Racing and gaming are a match made in heaven. Franchises like Sony’s GranTurismo and Microsoft’s Forza are some of the proof. MSI is bringing the two categories together yet again with a special collaboration with luxury high-performance brand, Mercedes-AMG Motorsports. The new partnership will see a new line of co-branded laptops from MSI. The new MSI Mercedes-AMG Motorsport Stealth 16 and MSI Mercedes-AMG Motorsport Stealth 18 were on display at COMPUTEX 2024.
The design of the Stealth 18 is a collaborative effort between MSI and Mercedes-AMG’s design teams. This fusion of aesthetics embodies the spirit of high performance. The palm rest area features a prominent AMG pattern, exclusive metal nameplates from both brands adorn the chassis, and the Mercedes-AMG Motorsport logo is prominently displayed. Combined with a lightweight magnesium-aluminum alloy body, these elements create a sophisticated and powerful visual experience.
The performance of the Stealth 18 lives up to the legacy of the Mercedes-AMG GT2 factory race car. It boasts the powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. This combination is further complemented by a large area vapor chamber cooling system. This powerhouse configuration ensures smooth gameplay and the ability to dominate the digital battlefield, just like the Mercedes-AMG GT2 dominates the racetrack.
Pricing & Availability
Specific pricing and availability information for the limited-edition Stealth 18 and upgraded Stealth 16 Mercedes-AMG Motorsport laptops will be revealed soon.
NVIDIA released their GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti not too long ago. No luck on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 currently. Still, the two desktop class GPUs will be some of the most popular GPUs that NVIDIA will produce at this time. In that sense, you will find plenty of desktops built in 2023 coming with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 over the super high-end RTX 4090.
While it is uncommon, white PC builds can look sleek. We like that great white colour themed builds can look very clean and easily stands out in your room. It also automatically brightens your gaming environment. Pair it to decent RGBs and you have yourself an Instagram worthy build.
The thing is, if you have a white colour themed build, you are hard-pressed to upgrade it. Most modern GPUs do not come in any other colour than black. For the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, you do not have much of an option. You might be pleased to know that MSI is going to solve that upgrade problem for you. They already have the GAMING TRIO WHITE series GPUs. Now, they have even an even more powerful option for you.
Welcome to the GAMING X TRIO WHITE series GPUs from MSI. Ironically, there are currently only two GPUs within the series currently. You have a choice between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.
This is not MSI’s first GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs. They have already made the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GPUs. Unlike some of their other cards though, the two NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs clad in white shrouds and triple fans are pretty standard in terms of specs.
They are still PCIe Gen 4 GPUs, so you want to make sure your motherboard can support it, to get the most out of the GPUs. The 9,728 CUDA cores found on the RTX 4080 variant clocks in at 2,610 MHz while the 7,680 CUDA cores from the RTX 4070 Ti clocks in at 2,760 MHz, both slightly higher than the standard GAMING TRIO WHITE GPUs. As the naming convention suggests, the RTX 3080 comes with 16GB of GDDR6X memory and the RTX 4070 Ti comes with 12GB of GDDR6X memory. They still draw up to 320W and 285W respectively.
The cooler is a large heatsink that is cooled by three TORX Fan 5.0 with rims that allows for more focused air flow for even more effective cooling on the GPU. The nickel-plated copper baseplate sitting right on top of the GPU chiplet is designed for even better heat dissipation and distribution from the GPU to the heatsinks for even more effective cooling. The GPUs even feature Dual BIOS for either a ‘quite’ operation, or extract maximum ‘performance’ from the GPU at the cost of noise. The metal backplate is a snazzy mix of frosty white and silver colour combination that not only reinforces the board, passively cools the back of the board, but also adds some flavour to your all-white build.
There is RGB, yes. They call it the Mystic Light and it sits on the shroud of the GPU. It syncs with your PC and other RGB arrays via Mystic Light Sync and Ambient Link. The GPU even comes with a matching support bracket for the GPUs, since these new GPUs are rather hefty.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series, which they fondly refer to as the Ampere architecture processors, were rather potent. At its introduction, it presented the largest generation leap in performance from its predecessors. There were a lot of excitement for the Ampere built GPUs because of the generational gap presented between it, and the older GeForce RTX 20 series GPUs. Then there is the GeForce RTX 40 series that was just introduced by Jensen Huang last night.
NVIDIA calls it the Ada Lovelace, and it builds upon the technologies presented in its predecessor, the Ampere platform. It is even more capable in its real-time ray tracing functions. It also packs enough power to run an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm of its own for 3D rendering and processing. That also means this time, AI is involved in rendering the pixels you see on your display.
2X Performance
First up, you want to know how much faster the new RTX 40 series is compared to the RTX 30 series. In terms of ray tracing performance, the RTX40 is capable of up to 191 teraflops, nearly threefold of its predecessor. Its tensor cores are also capable of up to 1.32 petaflops, about five times the previous generation. But it is not just 3D rendering and ray tracing the gets the performance bump, you also get twice more NVENC decoders that allows the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series to half video workload times.
How NVIDIA achieved these numbers is a little technical, so we might have to explore that in a different story. In short though, it is not like NVIDIA slapped twice more cores into their chip. They did put more cores into their processing chip, but they have also improved their RT cores with 4nm architectures (hence Ada Lovelace architecture). That results in an improved energy and thermal efficiency of their chips in their GPUs which also means they can push their cores even more than before. That also means that ray tracing performance is doubled over whatever that came before. Thanks to the new Micro-Mesh Engine, the new cores can also generate textures in greater detail than ever before without taking up performance and storage resources.
DLSS 3.0
DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), we think, was a rather clever technology when it was introduced. While plenty of electronic giants in the home entertainment industry spoke at lengths about how upscaling is the future of television, NVIDIA took it to the next level with DLSS in gaming. You could, for example, play your games in 4K resolution while the GPU only needs to render the graphics in 1080p Full HD, for example. DLSS 2.0 was a major upgrade to the clever feature and made DLSS properly good and reliable. DLSS 3.0 make DLSS a must have feature.
Where the previous iterations of DLSS lack is speed. While DLSS 2.0 was fast, it lagged behind when you compare it to playing games at native resolution. The AI still must take its time to render each texture from each frame and upscale them to whatever higher resolution you want your games to play in. DLSS 3.0 allows the GPU to now render entire frames for an improved gaming experience, much faster than before. This is thanks to a rather powerful and clever neural engine packed into the GPU.
Source: NVIDIA
2X Video Rendering
Like we pointed out earlier, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 is not just made for gaming. It is a powerful GPU made for the modern content creator too. For 3D artists, the added power and improved DLSS 3.0 makes rendering scenes and graphics on-site much faster than before. Ray tracing is much more accurate than before as well, allowing textures to be rendered more accurately and more lifelike over previous generation GPUS, and all of it can be done in real time, cutting production times.
Thanks to the inclusion of two eighth generation AV1 encoder, video editing suites gets an extra boost in power. That also means smoother real time rendering and scrubbing. It also means that videos gets rendered twice as fast now.
NVIDIA Broadcast also benefited from the dual encoders. Partners now have access to features like Face Expression Estimation, Eye Contact, and even more realistic Virtual Backgrounds. That also means you get better, more interactive video calls, or even better streaming graphics.
Introducing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080
Source: NVIDIA
For now, NVIDIA has only introduced the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 and high-end GeForce RTX 4080. They say that the GeForce RTX 4090 is about twice as fast as the RTX 3090 Ti while maintaining the same TDP at 450W. There are 76 billion transistors and 16,384 CUDA cores you can find on the silicon fitted on the flagship GPU. It is fitted with 24GB of the latest, fastest GDDR6X memory too.
The GeForce RTX 4080 packs up to 9,728 CUDA cores and up to 16GB of GDDR6S memory. There is also a 12GB edition with 7,680 CUDA cores and 12GB in GDDR6X memory. They say that the 16GB variant is twice more powerful than the current GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and more powerful than the current GeForce RTX 3090 Ti while maintaining a lower power consumption.
Price and Availability
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 will be available in select regions from the 12th of October 2022 onward. Prices will start at US$ 1,599, US$ 100 more than the RTX 3090 when it was launched. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB variant will retail for US$ 1,199 while the 12GB edition will go for US$ 899. Both NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 variants will be available only in November 2022. For more information on the new GeForce RTX 40 series, you can visit NVIDIA’s website.
