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Docking stations and graphics cards ?

post #1 of 6
12/13/08 at 9:09pm
Thread Starter 
Can a decent graphics card plugged into a docking station turn a laptop into a relatively up-to-date gaming machine ? Are there any special performance considerations, compared to how effective the graphics card would be in a PC ? Also, can the signal from the card be fed back into the laptop screen or is an external monitor necessary for such a configuration to work ?

What brand laptops support docking stations with adequate pci-e slots?
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post #2 of 6
12/13/08 at 11:30pm
okay... so a couple of things here.

first off, laptops dont work that way. none of them have a dedicated docking station which does what you are wanting.

secondly, the closest you will get is the asus xg station which although okay will not feed back into your laptop monitor and will not provide near the same level of performance as you would see in a better laptop or a dedicated desktop despite using desktop cards. of course this would also require the product to be available which it is not at this time.

so in short, no there is no way to turn a not so good laptop into a good gaming one easily.
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post #3 of 6
12/14/08 at 12:43am
The XG Station has been on the drawing board for a couple years now, I'm really skeptical if it'll ever come out at all.

Really all docking stations do is provide extra ports, USB, legacy, and display. This way you can have much more hardware hooked up to your system than you could when it is undocked.
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post #4 of 6
12/14/08 at 4:59am
there has been more talk of it being released lately, but asus has not put out any real dates for that and like you said, im really skeptical of if it will ever happen.

i am betting its because of the serious speed limitations and until they can find a way around that its not gonna happen.
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post #5 of 6
12/14/08 at 7:36am
Thread Starter 
Oh well. What's led me to at least hope this might be possible are these cases of people putting graphics cards in thinkpad advanved docks:
http://www.tradersworld.com/computer...gStation_4.htm
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/m...cending&page=1

And the next thing I was thinking was that maybe this could be used for more then more displays. After all, laptops nowadays have quite decent specs, but most have crappy integrated graphics - so if there was a way around that, other then getting one with a dedicated GPU...
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post #6 of 6
12/14/08 at 1:25pm
The problem even with the advanced dock for Thinkpad is the card is crippled to 1x PCIe bandwidth AND only two cards work with the darned thing, neither of which are much higher performing than dedicated GPUs that are available. Even if the dock wasn't nerfed to supporting only two specific cards there is no PCIe power connector to power anything that'd be worth the expense in upgrading. Heck, Dell dropped an expansion slot from the E Series docking stations.
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