An external graphics card that's actually nearing release? Be still our hearts! Fujitsu Siemens' recently leaked external unit, which will be based on ATI XGP technology, is actually really, really close to hitting retail -- according to a piece over at Fudzilla, anyway. Slated to be titled Lasso, the RV670-based device should be more than enough to handle basic tasks, but unfortunately, benchmarks were off limits. On the upside, digital photography was not, so head on down to the read link for a few more snaps.

Phew. A few more months of nothing and we would've been forced to put this thing on vaporware watch. None of that nonsense will be necessary now, however, as ASUS has finally gotten its act together and officially launched the ROG XG Station. Hailed as the "world's first VGA and multimedia docking station," the ExpressCard-interfacing unit comes bundled with a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT, four USB 2.0 ports and a snazzy display for good measure. Not unlike ASUS at all, there's nary a mention of a price or release date -- so yeah, we're right back where we started.

Although external graphics on a laptop were once a pipe dream, things are starting to come together for those yearning for desktop-style graphics processing on a mobile machine. MSI's first shot at the solution is apparently dubbed Luxium, and our Chinese brethren were able to steal a few shots from the display kiosk at Computex. Details are a bit scant at the moment, but the device will apparently provide a PCI-e to ExpressCard interface to get your desktop GPU interfacing with your lappie, several USB ports, a "USB to LAN" connector, S/PDIF in / out, optical audio input, and 7.1-channel Dolby Digital support. Yeah, we can't wait to see the benchmarks on this one either, but for now you'll have to be content with tapping the read link and taking a good first look at this promising product.

As microprocessors increase in efficiency and semiconductors diminish in size, the power required for them to function would also decrease -- in an ideal world, anyway. Unfortunately, this hasn't exactly been the case. If we're to believe the rumors, ATI's next major graphics core, dubbed the R600, will be packed to the brim with pixel pipelines and shader processors to handle the tasks that lie ahead in Windows Vista (if it ever comes out, of course), and, you know, games. But the crazy part here is that the chipset will supposedly require so much power that only an external implementation could provide the level of power necessary to satisfy those demands. An outboard graphics card, however, would one-up internal boards by providing a new level of flexibility. For starters, the same board could power your notebook and desktop, and laptop gamers would have access to bleeding-edge graphics that could turn a relatively weak notebook into a suitable LAN-party machine without the expense of an entirely new rig. Of course, there's still the issue of an external interface that could handle the multi-gigabit bandwidth required to make this system feasible not yet existing, but who knows, maybe those microchip wizards from AMD can give ATI a hand in bringing this to fruition without kicking our kilowatt meters into overdrive -- for now though, our quad-SLI setups are doing just fine, thanks.

[Thanks, Mack S.]