Asus presents external PCIe-video cards for Notebooks
Asus presented an external box for notebook video cards. Furthermore, the "XG Station" provides a built-in sound card and a USB-2.0-hub.
Standard x16 video cards can be attached to the XG Station, even newer models which use 2 slots.
The box is powered by an external power supply. Because the XG station is separately offered and available bundled with a 7900GS-video card, you can assume a wattage of about 50 Watt, which is the maximum that this card may demand. It is possible to over-clock the video card by the means of an adjusting knob.
Besides video functionality Asus also integrated a USB-2.0-hub and attached a sound chip of unknown origin to it. Its integrated out should support "Dolby-Headphone" coding.
Although this concept is what gamers dream about, there are yet a couple of open questions:
This module is attached to the Express-Card slot. This new slot, is only provided by notebooks which are equipped with a PCI-Express-chip set, which is only available since 2 years. The throughput is only about 250 MByte per second, whilst a x16-video card needs about 4 GByte/s. So the XG station is likely a bottleneck.
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