NVIDIA is giving finishing touches to its first GeForce RTX 20-series Mobility GPUs for notebooks, based on the "Turing" architecture, with product launches expected from Q1-2019. The company could debut the series with a high-end part first, the GeForce RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q. The rest of the lineup includes the RTX 2070 Mobility Max-Q, RTX 2060 Ti Mobility, RTX 2060 Mobility, RTX 2050 Ti Mobility, and RTX 2050 Mobility. What's interesting about this list is that NVIDIA is limiting the Max-Q design to its top-tier RTX 2080 Mobility and RTX 2070 Mobility parts.

Max-Q is an all-encompassing laptop thermal-design methodology, which allows gaming notebook designers to come up with thinner notebooks with higher performance. One of the key aspects is special Max-Q ready variants of the GPUs, which are probably binned to run the coolest, and least voltages. With a device ID 1eab, the RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q is based on the TU104M chip, while other SKUs could be carved from the TU106M or a chip even smaller. It's being reported that with this generation, NVIDIA is playing a more active role in helping its partners engineer their Max-Q notebooks, and helping them meet NVIDIA's strict Z-height minimums.

NVIDIA today announced official availability dates for what will forever be engraved in history as "the cheapest Turing" option - which contrary to what that might lead you to expect, isn't cheap at all. NVIDIA's RTX 2070 graphics card will be available starting October 17th, bringing the benefits of raytracing acceleration to a much lower price-point than the already-launched RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

That said, the RTX 2070 will still retail for $499 - a full $120 higher than NVIDIA's last-gen GTX 1070, and that's not counting what's being less-than-amicably called the "NVIDIA tax", which brings Founders' Editions pricing of the graphics cards up to $599, and allows AIB to increase pricing of their own designs up to that level - or higher. It's not a cheap option - especially considering how the RTX 2070 is now being built in the TU106 silicon, a smaller counterpart to the full-fledged TU104, and in contrast to the previous GTX 1070, which was built from the same chip as the GTX 1080).

ASUS has revealed their entire lineup, interpreting NVIDIA's RTX 2070 silicon (and its TU106 die, a first - remember that **70-class cards previously featured cut-down versions of the full NVIDIA chip). There aren't many surprised here - ASUS has already spent enough R&D in previous years so as to only need to minimally iterate on their designs for each new generation.

The ROG Strix graphics cards sit at the top of the heap, featuring the company's DirectCU III cooling tech (triple fan) in a 2.5-slot design. RGB lighting and dual BIOS support are par of the course by now, as are some of the other features - backplate and metal brace included. Connectivity-wise there are 2x HDMI 2.0b ports, 2x DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, and 1x USB Type-C port for VirtuaLink. The graphics card draws power from the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors and will be available in three versions (Gaming OC, Gaming Advanced, and Gaming) according to factory overclocks.

While working on GPU-Z support for NVIDIA's RTX 20-series graphics cards, we noticed something curious. Each GPU model has not one, but two device IDs assigned to it. A device ID is a unique identification that tells Windows which specific device is installed, so it can select and load the relevant driver software. It also tells the driver, which commands to send to the chip, as they vary between generations. Last but not least, the device ID can be used to enable or lock certain features, for example in the professional space. Two device IDs per GPU is very unusual. For example, all GTX 1080 Ti cards, whether reference or custom design, are marked as 1B06. Titan Xp on the other hand, which uses the same physical GPU, is marked as 1B02. NVIDIA has always used just one ID per SKU, no matter if custom-design, reference or Founders Edition.

We reached out to industry sources and confirmed that for Turing, NVIDIA is creating two device IDs per GPU to correspond to two different ASIC codes per GPU model (for example, TU102-300 and TU102-300-A for the RTX 2080 Ti). The Turing -300 variant is designated to be used on cards targeting the MSRP price point, while the 300-A variant is for use on custom-design, overclocked cards. Both are the same physical chip, just separated by binning, and pricing, which means NVIDIA pretests all GPUs and sorts them by properties such as overclocking potential, power efficiency, etc.