Asustek XG Station external graphics card

make an option to enable/disable routing back to the laptop lcd then everybody will be happy

 

And as far as I know, the XG station plugs in to the wall directly. Its not meant to be portable, as Cori said; the XG is more of an uber-dock...

 

I still don't get why people want to play on the laptop screen using a external GPU... I mean, I like gaming on my lappy screen, but that's with the internal GFX. When you get that sort of über-dock, you need a proper screen.

 

Theres 2 attractions for this: its cheaper because they don't need to buy an external monitor (a lot of people already have one though...I have a 19" Sony) and secondly, it makes the XG portable. Except it isn't because you need a wall socket anyways...

 

I have the need to bring a powerful laptop to lan parties,but i dun wan to bring the desktop lcd along coz it would be too heavy.

 

universal external battery with mods will solve that problem
lol..

 

The XG station is nowhere near small and portable, it's shape also kills it(A giant 'L').

 

but neways i found a site a while ago that benched the xg station with various nvidia graphics cards
of the 6 7 and 8 series i think and generally the scores were basically the same as x16 except each x1 score was lowered by maybe and 1/8th

i don't have the link unfortunately as i stumbled upon this site and apparantly i didn't favorites it, can't really find it either it was in japanese or german

so this lead me to believe that bandwidth isn't everything in performance

 

I agree the XG is a desktop replacement mod. A permanent fixture. It should still be portable enough to bring to LAN parties and to and from school, but not much more than that.

 

It will be portable enough to bring to lan parties (because together with a laptop, it's still smaller than most desktop), but not to school. There's also no need for it in school.

 

I mean like College. It is easy to take back and forth from home to college.

 

Oooooh. If you mean bring it from college dorm to home, then yeah, it's kinda easy. Could be a bit fragile for airplanes though. If you mean bring it to classes, it's still not easy and soo not the point of the XG-station.

 

does anyone really think this thing will see the light of day.if it actually shows up somewhere for sell.i may get back in the lappy business.gaming laptops are just to pricey for what ya get imo.it would cost me out the rear to get a lappy as gaming capable as my current desktop.

 

I'm hoping it does. It's a great idea, especially for students that want a useful laptop but still want to game at home.

 

That would be Great. Then you could buy a 13.3 Inch laptop and still game on it!

 

Actually, Asus was demoing this at CES this year on the 12" W5F notebook. If it hits the market, it should be within the next 2 months that it does so. I am sincerely hoping that it hits a $350 price point, since it comes with a $200 graphics card (8600GTS).

 

well i am betting that people already know this...but when i was scrolling throught the previous pages of this forum it sounded like they didnt

but asus has announced that there WILL be an option to route display through an external monitor or through your laptop LCD.

here is a link

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=5369

its at the very bottom 2nd from last paragraph.

 

Bleh, there hasn't been any new information on this for awhile. It's almost like Asus just let the XG Station fall off the face of the Earth...

 

Well is there a release date or something?

And how much of a performance gain would I get up from an X1600 in my laptop now and a 7900GS externally in the XG station?

 

The only unofficial release date was "beginning of Q2, 2007."

And as far as I know, it wouldn't help you at all. The 7900GS connected through express slot seems to give relatively equal performance to a Go7600/x1600.

 

Close enough to having the same performance as to make the XG not worth purchasing. (that was a really convoluted sentence)

This really only makes a big difference to those with integrated graphics cards in ultraportables and the like.

 

any new info on the release date yet?

 

No. I would expect both the Asus forums and the Gaming forums to light up like a d@mn christmas tree if anyone ever gets a definitive release date, though, so I wouldn't worry about missing it.

 

Anyone know anything about the MSI version of this thing?

Nox

 

Seems like the Asus XG station has fallen off the face of the Earth since there's been no recent official mention of it. -_-

 

Yea....I know that some of the resellers have one (MilestonePC does, at least) so its there...And at Computex they said Q3 with an 8600GTS.

How realistic that date is, I have no idea.

 

:/ Damn..Was hoping there would be some news.

 

Im going to sound like a troll repeating this,

But it will never happen.

 

No, it will happen eventually, just not in the kind of time frame Asus was implying. I bet Asus does eventually release the XG station. I'm not sure what the hold-up was, since clearly they got pre-production models working. Maybe they decided the cost would just be too high, or their wasn't enough demand, or something.

 

I think they are holding out for a higher bandwidth version (with PCI-E 2 or whatever), or a version that outputs directly on the notebook screen.

 

Ya theres a real version coming out in the next round of notebooks

This product would just poison the public to the idea because it doesnt work.

Nvidia and ati have their official versions ready to bring to market.

This will never be for sale Ill put a wager on it with anyone.

 

No, I think it will ship eventually. This is an item that has a lot of potential, and has seen a lot of attention over the last 6 months or so since it was debuted. Asus wouldn't give up on such a profitable product....I hope.

What are these Nvidia and ATI versions you were talking about? Care to elaborate?

 

ATI has the Lasso, but there is far less press about it than the XG Station; presumably it is further behind in dev. How can I tell Asus that I will pay big money for this thing? The GPU is the one factor in my mind that separates lappies from notebooks and this bridges the gap.

 

Oh yea, I remember reading about that in like March. The external CrossFire thing, right? Isn't it still in dev? The Asus XG is in preproduction stage already...

 

So I haven't had a chance to read through everything quite yet, but I've tried to get a general idea of this product. So it seems pretty clear that this product will not be able to plug into a USB slot, and there has been talk about it going into the ExpressCard slot. Is that possible? Or is the ExpressCard still too slow?

 

This product is probably dead. Asus may or may not eventually release a version of it, but most likely not in the near future.

The idea is that it attaches through an express card slot, so it has PCI-E x1 speed. This limits the speed to about that of a desktop 7600GT. Thus it would still be helpful to an ultraportable or a laptop with integrated graphics, though it would never reach the speeds of newer performance mobile graphics cards (8600M-GT, HD2600XT, 8700M-GT), and it wouldn't even come close to the power of a true gaming desktop.

 

A desktop 7600GT sounds pretty good when you're coming from integrated graphics.

But I agree, it looks like consumers may not see the Asus XG station in its current form.

 

I planned on getting this one, but looking at that picture the in- and output is dvi. Well my flatscreen supports dvi but not my notebook. This is too bad.
EDIT: I just realized my bad, the input comes from the pciE-card and theres no need for an dvi-output of the notebook. The screen has to support dvi though....

 

wow i had already forgotten about his asus gadget, now i see they have some competition.

 

They can't do this through the expresscard slot, but what about a special expansion bay port on the bottom of the notebook? Can't they sell this as a part of a special dock?

 

I think this is the best invention ever for notebook computers.
Asus stands for quality products so i don't think they will sell crap

I heard they will come with an XG station with SLI to

 

The xg station was demoed (see PC magazine), and is real, but the last I heard they were having problems with Vista drivers, so it wasn't ready for retail.

 

so when and where am i gonna be able to see this in stores?

 

Never. Possibly in your imagination, if it's vivid enough.



Seriously though, I doubt the XG station in it's demoed form will ever make it to consumers.

 

I agree, I just don't see how it can work. And if it does work, I don't think that people are going to get the performace they want/expect from it. It is a pretty cool idea though.

 

It works, its just that its been right around 10 months since it debuted, and it still hasn't come out yet.

 

Oh no, as Vivek posted, it definitely works, and other solutions similar to the XG are even available on some systems (mostly as proprietary docks though). However, what with the desktop graphics card market exploding in performance since Asus first started working on this project, suddenly being able to achieve speeds of 7600GT don't seem so amazing anymore, and when you add that in to the fact that even on a 14.1" notebook you can get dedicated graphics more powerful, I doubt Asus would see much of a profit with the XG in it's current form.

I do however hope that they'll still consider an XG2 connecting through a proprietary docking port to future Asus laptops, as I believe with such a system you could get close 8800GT speeds, or at least up to X1900XT speeds.

 

So.... I remember seing this ALLONG time ago... theres a company called magma who offers a solution just like this

Only downturn... is... no one buys it... no one reviews it... and the price starts near 1 grand.

Anyways... How on earth will you achieve 8800gt speeds? I mean... 8800m gtx sli will

But through express card 34/54 you will not be able to.... unless they are planning on some laptop that has a special express port which will allow X16 pci-e (Oh mama! thatd be nice) so we can work on a 14 or 15.4 inch (maybe smaller) and once at work or home plug that baby in and you can always keep up with "Neat desktop" speeds and cheaper + better than laptop gpus... this is my vision which could work in my mind... And I would buy that lappie if it made sense to me.

 

anyone know when this is coming out or suggest an alternative, ive got a laptop but the intergrated graphics are not good enough for some games. im getting a PS3 but id still like to play games on my laptop

 

hook up your ps3 to your laptop and call it a day