to use the full resources of said card.
On the other hand I just bought an Asus ultrabook, UX430UN, it's 14" screen in a 13" dimension, 1.6 cm thin and weighs 1.25 kg with an i5-8250U which by the way has 4 cores 8 threads. Inside there's an MX150, the "genuine" one. Problem is it throttles at 73 C which is set in stone by Asus, I don't really blame them, the laptop has no cooling grills underneath, they are tiny and placed under the hinge of the screen plus only one fan cooling both the CPU and the GPU. That's their design choices, the notebook looks and feels great otherwise. In any way, shape or form this ultrabook is not marketed or intended for gaming. Sure you can have more fun than with the integrated Intel graphics but the real benefit from the MX150 is if you are doing some video editing and similar stuff. In such a small ultraportable form factor I would have preferred a factory underclocked GPU which can sustain lower FPS but without stutter than a more powerful one which can't be used to its full potential.
granted this is a 15in laptop but incredible thin and a huge amount of power in such a tiny body. 25W TDP CPU plus 50 watt GPU?
This is the cooling on the ASUS UX331UA:
#notmydedicatedgpu
I bet these are only overheating because some retard never gave it 1 inch of space to breath. My CPU over heats at 10-15 watts without being propped up. If it gets 1-2cm of space it runs 25W TDP perfectly fine. The GPU rusn even cooler since its a larger die.
N17S-LG-A1 // 936 - 1037 MHz // 10 Watt TDP
If it was me on the naming board at Nvidia it'd be MX150 and MX150LV :)
edit: or perhaps MX150 Max-Q, just to follow the current schema.
and btw that 4x times better is for photo and video editing. So probably faster because of nvenc, which does not depend on gpu clock). Granted they should be more transparent about this, like making clear that tdp is configurable and performance will be affected. And yeah best way is to make it clear by naming. But at least they are both gp108, not like they used to be wholly different generation chips with same name on low end.Edit. Ahh there's 4x for gaming on specs page. Overall very vague specs for the card.