Nvidia's new design to make gaming laptops much, much thinner

Razer has carved a niche out for itself by making gaming laptops that pack the power of a tank into a machine that has the shell of a MacBook Pro.

But slim and sexy will soon be the norm for gaming laptops if Nvidia has anything to say about it.

The company on Tuesday at Taipei's Computex announced Max-Q, a new design architecture that will allow companies to make gaming laptops that are three times thinner and three times more powerful than the current crop.

In practical terms, Nvidia says there'll soon be laptops as thin as a MacBook Air that are 70 percent more powerful than the current crop of gaming rigs.

How will this be achieved? The company says uber-powerful GPUs like its GeForce 1080 will fit into the machines, and that Max-Q design will use GPUs in a different, much more efficient way. Plus, drivers have been fine-tuned to boost system efficiency, and advanced thermal design will mean more power, less heat and less noise.

And this isn't some hypothetical future computer -- we'll start seeing Max-Q laptops kitted out with GeForce GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs from June 27, according to Nvidia. It said companies like Alienware, Asus and HP will be using the Max-Q design.

Check out the rest of CNET's Computex 2017 coverage here.