This bizarre contraption takes quite a bit of explaining, and it's hardly something that every consumer is going to rush to buy. Listen: It's an external video card. Bear with me. I'll explain.

 

Say your notebook doesn't have 3D graphics (as is the case with many a crippled business machine). But you want to play Oblivion nonetheless. So you just hook up the an external video card (called XG Station, at least for now) via your laptop's ExpressCard slot, and run a cable to an external monitor.

 

Close the lid and boom, the monstrous XG Station takes over and does all the graphics processing instead of the lame chip inside the laptop. Because ExpressCard has very high available bandwidth, this is now a real possibility.

http://tech.yahoo.com/ces/null/11883;_ylt=...DLzZS7TWEyyL5A5

 

^pictures

 

Interesting

It will go the way of other brilliant ideas.

IBM have a docking station for the Thinkpad that can take a couple PCI cards, including a video card, so it's not that novel.

Me want see SLi 8800 GTX external laptop card

The biggest hurdle would be the connector ... after all, the motherboard is finely balanced to allow the various component timings to match.

It will go the way of other brilliant ideas.

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Will it fail? Prolly, but I still think it's a good idea. What will kill it is that it's too big and kind of would kill the portability factor. Plus, it prolly costs alot.

Well, I think the biggest problem is that the market that buy laptops don't buy gaming rigs. (Although there is a niche market, with Rock, for example, marketing to the portable gamers.)

 

Of course, all innovation is good news, as this will have unexpected consequences and unknown potential positive impact on technological commodities.