ASUS XG Station is a very interesting device that offer laptops a lot more potential for running advanced 3D applications and games. ASUS XG Station is namely an external graphics card device that is plugged into a laptop and simply bypass its integrated graphics circuit. The device can be used together with several different PCIe X16 graphics cards, which means that you can connect your high-end graphics card to your laptop. ASUS has plans for a new and tuned version of its XG Station that will be presented at CeBIT and at VR-Zone they’ve published a short preview of the device that can handle cards in the GeForce 8800 GTS performance range.
ASUS XG Station has some interesting functions and advantages, but there are also limitations and disadvantages with a solution like this one.
“Although XG1 possess some really neat features but it still has its downsides like limited bandwidth and requires external display. Since XG1 is linked up to the notebook through the ExpressCard slot, therefore the graphics card slotted into the PCIe x16 slot inside the XG1 has a reduced bandwidth from full x16 (4GB/s in each direction) to just x1 (250MB/s in each direction). Certainly graphics and video performance will suffer a considerable hit. Also another downside is that XG1 needs to be hooked up to a display monitor since there is no video-in capability in the current notebooks so you can’t play games on your notebook screen.”
ASUS has plans for a new XG1 version where these limitations will be remedied.
