G55VW gets thunderbolt (from July)

Press slurge here: The G55VW Gets Intel Thunderbolt - Republic of Gamers

With link to discussion here: G55 Thunderbolt clarification

I did a quick site search for G55VW and found nothing so sorry if this has already been posted.

Spec wise though - looks rather awesome. NV660M, IB i5/i7 and all the usual bits. The main thing though is the thunderbolt availability.

Been waiting about 18 months for this. This laptop + thunderbolt to PCIe bridge board (they will come, around already in small/expensive numbers) and I get to have a VERY nice laptop for on the road with the full power of a desktop once it's home.

Will be watching for something with 3x PCIe: eGPU, hardware raid 5 + soundcard as far as the bridge board goes.

 

There was a discussion about the thunderbolt in this thread:

Asus ROG G55 & G75 in April with gtx 670m

But its kindof dead now.

Im also eagerly awaiting this release of the G55, was about to pull the trigger on the current one till i found out about the thunderbolt addition in July.

 

Is there any retailer (preferably the kind that let you customize everything) that offers the Thunderbolt version yet? Or have they not come out? I believe that most places that claim to sell the Thunderbolt version don't actually have the Thunderbolt version.

 

From what ive read, theres no retailer at the moment that is offering thunderbolt. Also no official word yet on when will be available.

If you look here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...g-g55-g75-april-gtx-670m-172.html#post8699630

a retailer is saying possibly Q4
i dont think ill wait that long though =/

 

I was going to wait as well, but then I said screw it. If I keep waiting I'll never buy anything, and with the speeds of USB 3.0 it'll be more than enough. Not like I plan on gaming off an external...even if I did the speed from USB 3.0 is more than enough to game from. Lets face it, depending on the file size my Passport can do around 100MB/s read and that is more than enough for me when it comes to an external source.

 

Yeah i think ill go for it in the next couple weeks and import from Xotic. Ive been weighing up what id loose and gain with the displayport and thunderbolt. Though everything i use has USB and i wont be planing on purchasing thunderbolt drives if theyre going to cost a significant premium over USB3 with no performance gain.
Just need to find some more info if i can get a RAID 0 going in the G55 if i replace the optical.

 

I contacted a distributor who contacted Asus and reported that they weren't coming until Q4. What a shame.

 

Hey guys, found some good news.
One of the ASUS reps has confirmed that G55's with thunderbolt are shipping out next week at the ROG forums.

G55 Thunderbolt clarification - Page 3

 

So what exactly does Thunderbolt get you aside from fact access to storage?

 

You could also connect your display there, have included speaker (like with HDMI, just with higher resolutions) and included networking. All in a single display included, see the new Apple screen for an example.
In the future it might be possible to add an external powered GPU, for much higher gaming speeds (but needs to be developed first).
But in the end it's just an other high bandwith port on your computer that is in competition to USB.

 

Huh interesting, while it is attractive I'll wait 6 months for them to get it worked out. No sense waitng on a lappy now for a feature that won't be mainstream until 2013. Not to mention even if it were to hit big soon it would be more money than I'd want to spend to get the good stuff. For now I'll keep my desktop and my laptop lol

 

The next Clarkdale chip from Intel will have thunderbolt support built in. It SHOULD mean that adding thunderbolt becomes a $20 part choice. USB3 can keep being the go-to connector of choice for single drives etc. Thunderbolt for external PCIe bridge boards. These WILL definitely come (actually they are already here but you don't want to know how much they cost). There was a company doing expresscard (whatever the external card slot is on modern laptops anyway) to PCIe bridge boards so they just need to bridge over thunderbolt instead and we have a <$100 external box for housing graphics cards/etc. Considering the bandwidth available to PCIe 3.0 (I think ivy bridge, certainly clarkdale if not) we should easily be in the 10-20GB range for bandwidth which makes all current graphics card completely viable. Add a raid card, decent sound card, whatever else you may want (there's the bandwidth for even a 3 to 4 slot PCIe bridge board) and you have a single plug to boost a laptop up to desktop levels of power.

I honestly see computing going in this direction. Laptops are outselling desktops by a fair margin. Offer people the advantage of a laptop they can take away with them that becomes a full powered desktop when at home and that metric is likely to go further in laptops favour.