Will the graphics amplifier help me?

IMHO It should help definitely. I've the same laptop as you with i7-4720HQ cpu. The CPU is definitely a bottleneck.

Even in games like Overwatch after a few minutes my cpu drops from 80+ to 20+ I've checked and the same thing happens with Crysis 3, BF1 Beta, Shadow Warrior 2 etc.

When the drop occurs it's because the CPU throttles to 800 Mhz. I've checked several times using various software and noticed that it's either a thermal or power throttle meaning either the CPU goes up to a certain temperature or because of our hybrid power supply thingy and then throttles to 800 Mhz.

What I do know is that there's no way the cpu can maintain 2.5 ghz at 60 fps let alone 3.5 ghz due to heating or power issues since the heatsink has to be shared between the gpu and cpu etc.

By using an Alienware Amp, I think that CPU gets the heat sink and power supply all to itself keeping the CPU cool and well supplied.

Also as a side note, you can enable automatic boost in your bios when using the Amp apparently it OCs our CPU a bit when in dock mode so it can maintain the 3.5 ghz for longer if not indefinitely should boost your fps. Also, make sure to connect the amp to an external monitor if not your GTX 1080 will get a 20% penalty over sharing the bandwidth through the pcie.

BTW, you can try this the next time you notice your game having fps drops. Not sure why but when you plug out the PSU from your laptop and replug it, the games stops throttling. Haven't figure out why.

Thank you for your reply, cjlee6.

I've looked for software to check my cpu speed but I haven't managed to find one which makes graphs yet. The software I found only shows the ghz amount live. I want to do a lets say 30 min gaming session and then see a graph of how the ghz changed during the time period.

Is there any software you could recommend me?

Intel XTU

thank you

So I just played some ARMA 3 and got this:

s17.postimg.org/.../image.png

green = temperature. The peaks are like 90 degrees Celcius.

CPU GHZ differs from 2.5 to 3.35

The CPU utilization peaks are 40% and there aren't many of those peaks, so CPU usage is often below that. I'd say average is like 30%

So by looking at this I guess that heat is a problem.

And does having a CPU utilization at like 30% mean that I can get better GPU without worrying about bottleneck? Is my GPU what needs to be upgraded in order for me to achieve the FPS i desire?

Wow. 

I have different system (17r3) but when rendering at about 90% CPU for extended periods, the temps stay quite low.

I'm seeing about 60C, which seems pretty good. I can hear the fans running, but they are not particularly loud.

I have noticed that I get much better temps with the rear of the laptop elevated by at least 10mm, currently at about 25mm - makes about a 10C difference.

Hmm, even when idle, my laptop doesnt go below 65 degrees. When gaming, it's always 80-90.

I'm gonna clean the dust inside (havent done it for a while) and check if it gives any improvements. If so, I could prolly use one of those laptop coolers to improve it further.

the reason the old system cpu throttle to 800mhz because of that cheap 180watts power supply dell decide to deliver with alienware. exchange that for 240watts and you should be good.