Because the dock requires ASUS proprietary technology and only ASUS laptops will have it, we are told that the laptops will carry a mini-DisplayPort input connection, meaning that the GPU can be hooked straight back into the laptop if necessary. The external dock does need an external monitor to run. So there are a few things worth mentioning. The dock is designed to take any serious single GPU card up to 350W, and because the data comes over PCIe, the card can also be overclocked as if it was directly attached as in a normal desktop. The enclosure on display we are told is near final, and uses the same Mayan pattern-like design as ASUS’ current range of small gaming PCs. That being said, there were two data cables going from the dock to the laptop, making me think that this is actually two lots of 20Gbps maximum and the IC logic is there to reconstruct the bits from different PCIe lane data streams. Using a proprietary IC, ASUS is able to carry 32 Gbps of data over a passive Type-C cable (note, Thunderbolt 3 is limited to 20 Gbps over passive) to a dock that can decode the data. The external GPU dock on display from ASUS is a little different again to the laptops and AIO mentioned in the previous paragraph, by taking the PCIe lanes and passing the data over a Type-C interface. This has a variety of limitations such as hot plug probably won’t be enabled and it requires a reboot to switch between the graphics, but it does provide a stop-gap solution for sure.
If we look at several items on the market, namely the newly announced GX700 laptop from ASUS with a water-cooled graphics card, or the MSI GS30 series of laptops, or even something like the MSI AIO with an external graphics card - the trend is to pass the PCIe lanes through an interface as if the connection is transparent to the PC. However, ASUS’ implementation is considerably different. Third generation Thunderbolt offers up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth over an active cable, and it sounds like some implementations are now supporting hotplug, meaning that we will see some entering the market. Several reasons were given for them not being released, including limited bandwidth and the ability to hot-plug were cited as well as other factors. Intel’s Thunderbolt line of ICs has historically been the source of musings, and we saw first and second generation Thunderbolt enclosures being demonstrated at previous events. During CES this year it was clear that one of the overriding themes was external graphics solutions.