ASUS had a number of interesting products to show but the one
that really caught our eye was the XG Station - an
external graphics card case for laptop users!
The easy bit is install a PCIe graphics card inside but what's
needed is a compatible notebook for the XG to connect to
- one equipped with a new ExpressCard slot.
That slot hooks
up to the notebook's core logic via a PCIe x1 conduit. The graphics
card within the XG is then connected to an external monitor and away
you
go. One thing we're not sure about is quite how much
the comparatively low-bandwidth interconnect
saps performance.
ASUS was showing a sample equipped with one of its
own NVIDIA GeForce 7900
GS cards - the
fastest currently approved. The Station's LED screen can highlight,
among other things, current GPU speed and gaming FPS. Turning the knob
allows you to overclock the GPU, too. The sample we saw, though, was
running pretty darn hot, so we reckon that ASUS may
need to beef up the cooling
for the box.
Above you can see the card's left-hand graphics output is
being fed out to a monitor (white plug).
The XG also features a USB2.0
hub and Dolby
Headphone Technology that creates pseudo 5.1-channel sound when any
pair of headphones is connected.
At first, ASUS will only be selling the XG Station in a bundle that
includes its own GeForce 7900GS graphics card. We don't know the price
as yet but do expect to see the package in the channel in Q2 this year.
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Edit: I can't even seem to find the news i had before, i think it was only details of the cards that will be compatible with it until newer drivers get released. I suppose vista will have pushed anything like this back at least a bit anyway.Quote
Errrrrmmm...the ExpressCard standard specifies 1 PCI-E lane for ExpressCard support, as opposed to the 16 lanes typically used for PEG; isn't it just going to choke?
Probably not that badly
When PCI-E x16 graphics cards first appeared a couple of years ago, tom's hardware did some experiments where they carefully masked off some of the pins of a PCI-E x16 graphics card, so that it only had an x8, x4 or even x1 connection to the host system. They ran some gaming benchmarks, and found that the performace was down, but not hugely. Something like 20% lower FPS on a x1 connection, which will still be ten times better than anything the integrated graphics on a notebook can manage.Quote
Still not had release details yet thoughQuote
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