Would a future AGA capable of an RTX 30XX be of any use to 2020 laptops?

The AGA port on the most recent Alienware laptops seem to be capable of supporting (up to?) PCIe Gen 3 x4. The most recent leaks of the RTX 3090 mention PCIe Gen 4.

Based on what I’ve read so far, it seems that the connectors should match up (Gen 3 card in a Gen 4 slot and vice versa). However, a Gen 4 card in a Gen 3 slot won’t be fully utilized due to the bandwidth difference.

I created this thread because when I first came across the AGA, it sounded like a decent mid-term upgrade idea, but reading up about the differences in the new generation gave me pause. Given that I’m getting a laptop in the tail end of the RTX 20XX generation and the growing number of places Gen 4 is going to show up, I’m starting to have some second thoughts about this upgrade path and feel like (assuming there isn’t a catastrophic failure or theft), I should just save up for a computer with whatever comes after the RTX 30XX lineup.

Thoughts?

 

I have no way of knowing if a new AGA will be released or if the new Nvidia GPUs will or will not be useable in existing slots.


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No alienware laptop has pcie 4 since Intel has not yet released a processor with pcie 4 and for some reason does not want to support the new amazing AMD processors. As for the AGA itself pcie 4 is backwards compatible so the cards should work but none will physically fit in the AGA without the cover removed.

 

Accidental double post

 

I guess we will have to wait for benchmarks to see how much power is lost because of PCIe 3.

 

I would say no performance would be lost due to supporting PCIe 4. No GPU in existence today comes close to saturating the bandwidth provided by a PCIe 3 x16 slot, and I don't think there are any that saturate a PCIe 3 x8 slot either.