External video card for notebooks?

Geoff

VIP Member
It's finally reality! AMD's XGP allows you to connect any PCI-E 2.0 x16 (8x electrical) video card you want to your notebook.

amd_lasso2.jpg


The Inquirer said:
THE AMD PUMA launch was more interesting for the bits around Puma than for Puma itself. There were a bunch of goodies from Lasso to Cinema 2.0, including a clip of the 770 'Ruby' demo.

The biggest news of the show was Lasso, now called AMD XGP technology, and it is a killer app for notebooks. It is an external PCIe2.0 8x breakout box that you can put a full blown GPU in. As you can see, you can put a full 3870, soon 4870, into it and game on your notebook without giving up much.

The XGP box can do Crossfire, so you can theoretically do 3 way on a notebook. Also, since it is fully PCIe2.0 compliant, you can render on the external box and pass back to the notebook just like a normal card.

This concept was really done right, in addition to the GPU, the XGP box also has USB ports on it, and they are passed over the same cable. Multi-monitors, gaming, Crossfire and the rest, what's not to love? The answer is of course Vista, but that is another topic.

OK, it is a topic for now because MS had the next speaker up trying to show how the Broken OS wasn't actually broken. They failed, but did so in full view of a few hundred reporters and VIPs. The idea was the new 780M chipset has amazing graphics power and can do multiple HD streams. It actually can.

MS put up the broken OS with an HD stream as the desktop background. So far so good. Then they added a 720p movie playing in a window. Not bad yet. Then they added a game running in 'HD', whatever that means, and started flipping through screens with alt-tab. It was skipping like mad, broken like the OS. Moral 1 - Don't do three 'HD' things at once on Vista. Moral 2 - Don't use Vista.

And for those who are skeptical, this is right from the horses mouth!
http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/index.html
 
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sorry for double posting

just a question. it says on the link it connects via a special external pci-e 2.0 slot. what the hell is that?
 
sorry for double posting

just a question. it says on the link it connects via a special external pci-e 2.0 slot. what the hell is that?
My guess is that at least for now, it's only on a select few notebooks. However they are working to have it standard on more and more laptops.
 
I don't think this is going to be an immediate fix to laptops inability to game.

I can see this idea being integrated with portable hardrives in the future though.
 
These things have been out for along time now!! I guess they are better now though.
External graphics cards, yes. However the AMD XGP uses the new PCI-E 2.0 interface on hopefully more and more laptops. The older designs used very restrictive interfaces, AMD claims that the performance of the XGP far exceeds what those other products can achieve.

OMEGA, how do they perform against internal desktop GPUS?
Since it's not actually released yet, there aren't any benchmarks from what I could find. However I would expect it to be fairly similar with the mid-ranged to some higher end cards, but because right now it only runs at 8x speed, I'm sure it's restrictive with some of the dual-GPU cards.
 
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