*OFFICIAL* Alienware "Graphics Amplifier" Owner's Lounge and Benchmark Thread (All 13, 15 and 17)

Hey everyone with a 1080 and problems, msg Alienware on their official FB page, they have been good at actually checking their messages. Tell them what errors/problems you're getting and as much helpful info as you can, drivers, BIOS, laptop model, etc etc. With the 1070 coming out soon and their new laptops featuring new GPUs hopefully they're serious about getting this fixed soon.

 

What about regular firestrike on the internal display lol.. that seems to be a common baseline now a days.

 

Hey guys, I am experiencing a very strange phenomenon. My old set up of 980m (8GB) ran Assassin's Creed Syndicate on Ultra settings at 1080p around 30 FPS (give or take a slight dip or rise).

Now have have my APA and GTX1080 and the same game is averaging just 24 frames and as low as 19.

Also, I am unable to update to the latest Alienware Bios (13) as it crashes the system and gives me a blank screen. I have .12 bios.

Any tips on how to resolve this low framerate performance from a brand new GPU that on paper is at least 3 times more powerful than my 980M and should be getting Assassin's Creed: Syndicate Framerates of around 80 average at 1080p.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks!!

 

Did you mean 1.2.8 bios? I am having the exact same issue. 1.2.12 is giving me really weak FPS and I can't even install 1.2.13.

If I read you correctly I should be trying 1.2.8.

 

[Help] Bought the AGA and hooked it up this morning (no graphics card). USB is working. Can't change the color of the alien logo coz it's not showing up on Command Center. Is this normal? I'm on Win10.

 

Yeah 1.2.8 my bad. That should fix fps issues but a lot more unfixed issues remain until we get some sort of update from Dell.

 

This is normal. If there is no GPU in the GA, the computer will detect it as a PCIe USB Hub.

 

Thanks a million I will be patient! Waiting for that update )))

 

I got my 1080 today and ran Overwatch at 4K using the internal monitor . At epic setting I was getting around 70-85 fps the game ran well .. Not sure what it should be getting but the 970m got me 15 to 22 fps

Let me know if you want me to test anything

 

Hey guys, I made a thread about the GTX 1080 + GA over at AWA with the information here. If anything is wrong or missing, please tell me.

 

Cerrata, have you been able to play any other games with the 1080? What laptop do you have and BIOS version? Based on the games that work for me, I was assuming only older games work (GTA V, Arkham Knight), but Overwatch is the latest game out so who knows. Maybe it has something to do with the DirectX version or something?

 

I'll test out doom in a few minutes and let you all know

 

I'm trying to test out the game for some reason when I'm playing full screen the image is huge and can only see a part of it .. Unless I go to windowed mode any way to fix this ?

Update
Just ran 3D mark and only scored 11023 not sure why it's so close .. Graphic score was 19200. I'm a little disappointed.. Doom seamed to play well .. But only in window mode ;(

 

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8656713
This is my score seems low ?

 

oh well asus with the ROG XG station 2...

 

Great stuff Thanks!

 

It is compared to mine: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8639456

However if you look at details, you will see that it is not your graphics score that's lacking but rather your physics one, which is a CPU bound score rather than GPU related. Simply said, your CPU is too weak.

 

Did you disable your turbo clock? You're only getting max 2.5ghz instead of 2.5ghz on stock and 3.5 ghz on turbo, which is going to drop your overall score dramatically.

 

[Help] My system shows 2 AGA drivers and I can't seem to uninstall the older one (1.0.24 vs 1.0.27). Is this normal?

 

Thanks!

 

Wow. Is it the AGA that is killing the 1080?

My 980Ti is only about 8% slower.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/11880951?

 

Just got my setup last week. Unplugged the case fan as the gtx970 i have in it doesn't break a sweat, even during game play.

But i was curious as to how the GA is supposed to behave when shutting down the laptop. If i leave the AGA cable connected and shut off my laptop (in any manner -- fn+f1, windows menu, configured power button, etc) after a while the AGA will start back up again. So far what I've been doing is, after shutting off the computer, I unplug the AGA cable and the laptop will remain off.

I'm guessing this is not what supposed to happen and if you shut off the laptop with the AGA cable connect, its supposed to remain off?

 

I have a 980ti also. My graphics score is about 18500 with external display and no overclock. I think im gonna wait till 1080ti

 

ohh theres gonna be a 1080ti?

 

Well..... There has been a ti for most cards, right? There will def be a better and improved 1080. There has to be?

 

im thinking to get a card for the AGA

 

Your graphics score is 18778
mine is 21496
That's a 2718 points difference which actually amounts to a 12.6% difference
Then again, you probably lose around 10% of the overall graphics performance thanks to the AGA's pcie 4x interface (as opposed to 16x) (why didn't Dell/Alienware use all the available pcie lanes is beyond my understanding)

 

Dave2D has made a movie of the Razer core and in the end of the video he tests it on other laptops including the Alienware. It seems to work but disconnect from time to time.

That is not that crazy, the 1080 is 20% faster on a desktop compared to a reference 980ti. If you have a non reference 980TI it will probably be faster already.

Because there are no lanes available on the Core I7 CPU. Dell has nothing to do with it. It is a limitation of all Intel consumer chips now.

 

Good point. I was looking at the total score since we have the same CPU.

All the other benchmarks I have read show the 1080 being 25-30% faster than a 980Ti. That may be true when installed in a desktop, but doesn't look to be true in the AGA.

I have seen stock clock 980Ti's getting 18k on FireStrike when in a desktop. The best I have ever done is a 14.5k.

 

Well that is maybe a factory overclocked card. Never see any card hitting that high. This is the stock 980Ti

Stock Gtx 1080 in the AGA gave me graphic score of 21420. which is a 30 percent improvement over stock GTX 980Ti. Overclocked it slightly and i got 23152, which is a 40% over stock GTX 980Ti, and a nice 15% boost over a heavily overclocked GTX 980Ti in a desktop. Result is bellow:

 

Does anybody know if there is any kind of data base out there, anywhere that can tell you what the best nvidia driver to use per game and per card?

I have been playing elite dangerous with my 980TI and using nvidia driver 361.75 the GPU uses 99% which gives me better FPS with 4K Ultra settings. However if I use any of the more recent drivers from nvidia, the gpu usage goes down to almost 60% on times and the FPS are really lagging as a result giving poor gaming experience.

If anybody can help with this, it would be amazing! Don't know anymore if games could run better just using older drivers but without going on a major mission its going to be very difficult to find out.

Many thanks

 

it was the most recent bio update... after i downgraded back to 1.2.8 everything is fine again, not to mention the performance is better. I was also getting some stuttering during gameplay (i play league and watch netflix stream on second monitor at the same time) on the new bios.

 

Update for all you guys. Now I have successfully fitted my MSI GTX1080 Founders Edition in my Alienware Graphics Adaptor and after some struggling have managed to flash the BIOS back to 2.3.8. There has been sonewhat of an improvement in games like Assassin's Creed: Syndicate which are now running in the low/mid 50's FPS on all settings maxed out- not too bad

However, I tried one of my favourite all time games 'Alien: Isolation' which used to run at an almost perfect 60FPS with V-sync on my old GTX980M 8GB on maximum settings and with my GTX1080 it struggles along at 25-30FPS. How very strange indeed. Any ideas about why a more powerful 2016 GPU would halve the frame rate on a game from 2014?

The HDMI problem has been solved but now I must plug my HDMI cable into the GPU directly (not my Alienware 17 R3).

Finally, has anyone heard when we will get a new bios from Alienware/DELL to deal with the terrible GTX1080 performance issues?

Thank as always!!!

 

Check to make sure it's not running off the Intel GPU I had to whitelist Ark to get it to work . Other then that mine has been running great so far here is my 3D mark score now http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8702107
Only really slow down is my cpu .. I have doom at 4K a shot and it ran amazing !!!

 

That's not good at all, I get 40-50fps in Assassin's creed syndicate at 2160p after I disable the anti-aliasing (who the hell actually needs that at 4K ?) If you are getting the same amount of FPS at 1080p, you have a serious performance issue.

 

Do use an external 4k display or found a way to use dsr?

 

Do use an external 4k display or found a way to use dsr?

 

I use an external 4K display.

 

Hi,
I have problems with drivers installation for Gtx 1080 (368.25)

I've installed the GTX1080 on my AGA (running with an Alienware15R2 GTX 970m, Win10 64bit, Bios version 1.2.8.)

I installed the latest Nvidia notebook driver 368.22 Win10 64 bit.

After swapping to Amplifier I couldn't install 1080 driver (368.25 Win 10 64 bit).
I got message from nvidia window that driver 368.25 is not compatible with the version of Windows...
Device manager not detected my Gtx1080.
I tried to clean up nvidia folders by using DDU, delete folders and try to install only 1080 driver but I experienced same problems..."driver is not compatible with the version of Windows"

Anyone experiencing anything like this or perhaps have a workaround?

 

Yes, for some reason NVIDIA defaults to Windows 7 when you search for downloads. You need to select Windows 10 on their site, so dumb :-/ I made the mistake.

 

Hi All,

I need some advice.

I have installed the GTX 1080 into my Alienware Amplifier and I can only play Oculus games for around 15 to 20 minutes and the games crash / freeze (driver stops responding). If I put my GTX 970 in there I don't have any problems. Any other ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I already tried using DCU driver cleaner and removing everything. Installing Mobile / Shutdown / Plugin Amplifier, Install Desktop Drivers.

Also, something interesting is non-oculus games seem to run fine. Played Overwatch on max settings for about an hour and it didn't crash.

I thought it could be an overheating issue, but why no problems with Overwatch?

Thank you in advanced!

 

after much tweaking, here's my best result so far:

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8611158

 

I hope that next month the driver support will catch up to show us what the 1080 and 1070 can do with the amplifier.

 

I agree it has issues. Any ideas? Do we need an AGA update from Dell?

 

Is that to an external display or to the internal screen?

 

The new 368.39 driver is now available.

 

Both a new Alienware BIOS and Nvidia driver are out. Niether fix the problems with the 1080, and BIOS 1.2.14 has the same performance issues as 1.2.12/13. I'm going back to 1.2.8.

 

lol what a fail....

 

I accept the bitter truth that i cant enable DSR although i poured my money to AGA and the all mighty GTX 1080..But what about this work around? I will be getting my hardwared a week later but i am sharing this link telling how to do it.. I am very curious about what the results will be and how it compares to DSR, if any of you try this let me know please

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=509076

Edit : The nvidia control panel no longer has these menus

 

What kind of issues are you experiencing? and do you own an R3?