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External Thunderbolt Graphics Card On Its Way

Posted by timothy on from the hook-to-the-big-monitor-on-the-wall dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing — but faster. The only problem is, Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop — and more importantly you need to carry around a second monitor to actually use a ViDock. So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"

4 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thunderbolt = dead in two years. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Totally agree. I mean, a single connector that can drive a monitor, external disks, and a range of peripherals and is small enough to fit on something like a mobile phone? What possible use case is there for that?

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. "So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?" by macklin01 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So why not just buy a proper gaming laptop?"

    For docking stations and such. Plenty of us plop our laptop onto a docking station or a USB hub + monitor + speakers + keyboard + mouse anyway.

    It beats the hell out of hauling an overpriced 10-pound beast to the same office desk every day, when you can just keep better equipment (with better ergonomics) neatly arranged and haul a lighter machine to/from work.

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    OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
  3. No bandwidth limiting yet by EdZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Thunderbolt is only 4x PCIe 2.0, so you won't be using this to connect modern, desktop-class GPUs to your laptop

    For multi-GPU systems in current desktops at least, there's little to no performance penalty going from 16x to 4x.

  4. Gaming + laptop = contradiction by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just don't understand the purpose of a high end gaming laptop. It's always quite more expensive than the equivalent desktop; and ultimately you're playing with a small screen, a cramped keyboard, and an imprecise pointing device, in a far less comfortable way... unless you plug the laptop to an external screen, keyboard, and mouse, so what was the point of a portable anyway?

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    Circumcision is child abuse.