Asus XG station

[Thing]

Anyone else remember the external GPU Asus did for laptops?

I can;t seem to find it anywhere. Was it ever released? Or was it such a limited run they're all gone?

*extra-hopeful* any chance of OCUK getting hold of one at a decent price?

 

[Rroff]

afaik there was never a production run of it.

 

[Thing]

Oh, that sucks. Woulda been quite handy for me 'cause I have no desire to buy a big shiny gaming PC but I DO want to play EVE with the Trinity graphics and I'd like the Total War games to scale to my monitor playably. Ah well.

Any idea if it's possible to make my own or is that (as I suspect) crazy/wishful thinking?

 

[SS-89]

Crazy

 

[Rroff]

Strictly if your laptop has a mini pci-e header (some do) you could mod a pci-e x1 graphics card to work with it... along with making up an appropriate external power supply... if you don't have a mini pci-e header then you'd have to make a cardbus to pci-e interface - there are some off the shelf solutions for this... however aside from the odd 7300GT x1 pci-e cards aren't easy to find either... and at the end of the day a 7900 series card over a pci-e x1 interface wouldn't be much faster than a 7300 anyhow which is probably why asus didn't bother pushing it much.

 

[benjo plz.]

snip

*cough*expresscard*cough*

 

[Darkwave]

They didn't have enough bandwidth to run a half-decent GPU properly IIRC.

 

[Rroff]

heh aslong as your expresscard interface uses pci-e and not a USB interface... I have a bad habit of just calling it cardbus as I've used older laptops for so long.

At the end of the day even if its a pci-e x1 expresscard port the max theoretical bandwidth is far short of what you really need to run a graphics card... a full pci-e x1 expresscard only delivers up slightly over 300MB/s compared to over 2gig for agp x8... so really your looking at PCI graphic card generation which tops out at about the nVidia 5200 so your almost better off with the onboard graphics on the laptop.

 

[benjo plz.]

yeh, my point was that express card is a pcie 1x header .

 

[Rroff]

You'd still need some kinda adaptor tho to get a x1 slot presentation outside the laptop to connect the gpu to... unless you want to vandalise the laptop or hardwire the gpu to the slot hah.

 

[benjo plz.]

You'd still need some kinda adaptor tho to get a x1 slot presentation outside the laptop to connect the gpu to... unless you want to vandalise the laptop or hardwire the gpu to the slot hah.

Like the XG? or the Magma Expressbox.

 

[Rroff]

Not seen the magma expressbox... the XG included a GPU and appropriate power setup... I doubt that most of the off the shelf x1 GPUs could be powered well enough off the bus power from a laptop to work reliably.

Does sound like the OP might want to look at the magma expressbox.

 

[benjo plz.]

the XG included a GPU and appropriate power setup... I doubt that most of the off the shelf x1 GPUs could be powered well enough off the bus power from a laptop to work reliably.

The XG was meant to be shipped with a 16x 7900gs, and 1x uses more power than expresscards do, so an external adapter would be needed.