NVIDIA pursuing external graphics accelerators for laptops?
By Joanna Stern 
posted February 8th 2010 7:06PM
posted February 8th 2010 7:06PM
It's not everyday that we can say there's external laptop GPU love in the air, but right on the heels the appearance of the Gigabyte M1405 with its GeForce GT220 dock, NVIDIA is expressing interest in external laptop GPUs as well. Manager of notebook GPUs Rene Haas told X-bit Labs that he thinks external graphics adapters for laptops are a "big opportunity" for NVIDIA, though he noted the drawback of their high price tags. We assume he is referring to AMD's ATI XGP box (or Fujitsu Siemens's Lasso) which is the only one available -- the ASUS XG station (pictured above) that seemed to vanish into thin air after its brief appearance at CES 2008. Either way, Haas very clearly states that the large market appeal of affordable external GPUs is just his opinion, though we're going to assume his opinion holds a bit of water in Santa Clara.
@TacticalTimbo Agreed, this would be the obvious implementation. Put the external GPU in a DOCK for that thin 'n light. The GPU in the laptop part can be conservative (as long as it can decode video full screen), while the GPU in the dock could have all the bandwidth it needed and power and cooling to boot. A nice compromise. Given the number of docks they'd sell somebody like Dell probably wouldn't be willing to do a custom one for every laptop (since they all, sigh, use custom connectors), but for a few select models...
I have upgraded everything on my laptop and the only thing it lacks is updated graphics card. This whole idea was floating around when I bought my gaming laptop 3 years ago. It would be nice but I'm just getting a desktop anyway. Gaming laptops are kind a waste if you ask me.
The rest of the components in even cheap laptops are that powerful these days that they easily exceed their gfx, so something like this would be an ideal solution that enables people to play games on their laptop without the excessive price and weight of gaming laptops.
This thing would have a big market IMHO.. My laptop has 4 gigs of ram, 2 ghz core2 duo and intel onboard graphics.... can play LFD2 only at least resolution with all settings low... This would be a gr8 addon if cheap..
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Any if u see vaio, dell quite a few laptop series have good procesors n intel graphics..
Man I was just wondering the other day why this hasn't been done yet. I would by the crap out of one of these. I really hope this takes off.
Instant buy. Cause then my MacBook could actually be put to use and not CrossOver.
i might actually consider a lap top if they had options like that
This already exists, its called a VIDOCK 2. It costs $200 for the version without the video card (you insert your own).
There is also a DIY version that costs much less, about $140 for a hack that could even handle pci-e 2.0.
Both solutions work, so as long as you have a express-card slot, windows 7, and some know how, you too can play bioshock on your lappy (through an external monitor of course).
@joebob You just excluded 95%-99% of the Consumers out there.
We're talking about a solid consumer friendly product.
@Philip Han
I see what you mean there, and I agree, it is not for everyone (well the diy vidock is certainly not user friendly in the slightest), but the regular Vidock isn't too challenging that the casual reader of Engadget can't figure it out.
In a perfect world the vidock 2 is an easy install, all you need to do is put the pieces together and install the drivers and you should be all set. But this isn't a perfect world and everyone is going to have difference experiences and different problems, it just depends on how willing you are to get it to work.
The true user friendly experience would be some sort universal PCI-e x16 plug on the lappy that will allow to connect a video card without a hitch, since that doesn't exist, we have to make do, and I'm sure that people that:
a.want to play pc games,
b.only own a relatively powerful laptop that only has GMA graphics,
c.cannot even afford a desktop that has half the processing power of their laptop/or it is just not practical for them to own a desktop,
would be willing to give this a try.
You see the problem that Engadget is posing is that these devices are crazy expensive, well vidock 2 solves that problem already because it is cheap and it works. Granted, my Dad wouldn't know how to use install it, but you or me could, and that is what counts, b/c they are not the ones that want this, we are.
I think that external graphics processors will be as useful for individuals working in media and graphics as the external audio interface (i.e. Protools boxes and other pro-sumer grade interfaces) is for audio engineers for a couple of reasons. The flexibility afforded by having your own unit that you can bring with you to studios would allow you to comfortably work across multiple systems. Were the drivers compatible, you could capture video using a linux system, switch over to a Mac for editing, then use a PC for post-production (storing the files in a server or on an external drive as you go). If you try to do that now each program is going to encode and decode the pixels using different algorithms, causing noticeable degradation such as aliasing and other artifacts. Having a single unit would ensure that everything would be preserved from start to finish. I would definitely invest in an external GPU if it means I could do pro-quality video editing using a laptop with decent processing/ram instead of forking over a grand or more just b/c the laptop has been 'optimized' with a miniaturized GPU that kills my battery.
this thing was in the market then off the market, hopefully they can set the price right and make laptops able to play some real games.
Typical NVIDIA they have no idea how to reduce the size of their GPUs when it comes to improving graphical output. Their PCI cards get bulker and longer. I knew it was a matter of time before they declared their GPU's as separate units.
@cray
How is this a bad thing?
You got wimpy GMA lappy graphics for spreadsheets on the road for low power consumption, and a nice big beefy gaming machine when your home. Its the best of both worlds on one pc!
My question is why has it taken so long for these guys to figure it out!
@joebob
The less peripherals I have to lug around, the better. The only accessory I have for my T61 is my power brick. That's it.
Hell, I specifically sought out a laptop with a trackpoint because I don't want to carry around an external trackball, and touchpads are unusable.
actually, external graphics could be DIY'ed...look here...http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=397667
some benchmarks has been carried out on different notebooks too.
@Hazdaz
I respectfully disagree:
1. There's not going to be any significant overhead if it's simply an external PCIX x16 implementation: I'm assuming it would simply be a x16 slot, pulled out to the external of the laptop (and of course modified slightly.) This would seem the logical thing to do. I may be wrong on this; bit of guess work here.
2. Laptop CPUs are easily powerful enough for today's games; the i5 and i7 laptops have more than enough CPU power. The bottleneck is with the GPU.
3. Laptop HDDs are slow, but a) this is irrelevant as it only affects map loading times, and not in game performance b) SSDs are going to be in most/a lot of laptops by next year, possibly by the end of 2010. (Intel have recently told journalists they are ready to roll out the smaller nanometer SSD flash chips, meaning cheaper SSDs and higher capacities.)
I REALLY like this idea. I like to attend gaming LANs and that's when I want a gaming laptop. Almost all other times I don't like the added heft and drain of battery life that a gaming laptop invariably entails. I also hate having to heft my desktop with me to LANs. The near perfect solution is to have a decent weight laptop with decent battery life where the heavy and draining video card can be carried along if really necessary and otherwise left behind. I would buy this if it had decent performance and price.
I think this is great idea. The typical trouble I run into is that I like to play games (of many sorts, from eve online to CoD), but I travel hell lot often and I don't want to carry a huge laptop. I have now MBP 15" and I still think it is big. If I could have something like MB Air in size and weight which I can take to the journey and then come back home and plug it into external graphics card and have great graphics or may be even two external displays set up - that would be instant buy-in from me.
how would you connect it to the laptop though? whats the bandwidth on a laptop dock?
@acme64
Depends how you set it up, could use pci-e, usb3 or make a new interface standard an chip.
Love to see a flat dock with that charges laptop too, shouldnt be too hard if you make the whole thing a heat sink.
The XG Station was actually available for sale in Australia for a little while. It was pretty expensive and the video card was not particularly strong and neither was it user-replaceable.
@reticulate Oh and it connected through an expresscard slot.
I hate this whole trend of desktop-replacement laptops.
If you need anything larger than 14", get a damn desktop.
My PC is used for 4 things: Gmail, iTunes, viewing photos and updating my resume. For me, gaming in the future = a netbook with this external graphics system or services like OnLive. I'd sign up for OnLive tomorrow if it was available in the UK, then I'd never have to spend crazy money on graphics hardware ever again, and my games would always be "with me" just like all of my music is always with me on the iPod.
Even if something like this would cost a few hundred dollars you could easily buy a few hundred dollar cheaper laptop then some gaming specific laptop.
It's actually a cool, but not new, idea for those people who want their laptops to do double-duty -- on the road, it's a laptop. at home, it's a desktop i can play games on. i get that. but they used to just call this sort of thing a 'docking station' and some of the fancier docking stations came with their own graphics.
are we to believe they can convince us to lug around this big block everywhere we go too? that would be a different story.
Make this happen MORE