Hardware News Roundup - February 2008

Asus XG Station Approaches Availability

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.