Hardware.fr - Finally the XG Station?

Finally the XG Station?
>> Graphic cards

Written by Nicolas Gridelet
Published on May 16, 2008

URL: http://www.behardware.com/news/lire/16-05-2008/#9650

According to Matbe, ASUSTeK may soon launch the XG Station which has been awaited for almost a year and a half now! Destined for laptops, it’s a graphic card station which is connected to the laptop via an ExpressCard slot using the PCI Express interface. MSI has also produced a similar product, the Notebook Station, but in both cases it’s an ExpressCard (and therefore x1) slot that is used for connection to the PC and not a real external PCI Express x4 or x16 port. In addition, it’s not impossible that there is only PCI-E 1.0 support while the Centrino 2 (Montevina), which supports PCI-E 2.0, will be launched next month.

The Taiwanese giant finally chose to include a card, a GeForce 8600 GT set at 540 MHz for the GPU and 700 MHz for the 256 MB of GDDR3, and it’s also an SLI Ready version. We will just have to see if the “bottleneck” connection to the PC will at least enable seeing the gains usually associated to multi-GPUs.

Otherwise, there are two USB ports, a TV, DVI-I and audio outputs and a microphone jack which has Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual speaker, Dolby Digital Live and Dolby Pro LogicIIx support. ASUSTeK took the time to establish a list of this same brand’s compatible laptops: the W5F, W6F, U5F, U1E, F3SA, F3SV, U6S, R1E, U3F and Lamborghini while it’s unsure whether others will function perfectly when used with this device. Finally, we are still waiting for the price...