Hardware & Technical New laptop

[Lestat]

Well, tomorrow I will get my new laptop and already upgrade it. Current build


8th Generation Intel i7-8750H (6-Core 2.2 GHz 9MB Cache, up to 4.1GHz w/ Turbo Boost), 16GB, DDR4,
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 OC with 8GB GDDR5
512GB PCIe M.2 Class 50 SSD
17.3-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) 120Hz TN+WVA Anti-Glare 400-nits NVIDIA G-SYNC and Tobii Eye-tracking built in.

Order a 2tb Hard drive. Mostly for videos But also looking forward to buying another 512 GB PCIe M.2 SSD drive.

In a few years, I am looking to buy an Alienware Accelerator and put a desktop GPU in it. To take over the laptop GPU.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Nice!

Enjoy your new machine - it puts my $3000 Razer Blade Pro to shame

 

[Lestat]

Nice!

Enjoy your new machine - it puts my $3000 Razer Blade Pro to shame

It was worth it. Old system 50 FPS space. The planet around 30 FPS or lower. Stations around 15 20 FPS.

Now it 115 FPS Space. Planets or Stations 90FPS. That Tobii eye tracker is also cool.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Be aware that the Amplifier only offers a PCI-Ex4 connection. You're looking at a 10-20% performance hit (by bandwidth limitation) on a GTX 1070.

In other words, by the time that your onboard GPU is starting to show its age, you won't gain anything by putting a current gen GPU into an Amplifier.

 

[Lestat]

Be aware that the Amplifier only offers a PCI-Ex4 connection. You're looking at a 10-20% performance hit (by bandwidth limitation) on a GTX 1070.

In other words, by the time that your onboard GPU is starting to show its age, you won't gain anything by putting a current gen GPU into an Amplifier.

If you have done any good research please post the URLs here. I still in the research part so any good info will be helpful. What I am seeing the Laptop CPU not the GPU is the bottleneck of mine research. We also have to note. This is not the Thunderbolt 3. Which share resources with the computer. I am looking at Alienware Amplifier two different setups. Two different plug that does the same thing.

Thunderbolt 3 Plug and play. Pro Con slower.

Alienware Amplifier You have to turn off the laptop before you plugin. But it takes over as GPU and disable the laptop GPU. A big Con but the pro it faster than Thunderbolt 3.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/5dgd0k/graphics_amp_vs_desktop_performance/

 

[the100thmonkey]

I have an Alienware 13 with an Amplifier. I have the R1 though, so that is heavily CPU-bound. E:D used to run fine on it, but performance has steadily decreased as more feaures have been added.

What I've always seen with the Amplifier is lots of people posting their impressions and very few benchmarks with hard numbers. There's an interesting PCI-E scaling review here, which looks at how a GTX 1080 scales on PCI-E x4, x8 and x16 on all the different versions (PCI-E 1.1-3.0). The take home is that PCI-E 3.0 x4 loses between 5-10% depending on the game. The writer states "[a]n interesting trend we noticed is that frame-rate losses are more pronounced at the lower 1920 x 1080 resolution rather than the higher Ultra HD resolution. This is due to the higher frame rate at the lower resolution, which requires more PCIe bandwidth. The frame rates in such cases, with the GTX 1080, are still too high for you to worry about. Perhaps it makes a difference for some if they're gaming on fast 144 Hz monitors." This is basically what's stopping me from ditching a desktop system completely and upgrading to the Alienware13-R3 or Alienware 15-R4 - I play on a 144Hz panel.

 

[Lestat]

I have an Alienware 13 with an Amplifier. I have the R1 though, so that is heavily CPU-bound. E:D used to run fine on it, but performance has steadily decreased as more features have been added.

One thing I did read on the reviews. Was the CPU could be a factor in gaming bottleneck with the Amplifier. We can look at your 13 R1 which I think has the i7 5500u Dual-core CPU. When a lot of games Now are are requiring Quad core.

What I've always seen with the Amplifier is lots of people posting their impressions and very few benchmarks with hard numbers. There's an interesting PCI-E scaling review here, which looks at how a GTX 1080 scales on PCI-E x4, x8 and x16 on all the different versions (PCI-E 1.1-3.0). The take home is that PCI-E 3.0 x4 loses between 5-10% depending on the game. The writer states "[a]n interesting trend we noticed is that frame-rate losses are more pronounced at the lower 1920 x 1080 resolution rather than the higher Ultra HD resolution. This is due to the higher frame rate at the lower resolution, which requires more PCIe bandwidth. The frame rates in such cases, with the GTX 1080, are still too high for you to worry about. Perhaps it makes a difference for some if they're gaming on fast 144 Hz monitors." This is basically what's stopping me from ditching a desktop system completely and upgrading to the Alienware13-R3 or Alienware 15-R4 - I play on a 144Hz panel.

Well I'm kinda stuck using the laptop due to space Limitations The one thing I wish they did was shown the score from the Mobile Dedicated GPU to External GPU in the reviews. Also, I going to wait a few years and hope for better reviews.

 

[the100thmonkey]

One thing I did read on the reviews. Was the CPU could be a factor in gaming bottleneck with the Amplifier. We can look at your 13 R1 which I think has the i7 5500u Dual-core CPU. When a lot of games Now are are requiring Quad core.

Oh I'm painfully aware of the limitations of that CPU nowadays. Anything CPU-intensive just laughs at it. It wasn't so bad 3 years ago, but now... yeah. 720p is fine though. I currently have my Amplifier hooked up to an old 720p TV in my mancave.

Well I'm kinda stuck using the laptop due to space Limitations The one thing I wish they did was shown the score from the Mobile Dedicated GPU to External GPU in the reviews. Also, I going to wait a few years and hope for better reviews.

If you have the space for the footprint of an Amplifier, you have space for a mini-ITX/Micro-ATX box, surely?

As for the external box, I think the chipset PCIe-3 4x is a good comparison - that's basically the same as hardware PCIe-3 4x. The MaxQ design 10-series cards are pretty good performers. As I said above, the only concern I have regarding performance is that any card that's going to be a clear upgrade is going to be hobbled by the bandwidth limitation - I find 60Hz to be borderline for FPS games.