external graphics cards dead or dormant
stillborn or still relevant well we've
got two identically speced laptops and
both of the top external Graphics docks
that are ready to battle it out each
armed with a top-of-the-line NVIDIA GTX 1080 TI but will The Identical specs
yield identical results for
once no no they
won't the be quiet! purebase 600 features
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the link below first we need to explain why we're using
such op graphics cards the goal here was
to expose any weaknesses or efficiency
differences between these two by eliminating the graphics card itself as
a bottleneck and also to make sure that
both of them can keep even the power hungriest cards safely fed each are
equipped with plenty of power power the Razer core sports a custom 500 W power
supply while the Alienware Graphics amplifier has a hunt key 460 W ATX power
supply that was clearly made for a full system and repurposed for this the cor's
aluminum chassis feels solid and opening
it up to insert the graphics card only takes a couple of minutes whereas the
graphics amplifier well everything about that setup frankly felt a little janky
the build is all plastic and although I
had the right idea for opening it I actually ended up having to consult the
user manual because it felt like I was going to break it oh God when it got
stuck halfway I mean there isn't even RGB Lighting on this one for crying out
loud and if you thought the poor ease of
use for the amplifier was over think again the connectors on the proprietary
cable that carries a PCI Express 3.0 X4
signal from the computer to the dock
have these latches that can actually get caught if you're not careful when you're
removing them not to mention that Alienware solution requires a restart of
the laptop whenever you connect or disconnect it so that the internal
dedicated graphics card can be activated or disabled razor on the other hand
keeps up their strong performance in this area just plug in a Thunderbolt 3
cable into the blade notebook of your choice they don't officially support
thirdparty laptops but we'll discuss that more later install the NVIDIA
drivers and you're good to go every part
of the process felt smoother and more
polished on the Razor side though if its
performance can hold up I suspect many will forgive the Alienware Graphics
amplifier for its lack of uh spit and
shine given that retails for 200 bucks a
whopping $300 less than the core though in
razer's defense with the purchase of a blade laptop you do get $100 off so I
guess it's only twice the cost of the graphics
amplifier let's get to the test every
game Benchmark was Run 10 times in a row
to reward strong thermal performance and we recorded both the average and and the
minimum frame rate that was maintained 97% of the time we used identical
drivers and settings and ausa's 240 HZ
gaming display for both systems
everything between them was equal except for one thing gaming
performance for Rise of the Tomb Raider and for honor the Alienware pulled out a
bit ahead of the core while the core
actually pulled slightly ahead in the all important minimum FPS metric but
where things really got interesting was in Ghost Recon wildlands and DX mankind
divided where the Alienware Graphics amplifier showed that it has the
potential to absolutely spank the core
delivering buttery visuals compared to the questionably playable performance on
Razer solution and as a troubleshooting
step then we tried comparing them using the built-in laptop display rather than
an external monitor but this changed
nothing for Alienware and then generated even slightly lower performance for
Razer due to the extra display signal
data being carried back to the blades display something that we actually
tested more thoroughly in the Razer core Deep dive which you can check out here
so what gives well we could only think
of two differences between these solutions that might affect performance
one thermals either of the CPU in the
laptop or the graphics card in the enclosure and two the connection to the
graphics card so to see if thermal throttling was the issue we booted up
Ida 64 and monitored temperatures on our
blade while gaming it got hot but it was
nowhere near overheating then to rule out the laptop
entirely we gave our 7600 100 HQ
equipped Blade Pro a shot but it performed nearly identically within our
margin of error no dice let's move on to
that connection then the theoretical bandwidth of the two should be equal in
GPU Z both have the same number of PCIe
lanes and the same reported 40 gbit pers second
bandwidth is there some way that we could pin this on Thunderbolt
3 what if the gigabit ether controller
on the core is sucking up resources we used disabling device
manager and it was not very effective so
it was time to go spelunking deep into the depths of the specs searching for a
single difference between the two and finally we found one in the dark
crevices of the device manager on the Alienware amplifier the GPU gets
connected directly to the PCI controller
on the CPU so the lanes that it gets are
solely devoted to Graphics the razor
core on the other hand gets connected through the motherboard chipset meaning
that the graphics card has to share its PCI El lanes and perhaps more
importantly the DMI interface with things like networking USB ports and
probably the biggest bandwidth sucker
storage but can we prove once and for all that the lanes are causing the
bottleneck NE for a complete Apples to
Apples comparison we needed to be able to connect the core to the Alienware 13
something Dell doesn't want you to do in spite of the 13th's higher-end four-lane
implementation of the Thunderbolt 3 standard good news though it turns out
that if you disable enough Alienware Services it will begrudgingly let you
use a Razer core and in games the
Alienware 13 connected to the core recorded results within our margin of
error proving then that the bottleneck wasn't in the laptop but in the
connection itself so final pros and cons list then
Razer has some big advantages they simple setup and hot swapability will
definitely win over customers who value ease of use and the excellent
compatibility enabled by using a standard Thunderbolt 3 Connection in
spite of advertising the core as only working with their own blade and blade
stealth makes them the default winner for many but if you're willing to look
the other way on build quality a little bit you're willing to Shell out for a
matching Alienware laptop and you want the best no compromises performance out
of your graphics stock at a much lower price the amplifier comes out way
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Tech things like could you run both of them in SL on the Alienware 13 to which
the answer is unfortunately no we did try