I love gaming, but I also love being able to move around the house and game. That means expensive purchases, as gaming laptops are very expensive compared to their desktop brethren yet still underpowered compared to them. However, laptops such as the Dell XPS M1710 (my last buy, about 3 weeks ago) are very powerful gaming machines. Despite this, and despite technologies such as NVIDIA’s MXM, you are generally stuck with a non-upgradeable graphics card, as upgrading your card in your laptop is still an iffy (meaning, if the manufacturer releases a card and if it’s reasonably priced) proposition.
Asus has something to crow about, as they have just demonstrated the XG Station, the world’s first external graphics card station for notebook computers. It connects via your laptop’s Express Card connector and has a PCI Express slot; this could be the solution for keeping up with graphics card releases on your laptop.
Equipped with Express Card interface, USB 2.0 and Dolby headphones, the XG station seamlessly integrates notebook computing with PC graphics power.The Asus XG Station is the world’s first docking station to provide a standard PCI Express slot for additional graphics computing power on notebook computers with Express Card slot, delivering VISTA Premium performance. Source: FarEastGizmos
They boast a 9x improvement, but that’s with integrated graphics vs. this solution. I’d love to see a comparison between this with an NVIDIA 8800 card against my M1710 with the NVIDIA 7950GTX graphics it uses. Release date is supposed to be the beginning of Q2 2007. I will definitely keep my eye on further developments for this product.
May 8, 2007 at 8:16 pm
my laptop is lagging badly when it comes to a WOW session – seems like this is the answer – where can i try out or order the ASUS external graphics card docker? txs