Asus external graphics to launch next month

By: Simon Büchel

After over one year delay, Asus is set to release it's XG Station next month, but only to OEM and channel partners. When the retail versions become available is still unclear.

A second life for your old notebook? (Image source: Asus)

Asus hopes the XG Station can provide notebooks with entertainment capabilities that could only be offered by built-in graphics cards so far, but without the downsides, like heat, noise, added weight and lower battery life. The XG Station could be connected with a notebook whenever performance is needed, and plugged out if silence, weight and battery life are desired.

Asus will sell the XG Station with different Asus PCIe graphics cards, but not as a bare bone version without card. The price of the XG Station will thus depend mainly on the price of the card, plus whatever Asus demands for the station itself.

The XG Station draws power directly from a power jack and uses a notebook's PCI-Express interface (ExpressCard slot) to transfer data, which means a PCI-E 1x transfer rate. Since PCI-E 1x will seriously bottleneck any recent graphics card, it is unlikely that Asus is going to offer anything much faster than the nVIDIA 7900 GS they used for a demo of the XG Station at the CES 2007 (a GeForce 8600 wasmentioned in the last rumors). This will also put the XG Station at a disadvantage against AMD's ATI XGP, which uses a special interface that offers far superior bandwidth, though only on notebooks based on the Puma platform (which are equipped with the port).
In terms of interfaces the XG Station offers 2 USB ports, a microphone and audio port, TV-out, as well as a DVI.

In order to provide up to date information about the XG Station's condition, Asus built-in a LED display that shows the following information:

• GPU clock speed

• System master volume

• Current GPU temperature

• Dolby® Headphone feature status

• Current actual Frames Per Second (FPS) information

• GPU fan speed Indicator

A control panel is also built in to control settings through a graphical user interface, like switching modes between notebook and external screens or to change clock rates (over clocking).