Graphics Amplifier Performance

Dell sent united states the Graphics Amplifier along with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 menu to test with (unfortunately I don't have access to Steve's library of GPUs). However this is a bang-up examination platform because information technology's a high-end desktop graphics card that, while not every bit powerful as the GTX 980, holds its ain against the pinnacle cards on the market today.

Information technology's worth noting, at that place are some graphics cards that are merely non worth putting in the Amplifier. The Alienware thirteen'south GTX 860M is around the performance of a GTX 750 Ti (~$150 GPU), and then annihilation around or lower than that will brand no difference or even reduce performance. On the AMD side, this means anything around or lower than a Radeon R7 265.

I would highly recommend spending at least $200 on a graphics card for the Amplifier to get a decent performance heave over what the GPU in the Alienware 13 already provides. So at least a GTX 760 or R9 280, though naturally higher is better.

With a reference GTX 780 in the Amplifier I was able to game on higher graphics settings hands. At 1080p, this card is suitable for playing pretty much whatsoever game on the marketplace at near maximum settings with decent framerates, and provides effectually double the performance of the GTX 860M.

For my time gaming on the Alienware thirteen with the Amplifier, this meant cranking the settings upwards significantly while keeping the framerate relatively similar. Of course you could get the other way and get monster frame rates, merely I preferred to play with graphical allegiance not previously achievable on this laptop. Games like Dragon Age Inquisition and Crysis 3, for example, could be played at mostly max settings with framerates higher up twoscore FPS. Previously these games would have run at medium, so it's a pregnant boost in graphical quality.

To compare the performance of the Amplifier with a high-end GPU to the Alienware 13's embedded GPU, I ran a selection of games with and without the Amplifier connected. I also compared the results with the Amplifier connected to our GTX 780 benchmarks on a high-end gaming organization, which should indicate how the combination of a laptop and desktop GPU fare in terms of non-GPU bottlenecks.

Besides, go along in mind it's possible to go fifty-fifty more performance by opting for the highest cease carte du jour on the market, the GTX 980, rather than the GTX 780. The 780 actually is a discontinued production, only if yous're after roughly the same performance, an AMD Radeon R9 290 should do the play a joke on, and can exist found for under $300 these days.

Throughout the games I tested, the Graphics Amplifier benchmarked ~15% lower on average compared to our high-cease desktop test bench with the same graphics card inside. Some of this will be down to a crude 5% reduction in performance due to the express PCIe bandwidth, though I often noted that the GPU was running at virtually 100% utilization.

Another caption is that the CPU is being bottlenecked, which wouldn't surprise me because the Alienware 13 is powered by just a dual-core U-series CPU with a 15W TDP. In nearly all the games I tested, CPU utilization was budgeted 100%, a situation that isn't ideal for a gaming notebook. In more than CPU heavy titles like Civilization: Beyond Earth (which I didn't test), this bottleneck could seriously injure operation.

Withal the skillful news is that the Graphics Amplifier does significantly meliorate operation over the internal GPU. Performance substantially doubled across the games I tested, which when playing at maximum settings often meant going from unplayable to very adequate frame rates. Chucking in an even more than powerful GPU will result in fifty-fifty better scores.

Thermally, the blower-way GTX 780 sat at effectually 80C during load in games, which is a typical outcome for this graphics card and good news for the thermal performance of the Amplifier with blower fashion cards. When I tried a Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-Ten, which vents sideways and into the case, it sat at around 75 degrees during load, which is above the typical 70C it would sit down at in a well ventilated PC example.

The fan in the Amplifier runs all the time, so even when information technology's idling y'all'll become the noise of the fan in the background. During load, the Amplifier is nonetheless louder than the internal fans in the laptop (which run very quietly when the GPU isn't beingness used), though its volume volition depend largely on the cooling solution of your graphics card.