During the CES, ASUSTeK has officially released the XG Station. This product, designed for laptops, is a station for graphic cards. It connects to the laptop computer via the Express Card slot which natively uses the PCI Express protocol.
ASUSTeK made a demonstration of the station with an NVIDIA 7900 GS graphic card (this duo will be available in May at $600) but we don't know yet if ASUSTeK will sell the XG Station alone. If it is the case, it will be possible to include any card thanks to the presence of a PCI Express x16 slot.
The XG Station also includes a LCD monitors displaying information (volume, processor frequency, several temperatures or even the framerate), a microphone input and two USB 2.
We noted that the Express Card is limited to one PCI Express x1 link, or 250 MB/s bidirectional. This seriously reduces the performances of GPUs usually working with X16 links (4 GB/s). In practice, with previous tests, we measured performances divided by 2 approximately in x1 compared to x16 with a 7900 GTO!
Of course, this is much better than most of the laptops based on Intel integrated solution, but we believe that if you have the intention to buy a new laptop it will be preferable to directly invest the $600 in a serious integrated graphic solution rather than counting on the XG station…
