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.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

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.

 

My experience with AGA on 3070

My Alienware is a 13 R3 OLED 1440p
32gb ddr4 2667mhz
2Tb SSD
Intel i7 7700HQ
Nvidia 1060 mobile

My first card connected to AGA was a 2080 SUPER Gigabyte OC Edition, I never had any problem.

Then I bought a Gigabyte 3070 OC Edition, but I could not get it to work in any way, I tried everything, even the multiple methods of plugging and unplugging, both power cable and data cable, nothing worked, the system recognizes it perfectly and the drivers are installed, but it just does not work ...

I sold it and bought a 2080 Ti Asus ROG Strix and it works perfectly.

If DELL fails to make the 3000 series work normally on the AGA, possibly in the future I will go for the TITAN RTX which the next gen games, gives 8-10% more FPS compared to the 3070.

I read right here that the TITAN RTX is fully AGA compatible, and technically the most powerful GPU that can run normally on AGA without any tricks.

 

The problem with TITAN RTX is that it's completely destroyed by 3090 at much lower price. TB3 to the rescue.

 

TITAN RTX It is better to 3070
3080 and 3090 is better to TitanRTX
Series 3000 is not compatible with AGA.

In the future I plan to buy a TITAN RTX, when I can find it for around $1000 bucks...

TB3 is awful for EGPU's.. Is not a option, is like a garbage...

 

Got it. Could be a long wait. TB3 eGPUs are as good as AGA in many cases,, and will get better with Tiger Lake'a and onwards new TB architecture. AGA is dead anyway.