Alienware Graphics Amplifer (AGA) for VR is not worth it

Just a quick note to try to help inform guys who think that adding a AGA to their AW laptop for the main purpose of improving VR performance is a good idea. I bought an AW 17r4 late last year with an internal gtx1060. Actually the internal 1060 worked pretty well with most VR games/apps except for some very high demand VR flight simulators like X-plane 11. Anyway, later I bought an AGA and Zotac gtx1080ti Blower (basically FE version) to improve my VR performance.

First thing I found out was that I also needed to buy an external monitor because just running the AGA back to the laptop monitor slows things down quite a bit. So, I went out and bought a nice new Asus VG248QE 144Hz monitor and a DP cable. You also need to disable the laptop monitor with windows system display setting so that it just projects to your external monitor. This worked great for all my non-VR games/apps. Probably ~2x higher performance than the internal 1060, which was already very good btw.

However, using my Oculus Rift w/touch controllers and 2x sensors, VR performance hardly improved. Maybe 10-15% at best. Not a lot of VR benefit for +$1,200. If I had to do it all over again I think that I would have been better off spending this amount and buying my AW 17r4 with an internal gtx1080 to begin with.

The good news is that the AGA works fine with my 17r4 and Rift. Everything is nice and stable, and my 17r4 seems to run a little cooler since it's internal gtx1060 is bypassed. Also, I really like using my nice new external monitor. I'll continue to use my AGA/1080ti for now but will probably look at moving the 1080ti over to a better VR desktop build, maybe sometime next year.

So, if you already have an internal gtx1060 or better and plan to use an AGA to improve VR performance, I recommend not to do this. Again, I am referring to VR, not non-VR. I hope this helps.