Brian's Brain

Two months back, I told you about the first ExpressCard-based product that "blew my socks off", Belkin's Notebook Expansion Dock. Unfortunately, the 'late November 2006' shipping forecast has come and gone with the product still not available, and the company hasn't yet responded to my question about which GPU is inside it. Without a unit in hand, I've no means of putting my Prying Eyes on it in order to ascertain its graphical attributes. But, given its $199.99 price tag, its numerous features and its promotional focus on 2-D and video functions at the expense of 3-D, I suspect its graphics muscle is relatively muted; perhaps, for example, there's a S3 GPU inside.

Asustek's XG Station, unveiled last week at CES, doesn't try to hide its graphics capabilities and, depending on what application you're running, they may offer a formidable upgrade to your laptop's built-in GPU. Asustek's unit translates the ExpressCard system interface, which effectively delivers x1 PCI Express v1.0 bandwidth, into a full x16 PCI Express 1.0 slot for a graphics add-in card. Like the Notebook Expansion Dock, it also offers USB and audio expansion, albeit to a limited degree as compared to Belkin's unit (and not including CAT5 Ethernet expansion, although the Asustek unit's support of Dolby Headphone virtual surround is a nice touch!).

The XG Station's primary focus is clearly 3-D graphics. You need only look at the LED front panel that provides readouts of GPU temperature, fan speed, frame-per-second performance and clock speed, and the ergonomic knob that enables the user to easily alter that clock speed. And, if you had any doubt after reading the prior sentence, note that the first XG Station implementation contains an Nvidia 7900GS graphics card! High-resolution displays rendering polygon-deficient scenes won't be unduly hampered by the narrow ExpressCard system interconnect. If, on the other hand, you try to throw a geometry-rich rendering project at the XG Station, your framerate will likely get clobbered.

How much will this GPU performance boost cost you? Asustek's release, which doesn't promise product until the beginning of next quarter, doesn't include a price, but Anand was able to finagle a $599 quote out of the company's CES booth representative. I should also probably point out that the XG Station isn't exactly portable, since it requires a dedicated AC outlet. But, for extreme gamers or graphical content creators who want to extend their multi-thousand-dollar systems' useable lifetimes, particularly given that neither ATI/AMD's Axiom or Nvidia's MXM graphics upgrade schemes has been widely adopted to date, the multi-hundred-dollar XG Station may be a compelling solution. For more product coverage, hit the following links:

• Ars Technica
• Digg
• ExtremeTech
• Engadget
• Gizmodo

The mind boggles at what might be possible when ExpressCard adopts the 2x bandwidth boost of the recently unveiled PCI Express v2.0 (more from Ars Technica and Slashdot)....

Followup: Belkin got back to me. The GPU inside what they're now calling the High-Speed Docking Station is from XGI (a spinoff merger of SiS and Trident), which was my other guess. It's XGI's Volari Z9; note the lack of 3-D hardware acceleration support. Belkin hopes to have product in my hands by month-end. Stay tuned for a review!