Alienware recently announced X15 and X17 laptops. These laptops are very thin and vaguely light and they just turn out to be conspicuously missing a port.
The company just confirmed to The Verge that it has discontinued the Alienware Graphics Amplifier external GPU. Therefore there was no need for these laptops to use the port anymore.
Alienware is not saying whether they’ll offer a future eGPU, instead, they pointed us to off-the-shelf Thunderbolt ones. In 2014, the Alienware Graphics Amp was first introduced for $299. And it was developed to be a companion to the company’s Alienware 13.
This made it be among the vast majority of the power of a desktop graphics card plus four extra full-size USB ports when docked.
Over the years, the combo is being liked by many. The company also added the company’s flagship Area-51M, the port to practically every laptop (and some of its compact desktops. Like the Alienware X51 mini-tower and Alienware Alpha R2 console-sized PC) is released.
Some of Alienware designs are created to have their own built-in upgrades
Some of these features are designed to have built-in upgrades of their own, and also a 460W power supply devoted entirely to GPU. and the price being dipped to $199 and sometimes $150. The Amp also managed to stay competitive for quite a while in the fair niche market of the eGPUs.
And has generally manufacturer-agnostic Thunderbolt 3 ports. Instead of the proprietary cables which can sometimes be used to also charge the laptop.
After the company discontinued the Amp, we were not sure if it took effect immediately. Because the Wayback Machine shows that it was still live as of the month of November 2020.
Also, Dell updated its support page for that topic in April 2021. Without including compatibility for the latest wave of the AMD and Nvidia graphic cards.
The Alienware M15 R5 and M15 R6 also omit the Graphics Amplifier port. The interesting part of all of this is to see if the end for Alienware’s dreams of upgradeable laptops. Certainly, the Amp lasted a lot longer than the idea of presenting new chips for the giant Area-51m laptops.
