Gadgetory

external graphics cards dead or dormant stillborn or still relevant well we've got two identical expect laptops and both of the top external graphics Docs 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 pure bass 600 features a versatile design noise insulation and optimizations for different liquid cooled radiator configurations learn more at the link below first we need to explain why we're using such opie 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 the razor core sports a custom 500 watt power supply while the Alienware graphics amplifier has a hunt key for 60 watt ATX power supply that was clearly made for a full system and repurposed for this the coarse 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 fought 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 Razer on the other hand keeps up their strong performance in this area just plug in a under bolt three cable into the blade notebook of your choice they don't officially support third party 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 it's performance can hold up I suspect many will forgive the Alienware graphics amplifier for its lack of a spit and shine given that it retails for 200 bucks a whopping three hundred dollars less than the core though in razors 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 ten times in a row to reward strong thermal performance and we recorded both the average and the minimum frame rate that was maintained 97% of the time we used identical drivers and settings and a Seuss's 240 hertz 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 Deus Ex mankind divided where the Alienware graphics amplifier showed that it has the potential to absolutely Bank 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 displace signal data being carried back to the blades display something that we actually tested more thoroughly in the razor 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 i-264 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 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 gigabit per second bandwidth is there some way that we could pin this on Thunderbolt 3 what if the Gigabit Ethernet 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 PCIe controller on the CPU so the lanes that it gets are solely devoted to graphics the Razer core on the other hand gets connected through the motherboard chipset meaning that the graphics card has to share its PCIe 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 one and for all that the lanes are causing the bottleneck for a complete apples-to-apples comparison we needed to be able to connect the core to the Alienware 13 something Dale doesn't want you to do in spite of the 13th higher end four-lane implementation of the Thunderbolt 3 standard good news though it turns out that if you disabled enough Alienware services it will be grudgingly let you use a razor 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 razor has some big advantages there simple setup and hot swap ability 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 is 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 dock at a much lower price the amplifier comes out way ahead fiber is totally unique it's this huge digital marketplace where freelancers startups and small businesses connect and as fiber says get stuff done whether you're in a startup or a small company and you need a logo or business planner maybe you need an entire website developed for you Fiverr has the talent pool that can get it done at a price that fits your budget so check out some of the gigs that we'd use through our landing page at the link below and the first 300 viewers who use code Linus will get 20% off v or services so join the hashtag and doers we trust movement on Fiverr and start getting it done today so thanks for watching guys just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one as well as a link to our community forum where you can discuss all kinds of great tech things like could you run both of them in SLI on the Alienware 13 to which the answer is unfortunately no we did try