Are low profile GPUs better than laptop GPUs or are they same thing?

Question

I'm overwhelmed by the different types of GPUs. Recently I came to know that laptops have different GPUs that have lower power consumption and are smaller in size.

But no matter how much I tried to find, I couldn't find a photo of any GTX 1050 or 1080 or RTX GPU for laptop. All I could find photos were like this:

I'm not really sure what kind of GPUs are used in laptops. Especially in terms of how they look and what weight and size they have.

Then I came to know about some low profile GPUs. They use less power. A quick Google search for low profile GPU shows something like this:

And some are even smaller with one fan like:

Now I'm wondering if low profile GPUs are actually the GPUs used in laptops - I'm not really sure. Because I can't find any reference about this. Which lead me to ask this question.

But I can't find a photo or article about the (mainly physical) differences between desktop GPUs and laptop GPUs (and differences between laptop GPUs and low profile GPUs in case they are also different things).

I've researched and found that desktop GPUs in most cases perform better in gaming than laptop GPUs in the same series, given similar specifications. For example, an i5 (8th generation) desktop with a 1650 GPU gives better FPS in most games than an i5 laptop with a 1650 GPU.

So, are there any differences between low profile GPUs and laptop GPUs? If yes, for the same GPU (e.g. GTX 1080 or 1050 or 1660) series, which one is supposed to give better performance?

Answer 1

Low profile GPUs are not the same as mobile/laptop GPUs.

Low profile GPUs generally are designed around reducing the physical size of the GPU, and not necessarily efficiency (though that ends up being a requirement to achieve a low profile more often than not.)

Mobile/Laptop GPUs are designed around the use case of needing to have significantly less power consumption to reduce both battery consumption and heat output. There's a necessity to reduce the amount of heat generated from components within a tightly packaged laptop, and a GPU is going to be one of the largest sources of said heat. Even then there's issues with thermal throttling for many laptops when under heavy load for extended times.

With that in mind, these GPUs are made with different specs. If we look at NVIDIA's RTX 30 series, their desktop GPUs have difference specs compared to their laptop GPUs. Lets compare a few specs...

	RTX 3080 Desktop GPU	RTX 3080 Laptop GPU
NVIDIA CUDA® Cores	8704	6144
Standard Memory Configuration	10 GB GDDR6X	16 GB GDDR6 or 8 GB GDDR6
Required Power/TGP	320W	80 - 150+ W

These are just a few spec points, but it's really not worth digging much more as a majority of differences are based on what laptop you would end up comparing with as they vary significantly based on laptop manufacture. What should stand out is the massive gap in required power, but also the variation in CUDA cores. There's a significant variation in performance between the two inherently due to the lesser specs of the laptop GPU.

Bottom line, desktop GPUs are significantly better performance wise than their equivalently branded laptop GPUs.

*As a note, laptop GPUs aren't something you generally buy as an individual part due to it being packaged into the system in such a specific manner for laptop manufactures so realistically there isn't much decision to make here unless you're deciding between a desktop or laptop.