Leaked ASUS Zephyrus And TUF Gaming Laptops Join GeForce RTX 30 Mobile GPU Brigade

It seems like NVIDIA is on the verge of announcing some new mobile GPUs perhaps, if recently leaks are any indication. It started yesterday when some Gigabyte Aero and Aorus laptops with unannounced GPUs leaked courtesy of @momomo_us on Twitter. Today the leaks keep on coming, and this time it's ASUS. A small army of Zephyrus and TUF Gaming notebooks has been spotted on South African retailer Pinnacle's website. 

At the top is GX551QR, which is a Zephyrus 15.6" notebook with an also-unannounced AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU, 32 GB of memory, a 1 TB SSD, and a supposed NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU with 16 GB of VRAM. That's a bit of a surprise to us considering desktop GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards only have 10 GB of VRAM. That points to a different memory bus configuration, most likely. It could also be that the rumored 20 GB desktop card will come sooner rather than later. A quick search for QX551QR on Google reveals additional listings on UK retailer Mercateo's website as well. Unfortunately neither listing has any photos, so we can't see what this system looks like.


The step-down model is pretty similar and bears the same GX551QR model number with a 15.6" display. This is another Zephyrus 15.6" notebook that retails the heretofore spectral Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and 32 GB of memory. The storage configuration has been changed to dual 512 GB SSDs, however, and the GPU is a purported GeForce RTX 3070 with 8 GB of VRAM. Unlike the GeForce RTX 3080 configuration above, that is the same amount of VRAM as the desktop cards. 

Third on our list is a Zephyrus 14. This one takes several hits to the specifications, as it has a Ryzen 9 5900 HS processor, just 16 GB of memory, and a 6 GB GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q GPU. The 1 TB SSD remains from the first configuration, however. Zephyrus 14 notebooks are surprisingly small while remaining spry for their size, as we discovered in our Zephyrus ROG G14 review. It's perhaps unsurprising that the smallest chassis would have the least-capable hardware, but it makes for an intriguing system nonetheless. 

The leaks, which can all be viewed on Pinnacle's page, haven't stopped yet, though, because there's a fourth option: ASUS's TUF Gaming FX516PM has an Intel Core i7-11370H processor, 16 GB of memory, a single 512 GB SSD, and another 6 GB GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. The Core i7-11370H has not come up before, but as it turns out that 11th-gen CPU made its debut on Geekbench a couple weeks ago. It's apparently a Tiger Lake quad-core CPU that can hit 4.8 GHz. The H in its name typically denotes higher-power processors than the U series, so it should have some legroom to work. Thanks to Tiger Lake's strong single-threaded performance, it should make for a speedy gaming CPU, too. 

These listings left us with more questions than answers: how many cores does a mobile Ryzen 9 5900 series CPU have? Why does the mobile GeForce RTX 3080 have more VRAM than the desktop model? Fortunately, at the rate these leaks seem to be hitting, we should get a lot of those answers soon. Hang tight, because we're sure that official announcements are right around the corner—maybe as soon as CES, or even beforehand.