ASUS XG Station And ATI XGP

its been over a year since the XG Station was announced

and not long since ATI announced theres.

anybody have any idea when either of these will actually be released?, because the XG station is over a year late, and the XGP doesnt have any release date aside from its being released with the "Fujitsu's AMILO Sa 3650"

and that has no release date at all

and im deffo planning on going with either of these, because i love stupidly powerful systems.

has anybody heard anything, or know anything about either of them? obviously the ATI one will probably be out this year, but maybe it will vanish like the XG did.

 

take a look at my sig. that one is already out.

 

With mid and low end GPU's and DDR2, These are not in the same league as the XGP which in the case of the Fujitsu Amilo and the XGP model on AMD's website, which sports a full 3870.

 

Can you use one of these in combination with an already fast, dedicated card, like a 9800 to get even more frames?

 

No, PC just uses the more powerful card since there is no interface allowing the external and internal cards to work together.

 

No.. but AMD promised that you could do that in the future.. with ATI cards

 

Look, I hate to burst your bubble, but don't be expecting too much out of external graphics card solutions. The expresscard interface may be fast, but it has nowhere near the bandwidth required to fully use anything above a GeForce 7300. While you can put any pci-express card in it, anything mid to high end will be severely crippled by interface bandwidth.

 

Yes they said their next platform will have a PCI-E 16x bandwidth-like port for a station that will give you full speed. It's gonna be pretty nice

 

Perhaps you haven't been doing much reading:

http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/xgp_technology_brief.pdf

XGP currently uses 8 lanes PCI-E 2.0 which is enough to run a 3870X2 with between 0-5% difference between 16 lane PCI-E 2.0

Keep in mind that PCI-E 2.0 has twice the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.1, so the PCI-E 2.0 8 Lane bandwidth of the XGP port is the same as a PCI-E 1.1 16x slot.

For that reason, a 3870, 3870x2, and perhaps even a 4850, 4870, and 4870x2 could be used in the XGP port without seeing any noticeable slowdown (at least not detectable without benchmarks.)

XGP is a viable solution for laptop mid-high end graphics.

 

XGP use a custom slot or port. It's not the standard PCIexpress slot that (i think) he was referring to.

 

TC im curious as to what you need it for, unless you have a different laptop not listed in your sig

 

The XGP requires you to have a puma laptop with a special slot. What he's been refering to are connected through an USB port

 

Okay, well that's nice that everyone is coming to his defense. I wasn't trying to pick a fight.

I noticed he said:

If he meant only external graphics solutions utilizing the USB or expresscard slot, than he is right.

However this thread is about XGP/other proprietary methods.

Again, not trying to step on toes, but his response was to the original poster, who was inquiring about specialized proprietary slots for graphics, like the XGP. While AMD has the exclusive license on XGP for the first year, it certainly doesn't rule out other manufacturers using the port after that time.

If it proves to be something that can find an upgrade path like USB (which will soon move into 3.0 spec), and be backwards compatible (say they are able to get a full 16 lanes pci-e 2.0 in the future), than there is a chance that it could become viable.

However I have no trouble admitting that what is possible is not always probable.

Until then, I have no qualms about buying a Fujitsu Sa 3650 or similar 12.1" or 13.3" notebook with this port (if a manufacturer would hurry up and come out with it already).