$3000 Workstation 16GB VRAM GPU in a laptop? Alienware Graphics Amplifier Review
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- Опубликовано: 25 сен 2024
- Like the best of both worlds? Need to game hard but need to go pro with professional graphics at work? I take a look at the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, an external graphics box to see if it can double up as a workstation converter to turn your gaming notebook into a professional powerhouse using either a Quadro or FirePro GPU.
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Most detailed review I've seen specifically pointing out the noise, GPU clearance issues, and well I'm still in the middle of the video so I'll let you know what else.
You should definitely throw in ArchiCAD and Revit for us architects, we really need someone doing this test and comparisons with or software; I'm not saying that you should do this with all of your videos, but when ever you showcase a rare and powerful card like this AMD or a Titan, etc... It would be much appreciated and you would certainly expand your viewer base.
Wonderful work.
Thank you.
I am looking to buy a new laptop for CAD should I buy an Alienware over a Precision, Zbook, or Thinkpad. Thanks, love your videos keep up the good work!
Finally a graphics pro review for Alienware graphics amplifier. AMD 16gig wow.. thank you
Paired this, my i9 Alienware M15r2 and a rtx 2070 super to do cad/cam design. Games well too.
This is one of the only other Alienware 17 owners. I have one. They are awesome.
Can you go into more depth with the amplifier? Thx , I love the content btw subscribed
The b roll looks awesome :D
10/10 production :D:D
Woohoo thanks! It's getting there, I'm a complete novice at photography so it'll get better over time, I need to make the lighting consistent and master the smooth panning, you can see in a few scenes it's a little jerky and as the sun went in the scene went darker at times which was really frustrating so I need to get some proper studio lights. And I need an anti-fluff solution too haha getting there though!
+TFI CAD Tips 🙂👏
+TFI CAD Tips how was your delivery I've seen nothing but negative experience when ppl order from them
You need a separate room with sound proofing for that amplifier alone
now am thinking of getting the graphics amplifier for my alienware 13
But the AGA can be more upgrade able since its quite a big box (yeah you can swap everything in the box but as it is the AGA is pretty good (except psu and fan roaring sound) but other then that it's good (the psu Power cord area is kinda small so the psu upgrade is a bit of a pain without modifying the plastic or the psu itself
Please,a question
Hi! I want to put MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X in my Alienware amplifier. I've seen in the video that it won't be possible to close the lid if i install this graphic card. Is it certain that it will still function adequately even if the lid is not closed properly? Thanks a lot!
professional applications that can use multiple GPUs could use the Graphics Amplifier GPU as well as and the onboard GPU for processing?
Can you disabled the Amplifier GPU buy switching the amplifier off, or does it have to be unplugged from the laptop to do that?
nice vid, just a quick question. can i use the mini pcie in the alienware 14(2013) for a diy egpu setup? i mean will it work like the alienware amplifier quality? i was planning to buy one of the latest vcards and do an egpu setup myself. thinking i can save more this way.
cheers :D
Dear TFI , KIndly guide I also have Alienware 17 R3, I Have GPA also and i have bought Strix Geforce GTX 1080TI card. But I have started playing COD Warzone and i can get good FPS
I'm frustrated how could this Alienware Amplifier hasn't compatible to connect with old Alienware such as MX model ??? They should make the connection for amplifier to AlienWare Mx mode so it would be still going strong with this eGPU
is the w9100 better than the wx7100 in terms of compute performance?
couldn't I hookup an egpu to my express card slot on my precision?
best review of this graphics amplifier. I want it for gaming with the same laptop. I understand this channel is for autodesk, do you know if this will help me with adobe PP ? I decode 4k video . thanks
what kind of driver problems did you face with quadro cards and aga?
review the core with same FirePro , comparison??
Thundbird 3? does it work with Solidworks
How much % of the card u can use using alienware garp adapter? İf u can use 50% of the card its good.
i have to guess that you were running all AMD and not Nvidia along side the AMD card.
so, i had a quadro M4000 and could not get it to run on the amplifier also couldn't get a k620 to run either, how did you get this to work?
Follow..
I wonder if it will work with an AMD Radeon PRO DUO, i know its a dual GPU card, but if it works it might be awesome for OCTANE renderer.
I don't think it will fit except if you want to let the amplifier cases stay open (and its massive)
i know it doesn't have workstation cards but maybe look at the MSI GT80s TITAN it has 2 DESKTOP GTX980s in sli in a laptop. albeit an 18 inch 1080p screen, but still lol.
Please can you confirm that drivers are available and you can install both Quadro and FirePro inside the graphic amplifier?
Follow, please
Top notch Review :D
I have the 17 r3 and just upgraded ram to 32gb. looking at the graphics amp and 2 1060 NVidia. I'm not sure if it is worth getting two of them since this pci express only runs at 4x. will it make a difference?
Two 1060's? You can't put two GPUs in the amplifier or use two amplifiers. At least you can't on the one I've got!
omg I am mistaken. had to look back and check. somewhere I was mislead with SLi capabilities. thanks , I know now. I picked a used G amp from craiglist $40. i already purchased 1060 . will use soon. :)
Hilarious and detailed review lmao!
Greets from Expert Elite - México.
does it work with the 480
I don't have a 480 but I don't see why not yea, there's nothing different about the 480 over other cards so it shouldn't have a problem
3:48 laughed so hard xD
Razer do a similar thing with the core stealth pretty sure that came to market first.
Ah got to that part of the video.
No this came out first
what is the track's name played at 03:52?
It's Dyalla Swain - What
thank you, great video.
What's the alice in wonderland track around 13:00?
+Alexanderxtc it's called Mad Hatter by Dyalla, I think it's only on SoundCloud
thx much, I'll look it up.
Someone try a quadro (rtx or ampere series) in the Aga?
This video is super super old, I think Alienware recently announced that they're totally discontinuining the AGA, pretty sure I heard that somewhere... maybe Thunderbolt 4 has passed their proprietary connector for efficiency and cost to produce
whats the music in the background
It's from an artist called Dyalla Swain, it's not on Spotify or anything like that, it's free music which I downloaded from the Soundcloud site he/she/they have
+TFI CAD Tips thank you so much
Awful (like pretty much any other eGPU in the market). But! that is with no doubt the best eGPU enclosure in the marked (Ready to use*)!!!!!!!!!!!! (Yes that works with everything on your pc, solidworks, games, CAD softwxares etc...).
The only good thing about the AlienwareGA is the "true" x4 PCIe. Other ePGUs use "thundebolt 3" which depending on the pc can be linked to one, two or 4 PCIe lanes. And even then the thunderbolt will share these lanes with other feeds like USBs or anything else you plug in like using a docking station. The performance of the AGA is ~10% higher than any other eGPU enclosure in the market.
other than that, the box is awfully ugly, Power supply is a shame, sounds like a jet engine. You can have better by 80 bucs.
If you have exprience with hardware and are looking for a more eficient use of that beefy GPU with Raytrace you want to buy, go for an EXP GDC Beast, plug on M.2 and something like a Corsair CXM series CX450M. Juste make sure to have a fitting laptop with a spare M.2 slot, some good build (Enough RAM and a good CPU (care for bottlenecking)). Just plug everything, drill a hole for the cable on the base of the laptop, install drivers (keep old ones) and use the graphics panel to choose which graphic card to use.
Then build your own case/enclosure with assis cooling, plex & rgb if you with, Graphic cards are already beautifull, don't shove it behind a austere encasement :D
So the performance was worse with the graphic amp? You showed all those other cards that wouldnt fit right, did you try them. Seems to me that you may be losing performance with the proprietary amp connection, but no way to verify unless you tested the card against a known baseline. I sure wouldn't want to buy either a firepro or GPU amp based on your results. Besides that, I missed the part where you tell us you need the onboard graphics card to provide the connection to the amp. what a waste.
You can't not have an onboard graphics card, it's a laptop, why did that need explained? There's always going to be an onboard GPU but it's disabled whilst the amp is in use so I've no idea what you're getting at there. Also at no point did I sell this video as being a "which GPU is best in the amp" test so I had no reason to test all the other cards and display findings, there is no known baseline for a scenario like this and I honestly couldn't care less if you don't want to buy the amp because I'm not selling it nor was this sponsored. Running a Quadro or FirePro in an amp allows a CAD professional to work on a supported hardware platform which in many cases is more important than performance.
There are plenty of laptops that don't use a dedicated graphics chip. The built in graphics in the newest CPU's like Intel 6700/6800's work well for 90% of the tasks that people use a laptop for (especially modelling programs that utilize multicore setups). For a Graphics professional that requires more display power, then just use a thunderbolt port and spend the money you wasted on a 970m for a real amp and use a 980 desktop or 1080 if needed. You get your support and you get BETTER PRICE/PERFORMANCE. YOUR USING THE 970M as a feedthough. What a waste of $$/ It would be different if they could be SLI'd .Secondly, your a twit - you wasted half the video showing us crappy performance with your beloved POS firepro, when you could have just said "I need it for support" You literally had no point and never made the case you replied with. Keep your day job firepro.
There are plenty of laptops that don't use a dedicated graphics chip, you're dead right. Except if you look at the title, this video is 100% entirely nothing more nothing less than a review on the Alienware Graphics Amplifier. Which can only be used with an Alienware laptop. All of which come with a GeForce 9 series GPU.
My day job is going very well though thanks, how's yours going?
If its a 100% review of the graphics amplifier, why doesn't the performance matter? The PROFESSIONAL, HIGH-END Graphics card YOU TESTED was thrashed by a lowly Mobile card in a laptop. That finding doesn't raise concerns with you? Or maybe about how the AMP and Interface may negatively impact the performance? Any 1st year engineer would establish a performance baseline of the firepro in order to establish the metrics of the amp UNDER supposed REVIEW. It is highly likely that the customer is not only paying for a 970m that is only used as a fancy serial pass-through, but is likely losing a significant % of performance somewhere along the way. If you had brought up any of these obvious questions, it would have vastly improved your "review" IMO. It seems to me that you missed this key point about the amp and may still be missing it.
No performance doesn't always matter. It sounds to me like your entire point here is hinged around your expectation that the professional card should always be better than a mobile GPU... that's not true, especially the 980M which is far from a lowly mobile GPU. Even a desktop GTX960 can outperform a Quadro M6000 in some CAD applications, especially in DX11 based modelling kernels like Inventor. I've shown what I needed to show, if you wanted to see something different, off you trot and do it yourself. And then you can see how frustrating it is to deal with people like yourself who pick holes at literally anything you come up with.
Wow so mush noise :(
poor kitty!
4k is not double 1080p, it's 4x.
I can't remember at what point I said that or what context it was, but 4k is double the pixels in the horizontal and vertical i.e. 1920 vs 3840 and 1080 vs 2160, in total yes that's 4x count across the entire image but I maybe meant double across the horizontal and vertical. If I said it was double the total pixels then yes that's incorrect and I'll annotate in a correction, cheers.
TFI Good video in general though. Something you may not have known about the graphics amplifier is that your GPU doesn't get full utilization of x16 PCI Express lanes. Depending on the laptop, you either get x4 or x8 lanes to the GPU in the Amplifier. Because it isn't getting 100% bandwidth, there'd be some performance increase by putting the GPU in an actual desktop. For example, I have an Alienware 13 R2 and it runs my GTX980 at only x4 PCI Express 3.0 lanes. As a result, it's only getting 1/4 of the total bandwidth it'd normally get it it were in an actual desktop, and so there's a significant performance hit. It's still more powerful than the laptop GPU though, so it's worth using it.
How do you monitor that though? I read up on as much info as I could prior to going live with the video, and the best I could find was official AW statements saying that there's no bottleneck on their proprietary cable whereas there is over thunderbolt using something like the Razer Core. It's difficult to do benchmarks as well as you've got to consider the mobile CPU which thermal throttles affecting the FPS in games and benchmarks. How do you get an accurate comparison between using a GPU in the amp vs using it in a desktop which is a totally different platform?
TFI Run GPU Z. It'll tell you the number of PCI Express lanes your card is running at. The amount of lanes that can be allocated to the amplifier is dependent on your CPU. My Alienware has an i7 6500u which is dual core, and can only allocate a maximum of 4 lanes to an addon card. Your laptop had an i7 6820HK I think?
ark.intel.com/products/88969/Intel-Core-i7-6820HK-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz
According to Intel, your card supports up to x16 lanes for an expansion card. Assuming your system isn't using any of those lanes for any other purpose (your NVME drive uses x4 lanes) then it should be able to give a full x16 lanes to the AMD W9100. With the NVME drive in the system, the most the CPU can give the GPU is x8. Depending on whether that GPU can actually use more than x8 lanes of bandwidth (to my knowledge, no GPU's fully utilize x16 lanes, but can probably use more than 8), the card may run at full performance, or a bit less than it should. If I ran it in my amplifier attached to my Alienware 13 R2, it'd only run at 4 lanes, and thus be bottlenecked.
As far as getting a legit comparison between how well a card will run in the Amplifier vs a desktop, yeah you're right it's difficult to compare since laptop CPU's are a fair amount slower than their desktop brethren. It'd also depend on what benchmarks you run (if they're CPU intensive vs GPU intensive) etc.
I play everything at 4k on mine via 1080ti.
AMD card was hitting 93 Celsius...yikes
LOL I have a alienware aurora R5 power supply fan it's so noisy...
My graphics amp is quiet
Nvidia Pascal gefroce GTX 1080 Ti laptops