At PAX Australia, we had a quick interview with Joe Olmsted — Alienware’s Director of Product Planning — about the new Alienware Graphics Amplifier. This device is not the first of its kind as ASUS released the ASUS XG Station in 2008. The ASUS XG Station connected to a notebook via an ExpressCard slot, required external power, and provided a PCIe 2.0 connection — PCIe 1.0 x16 in reality due to bandwidth limits. While it was able to work with any brand, in theory almost all installations on non-ASUS branded hardware were filled with issues, real world results were somewhat mixed.
ASUS only provided a very select lineup of notebooks that supported the ASUS XG Station. While the idea was similar the ASUS XG Station barely even hit the market — selling only in Australia. The ASUS XG Station shortcomings were bandwidth limitations, a small choice of upgrade options and GPU power. Between its Consumer Electronics Show unveiling in January 2007 and its limited release in May 2008 notebook GPU power almost doubled completely for both the AMD and Nvidia camps. With the retail VGA configuration being the desktop-class Nvidia 8600GT, the ASUS XG Station was nearly 5% slower than the soon to be released notebook-class Nvidia 9800M.
Right product, wrong time.
Alienware — through design or having the appropriate technology this time — seems to have gotten the concept mostly right. The Alienware Graphics Amplifier appears to have resolved the bandwidth issues by using a newer connection bus, which in turn allows greater GPU selection due to the I/O bus bottleneck being removed. Now you can upgrade with the GPU power you want, rather than the GPU power a company offered.
For the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, they started by looking at the power draw from a single VGA card. The final power ceiling they ended up with was 460 watts. "Put any card in there you want. There aren't too many cards going over 460 Watts. Even a Titan Black is not 400 Watts." The PSU contained inside the device — avoiding the need to have a separate power brick — supports either AMD or Nvidia full length, dual-height graphics cards up to 375 Watts.
Unlike the ASUS XG Station, which required a complete shutdown in order to install or remove the device, the Alienware Graphics Amplifier supposedly does not. "The Magic in this is in Software. So the biggest difference is if you pull the plug while it's running your system does not crash. It may seem like a simple thing; however it is a big thing." This is contradictory to what other websites are reporting with claims it also requires a complete shutdown. A real world hands on will allow us to confirm this.
The cable that connects the Alienware Graphics Amplifier to the Alienware 13 has a proprietary Alienware/Dell connector which carries the PCIe interface and also USB from the host machine rather than using a standalone USB controller. This allows the Alienware Graphics Amplifier to provide via a single cable four powered USB 3.0 ports. With monitors attached the VGA output is routed externally to those panels, with nothing connected the notebook display gets the output instead. Currently, the only machine that the Alienware Graphics Adaptor connects to is the new Alienware 13 with both shipping in November 2014.
Pricing for the Alienware 13 starts at US $1599 with the Alienware Graphics Amplifier selling for US $299.99. There is currently no Australian pricing for the Alienware Graphics Amplifier listed on the Alienware website.
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