Asus XG Station Approaches Availability

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Announced around a year ago, Asus' external graphics enclosure is nearly production ready, according to company sources.

The XG Station houses a single or double-slot PCI-Express x16 graphics card, using a notebook's Express Card interface to provide x1 bandwidth. This allows an included (unspecified model) mainstream graphics card to exceed Intel's 965GM performance by over 6.7 times, according to Asus.

The estimated performance sounds reasonable, given what we've seen from Intel integrated graphics and what we know of PCI-Express bandwidth. Asus appears to be "testing the waters" with this product: Interested parties should contact their Asus sales representative concerning production scheduling.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Any word on when this puppy is comin out?
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  • I'm with the above comment. Any word on this at all???
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  • santa please have my asus xg station production ready by christmas :) :P

    Come on asus save me from the hell that is intel's idea of graphics!!!!

    Very unproud owner of intel 945 mobile chipset (is there really more than one chip to the 945? it dosent act like it)....
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  • No kidding. The XG Station is turning into starting to feel like the loch ness monster. ASUS announced this thing over a year and a half ago, and its still not for sale.
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  • I REQUIRE this thing. I also have an intel 945. I have all the stuff i need to play some decent games on this thing EXCEPT the graphics. I really hope this thing does make it to market. It would be the saviour of all those who have a laptop and need some extra juice for the games.
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  • Bit of a flawed concept isn't it, when it only runs at 1x PCI? Presumably until they can interface with a laptop at superior speeds, this is a dead duck. No?
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  • This thing will require an external monitor. It won't work with your laptop's display.

    So buying a new laptop with a better GPU is a better solution?
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  • Nooo!!!!
    Reply