Recently it was discovered that Dell has used a cut-down graphics card in their m15 R5 laptop where 10% of CUDA cores are disabled.
It wasn’t a mistake but Dell’s intentional decision. They decided to limit the performance of their Ryzen 5000 series-based Alienware m15 R5 system. It is uncommon to see this in a gaming laptop considering the flexibility NVIDIA offers to laptop manufacturers in terms of selecting graphic card SKU and the enabled maximum TGP.
Jarrod’s tech, who is currently using the laptop, received a confirmation from Dell. The company revealed that the engineering team intentionally made the decision after ‘careful testing and design choices. They also confirmed that they might enable the extra cores in the future, which makes the decision senseless in the first place.
NVIDIA has pushed laptop manufacturers to display TGP variants on their product pages. The implementation took months, but now many manufacturers display detailed information on TGP and clock speeds.
The Dell Alienware division is an exception. They have never revealed the true specification of the RTX 3070 used. The web page lacks information on TGP, clock speeds, and the disabled CUDA core count.
As per Jarrod’s tech testing, Dell’s disabled RTX 3070 offers the worst performance compared to other variants.
Dell’s intentional decision to disable CUDA cores on RTX 3070 Laptop GPU has raised various concerns considering that it will be present in Alienware m15 R4 and upcoming R6 laptop. Both of them are based on Intel chipset.
Update:
Tom’s Hardware approached Dell for clarification. It is a mistake that will be corrected by mid-June.