Will the AGA work with the RTX 30 series?

@Andrew2703  Almost certainly too early for an answer that's both comprehensive and definitive.  The products aren't even out yet, which means nobody here will be able to comment from real-world testing, and Dell might not have completed internal testing yet.  But it might also depend on the specific card you're looking at.  Even the reference design of the RTX 3090 for example calls for a triple-width design and 350W of power just for the card.  The AGA only accommodates double-width cards, and even some slightly wider "2.25-slot" cards won't fit, which can rule out certain variations of a normally double-width card if the vendor installed a larger cooling assembly than normal for that card model.  The AGA is however rated for cards that require up to 375W (the PSU is 460W, but that has to run other components of the AGA, and PSUs aren't 100% efficient.)

But if you're not looking at the 3090, I would expect the other 3000 Series cards to work as long as you selected a model that physically fit into the enclosure.  Or if you want to wait for real world testing from early adopters, then I'd suggest bumping this thread shortly after the 3000 Series cards hit the market.

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006  The AGA's 460W PSU is rated to provide up to 375W to GPUs.  Even the brand new 3090 seems to require "only" 350W.  But I guess that might impose a ceiling for overclockers -- although ventilation might be a limiting factor for them as well.

I personally think they’ll update it with a triple slot design and make it a little wider and taller to accommodate the newer cards plus a bigger PSU to handle the wattage of those cards.

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006  Size-wise, it's rated for dual width GPUs, not "2.25" or "2.5 slot" cards.  Whether the AGA gets updated to support triple width cards will probably depend on how well the current AGA is selling and how many triple width cards we start seeing.  The 3090 is supposed to have a retail price of $1500, which is a good chunk of the cost of even higher-end Alienware systems.  If the only GPUs that require that size stay in that price range, I personally would be very surprised if Dell decided to develop a new AGA just to accommodate that.  The market of users who would both buy an AGA and want to run a $1500 GPU inside it is probably pretty small.  Sure, you could say that whenever Dell plans to update the AGA anyway, they may as well make it wider just for compatibility.  But the downside to that is that EVERYBODY ends up with a significantly wider AGA to park on their desk just so that a small handful of people who would ever want to run a triple-width card would be able to do so.  Everyone else will probably just gripe that the AGA is so huge.  The other possibility would be an AGA and an "AGA Plus", the latter of which would be wider for those who needed it.  I guess that's a possibility, but introducing variations of a product brings its own costs, which will of course increase the cost that consumer would have to pay for the product.

My money is on the AGA remaining a double width enclosure unless triple width cards become significantly less expensive.  But hey, I don't have a crystal ball.  You never know!

I think they’ll redesign it in a way that it might be slimmer then the current one and have more ports plus a triple slot design but if you were for example going to put a 3080 you can leave 1 slot closed and the other 2 open but if you want the 3090 you can have all 3 slots open for the GPU to take up.

Physically, the nvidia founders 3080 and 3070 will fit (I'll base all these numbers off nvidia's cards as the partner cards will have different dimensions and power figures).

Power supply is rated for 12V as follows:
A 18A = 216W
B 16A = 192W
C 8A = 96W
T 32A = 385W

It's not clear which supply relates to which plug, but I assume C is the 24-pin ATX connector. The maximum rating for a PCI3x16 socket is 75W, and previous RTX2080 has drawn 4A/50W through this bus.

3080: 320W - 50W = 280W shared equally between B & A plugs is 11A. This is within specification and should be OK, even if no power is supplied via the PCIe bus. But the supply is running at 83% of its maximum rating, and it's not even White rated. There's little in reserve for peaks and none for overclocking.

3070: 220W - 50W = 180W on a single 8-pin socket is 15A. To be safe you need to find the A plug and hope that the bus is always used for some power since the full 220W exceeds the A plug's power rating. Yes, bizarrely, the lower power card is more likely to overload the power supply because it all comes through a single socket instead of shared between two. This could be mitigated by a partner 3070 with two sockets, if it fits physically.

Finally - the bottleneck is the AGA connection is only equivalent to a 4-lane PCI3 bus (or 4-lane PCI2 bus on early PC models, half that of v3). This will start to bottleneck at higher frame rates (the bus usage is most affected by frame rate as scene data is pushed from the CPU to the GPU). If you intend to get that super slippery 360Hz 1080P display and Reflex mouse, or utilize the direct disk access texture unpacking, the narrow bus width is going to be a huge issue. We know the 2080 could saturate PCI3x8, and the 30-series' PCI4x16 is four times the throughput of this. For 4K 60Hz gaming I doubt if there's a problem, but anything above that is going to be at risk of degradation as the CPU/GPU wait for data to be transferred. Numbers will be entirely dependent on the title and system setup, but keep this limitation in mind particularly if you have an early model Alienware laptop or X51 (R1/R2?).

That’s....

actually pretty informative!

have you tried upgrading the psu though to relieve the power issue?

and aren’t there any boards that are PCIe 4.0x16 Boards that you can connect.

in short. No it will not work, at the moment.

I hope Dell i comming with an update to fix it and undertheath is my story, everbody with the graphics amplifier has this problem and the 3080.

I have an Alienware 17 R3, Nvidia 3080 and Alienware Graphics Amplifier. I received my 3080 today and cannot get it to work with my computer and/or monitors hooked up to it. I have the most recent 456.55 Game ready driver from Nvidia and the latest updates for Win10 Home. The card is recognized in Device manager but has a warning triangle infornt of the icon. Device manager states:

This device is not working properly because Windows cannot locate the drivers required for this device. (Code 31) Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

I’ve searched high and low and can’t find anything that helps. I have already tried to completely uninstall the Nvidia drivers and reinstall the latest ones. Tried Extern Driver update tools but nothing seemed to work. Is there anyone that knows the solution to this? already thanks for your time.

So I think Alienware will actually push out a firmware update to the graphics amp to allow the new 3000 series plus even might make it 4.0 x16 so it'll give you max performance and probably a new matte design.

@Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006 

Wait..... 

Where is the PCIE 3.0x4 from the amp. I thought it was the way it connects to the motherboard in the laptop and not on the amp's end. Redesigning the amp and doing some shiny new firmware wouldn't fix that for those of us with current-gen Alienware A51s in that case.

I think a firmware update will fix it though. all you're doing is making it change from x16 to x4 and that worked all the way up to the TITAN RTX so I dont think it could be a problem with the interface.

If it weren't a physical issue with the way it connects, then why wouldn't the amp offer 16X the entire time?

even 3.0x16 is more than enough for the 30 series cards and would make them run just like a desktop.

The perfect solution. I mean unless you're using a new ryzen cpu and motherboard, you aren't getting 4.0 anyway. 

So in my case my i9 10900k and mobo in a desktop still would only be sporting 3.0x16

I think their shifting into PCIe 4.0 with the 11th gen CPU's after AMD did it but its going to be a whole new socket.