A 12 GB variant of the GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU appears to be imminent, based on a product listing that MSI published today alongside a wave of new gaming laptop announcements. The company's updated Crosshair 16 Max HX E2WGXK specifically references an "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU 12GB GDDR7," a configuration that Nvidia has not officially acknowledged. The current RTX 5070 laptop ships with 8 GB of GDDR7, so a bump to 12 GB would represent a significant upgrade for anyone running VRAM-hungry workloads or games with high-resolution texture packs.
MSI's listing pairs the 12 GB RTX 5070 with Intel's latest Arrow Lake mobile processors, including the Core Ultra 7 251HX, Core Ultra 9 275HX, and a new Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus. The Crosshair 16 Max sits within a broader refresh that spans MSI's Cyborg, Crosshair, Raider, and Titan lineups, all combining RTX 50 series GPUs with various Intel Arrow Lake and Raptor Lake chips. Existing Crosshair 16 Max models currently pair 8 GB versions of the RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 with similar processors. For Linux users, the RTX 50-series Blackwell architecture marks a notable shift in Nvidia's driver strategy: the company has fully transitioned Blackwell GPUs to its open-source kernel modules, with the RTX 5070 Laptop GPU listed among the supported devices and the proprietary driver branch no longer applicable to Blackwell hardware. Phoronix's benchmarks of the desktop RTX 5070 (which also ships with 12 GB GDDR7) under driver 570 showed strong gaming and CUDA compute performance on Linux, offering a useful reference point for open-source users considering the upcoming laptop variant.
MSI has not disclosed pricing or a release date for the 12 GB equipped Crosshair 16 Max, and Nvidia itself has yet to make any formal announcement about the upgraded GPU. Given that a laptop OEM is already listing the part by name, an official reveal from Nvidia likely is not far off.
