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

Solution 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...

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.