Alienware Graphics Amplifier (AGA) adventures

Because of the previous thread on Egpu and TB3/4, USB C etc, i thought id summarize some of my adventures with the AGA (which is exactly the same as the Egpu kit you can buy from Ali, plus a fancy case and the software taken care of for you by Alienware.

Now i hear that AW have discontinued the AGA, and that thier new kit is coming soon, apperently its watercooled, so thats a welcome change.This may also be the reason i was able to pick up the AGA for 150 bucks (i payed 400ead inc shipping on Amazon) a few years back. so i bought 3 .. lol.. (there is method to the madness, as i do own 3 Alienware Alpha R2's that support the AGA)

anyways, a couple of introductory pics.. so were all on the same page.


looks small, it aint!

This is the plug it uses, both sides are the same plug.. its basically a pcie 3.0 (more on that later) 4x plug wrapped in a fancy cable. Plug one side into your Lappy/desktop, the other (its a long cable around 1.5m) into the AGA.



Stacked next to someones lappy. the box really is quite large.




The backside, youll note where the plug goes at the bottom. Very confusing why as to why they would have included a USB hub in the arse end of this as any other item youll plug in there will detract from your already limited bandwidth.. (again, more on that later.)


It really is a very nice enclosure, and will take full length/height cards. the cable is also very nice.. whats not so nice is the complete and utter horseshit PSU they have included in this wonderful contraption. Somewhere along the line, ill rip out that PSU and put a nice proper one inside. (also more on that later)

Right! so nice little unit right? well yes.. and no...

I actually spent a good part of 4 hours benching with this thing last night, and even though i enjoyed it a lot, it left me kinda frustrated a little until I realized one thing..

My setup for the AGA is the AW Alpha R2, maxed out in both CPU and RAM, It runs a 6700T (35W) 4 core cpu, and 16gb or ddr4 2133mhz CL16 (thats a system limitation as i have a 2400 speed stick in there)
So its a pretty speedy little box.



Coupled inside that puppy is a custom designed for AW, a GTX 960 with 4GB of ram.. which is a pretty neat little feat by itself as this unit is about half the size of only the graphics card. So its no slouch.. yeah its not the fastest, but back in the day, (2016) when this thing was released, it seriously kicked butt.. Yeah its now nearly 7 years old..

anyways, there is only one faster cpu you can chuck in this puppy and thats the 6700K, but it will throttle AND youll need to replace the 180W power brick with a 230W brick, which you can do. The 6700t is a 35W cpu, and the 6700K is a 91W item... not sure how much it will throttle, esp when using the AGA as it will remove the current/power draw from the then idle GTX 960..

I am still keeping an eye out for a 6700K for some more OC/ AW Alpha adventures down the road, but getting back to the AGA..

I am currently benching with a game called World War Z Aftermath, it has a built in benchmark , and i test on 1080p with everything set to max, and visuals set to high. (there also an Ultra setting, but lets not go there, were looking at a finding a minium FPS of 60fps, ultra setting will absolutely decimate the little Alpha. So thats why were sticking with HIGH.

You may ask, "Why are you benching with that game? that's not a commonly used benchmark... "

And that's true, however, for me this is pretty relevant, as this is the game we play a lot in my house, I co-op with my 2 older kids on a weekly basis, so getting great performance out of this game has a real benefit to me and my little gang. It also directly shows the performance impact of the AGA, and the AGA in turn shows just what an amazing job AW did with the Alpha..

My AGA setup. (well its actually Indi's computer )

Obviously the AGA is just sitting there for testing. it will live on the side id say from now on. And excuse the mess, it got late last night doing the benching.


RESULTS
Now for the results:

stock this unit benches at the before mentioned high settings at 2900 points. thats stock, no aga.

Just a heads up, my AGA has a GTX 980ti gaming G1 in it.


With the AGA plugged in, it returns a very disappointing 3500 points.

now if we have a look at some percentages.. 2900/3500 is an increase of 17% which i have to say is a very dissapointing result.. (taking into account the advertised cost of both the AGA and the 980Ti)

really dissapointing..... or is it???

lets have a closer look at that!

you might think that the issue is that the 4x bandwidth limit as gpuZ report the link speed as 4X at 2.1 spec (it does wonder backwards and forwards between 1.1 spec and 2.1, but youve seen that before.)

So, is that a result of the 4x limitation of the AGA (or Egpu/TB3/USB3) for that matter? well, yes and no... see the issue for the disappointing result here doesn't lie with the AGA (or other EGPU for that matter) The issue lies with the very nicely included and custom specced GTX 960 that alienware so nicely decided to include in the R2.

what i hear you say??

yeah, thats where this issue lies.. if your upgrading to a 980Ti from a GTX960, youll not see a absolute huge difference, compounded by the fact that your loosing around 5 percents of performance out of the box with the egpu/AGA overhead solution..

So that kinda sucks... right? well thats not the whole picture either...

Things get interesting once we load up MSI Afterburner...

setting the core to +125 and the ram to +205 (these are not maxiums, as the base temp hasnt changed at all and during the total benching the 980Ti temps went from 45 degrees to 51 degrees, thats it!! )

but just upping the core by 125 and the ram by 205, resulted in a huge increase..
World war Z Benchmark with exactly the same settings then showed a result of... 4500...

thats freaking insane...

because when we do the old maths again, we end up with 2900/4500 = 36% !!!

Now that's interesting... which also means that the so called limited bandwidth at 2.1 spec isnt actually /THAT/ limited.. initially...

after playing around with some higher core and ram offsets, i was able to push this up to a bit over 4800 points, however even though the reported temps stayed at a steady max of 51 degrees (the 980ti can do up to 85 degrees, and the other 980ti g1 in Jacksons 11400 pc, does get near that sometimes (exact same card)) i didnt feel it worth while to push it that hard for an extra 300 points.. (4% extra gain)


So what does all this mean? (this is for all Egpu sollution, minus the newer TB4/USB4 stuff)

1. The AGA is frikkin expensive... (at least it is now), and you need an AW to make use of it unless you mod it with a EGPU. You can get a Egpu solution from Ali for really cheap, search for "The Beast"

2. if your base computer (normally we'd say Laptop, or a all in one solution where you cant swap out the GPU) has something not completely worthless and useless in it, then this will reduce your "winning" margin.

3. Overclocking your card with an EGPU setup has excellent provident.

So yeah pretty darn happy with this.. gone from around 40 FPS to a base line of 60 and generally floating around 70fps in World War Z Aftermath.. so yeah i think thats worthwhile.


Thanks for letting me bore you shitless.. hehehe

stay tuned for further AGA and Alpha adventures..

edit: and then just to put this whole adventure into perspective... using the exact same card, stock clocks in my kids 11600/32gig z590 box, it scores .. *cough* 7300.. thats a huge difference... so price wise the AGA is dead in the water.. i wonder how it would go if the little AW alpha had a much faster CPU...

anyone wanna donate a 6700K for this project?

 

Hmm it has come to my attention I might have screwed something up here.. apperently you have to turn on TMP in the bios to get this to work properly..

More adventures to come then it seems..

I've also managed to snatch my self an R2 steam machine in the wild. Pretty rare those..

 

Hmm.. lolol well rather to my horror, i seem to have discovered ive been the arse end of a joke.... who fucking knew....

so turns out my used 2nd GTX980TI is a lowly gtx960... .. wtf!!! looks identical... someone has cunningly flashed a bios on there that says 980Ti, and even reports as 980ti in GPU Z and also NVflash... but upon flashing a real 980ti bios on the card, the flash only ever gets to 97% and fails... thought id bricked a card there for a short morning here... I was luckily able to rescue said fake card and now resport it self again as a 980ti, but with 960 (non ti) performance.... not good.. lolol

 

so today, i grabbed the Alienware GA out again, as my kids wanted some more OOmph in Forthight.. ive got a few spare 1080ti's lying around, so thought lets see how that goes.

The 1080ti is about 4.5 times faster than the on board gtx 960.. Haven benches at around 4.5k vs 973 on the 960.. thats pretty good i recon.. will keep the R2 going for a while longer... the only letdown is that you loose SLEEP function.. that kinda sucks.. but its livable..

1920x1080 8xAA full screen,ultra quality,

so it seems the bandwidth doesnt suffer that much after all..

 

Bunch of months later, this setup is going great.. obviously it would make fuck all sense to buy this stuff when new, but it's extended the AW alpha by a long shot, is say at least 2 extra years.. kids loving it.

 

They're a great idea, so nice to hear it's getting use!
So weird about your GPU being flashed with a fake bios.

 

Today I installed a 1080ti into my youngest kids R2, also with Graphics Amplifier, (I bought 3 or 4, can’t remember now on a Amazon sale a few years ago) glad I did… kinda came about as the middle kids r2 with G.A. Was acting kinda flaky so I had to re-install the OS (windows 10 on this one) and then was having a look at if the G.A. Would work with windows 11. (Not supported on this platform) guess what, it does. lol. Anyhow, while I was chucking the other 1080ti in the youngest kid R2, ran a few benchmarks on said system and found quite a big difference in results (haven benchmark). Roughly about 1000 points, which is a lot. Sure they are not the same graphics cards, so that might explain a bit, but not 1/3 of the performance.. so I go sniffing around a bit furthers..

Turns out the 2nd Graphics Amplifier (GA) is a bit of a dud, and scores predominantly a lot less than the other one. So I swapped it out, and then in the new one, the psu was making this horrible high pitch buzzing noise, so I swapped out the psu..

Got it working fine now, but man, glad I had some spares there..

Somewhere in the works there I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so pulled the trigger on a new z390 mobo and a 8700k with 32gigs of ram, lol, that cpu is roughly about twice as fast as the max cpu in the r2 6700u, so would prob make a pretty good kid desktop setup for the 1080ti. Still can’t believe what a bloody awesome card they were.. still runs most games pretty darn good.

anyways, both r2’s now shot with windows 11 and G.Amps and 1080ti’s. At least good for another 2 years I’d say. lol

a few pics I took from said escapades


(Slightly modified the cover to fit this one lol) yes I used an angle grinder to make those cuts. Lol


(This one closes fine with the smaller cooler)

pretty sure I have 4 R2’s (one steam machine) now, and one R1. Why, no idea, I think they are funky cool little computers that pack a punch.