Alienware graphics amplifier improves xconnect technology

The arrival of AMD XConnect technology has meant the possibility of having very compact equipment but with outstanding graphics performance thanks to the use of external graphics cards. This technology makes use of Intel's Thunderbolt 3 interface to provide the necessary bandwidth between the equipment and the module that houses the graphics card externally. Dell has come up with its own alternative and claims that its Alienware Graphics Amplifier offers better performance than Thunderbolt 3 modules.

Alienware Graphics Amplifier is Dell's proprietary alternative to AMD XConnect technology

The Alienware Graphics Amplifier module works in the same way as the other solutions by Thunderbolt 3 although with another type of connection, this proprietary Dell solution communicates with the PC using various proprietary connectors with the drawback that it will only be compatible with computers from dell. Thus we find specialized connectors for video and others for sound, a big difference with the rest of the solutions that only use a Thunderbolt 3 port. With the use of several specialized connectors , the loss of bandwidth that occurs in the port is avoided. Thunderbolt 3 if multiple peripherals are used in chains.

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Another advantage of the Alienware Graphics Amplifier is that it is capable of accommodating cards such as the powerful GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 with Nvidia's promising Pascal architecture, the rest of the Thunderbolt 3 and AMD XConnect-based solutions only support cards from the AMD itself, something logical. It currently makes use of a PCI-Express 3.0 interface but will be updated to PCI-Express 4.0 when the new interface arrives to be able to work with the most powerful graphics cards to come.

Alienware Graphics Amplifier is for sale for an official price of $ 199

Source: pcworld