The ROG XG Station 3 features Thunderbolt 5 connectivity and supports NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series, AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series, and Intel Arc Series graphics cards.
ASUS has announced the ROG XG Station 3, an external GPU dock designed for laptops with Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. The device supports desktop graphics cards from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series, RTX PRO 6000 Series, AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series and Intel Arc Series.
The dock utilizes Thunderbolt 5, which ASUS says provides "up to 80 Gbps of bidirectional bandwidth" and supports "Thunderbolt 5 Bandwidth Boost," which increases bandwidth to "120 Gbps in one direction for display traffic." The device is backward compatible with Thunderbolt 4 laptops, though these systems will operate at lower connection speeds.
Regarding power and charging, the ROG XG Station 3 includes:
ASUS confirms that the XG Station 3 does not include a power supply. Users must install their own SFX or SFX-L PSU with sufficient capacity for the selected graphics card.
The dock features an open-air design with an integrated GC-HPWR connector for ASUS BTF 2.5 graphics cards. This allows compatible models, including the "ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 BTF Edition and TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5080 BTF OC Edition," to receive power without a visible graphics card power cable. Conventional graphics cards are also supported using standard PCIe power connections.
The dock supports graphics cards measuring up to 361 × 139.3 × 93.9 mm.
While the interface supports high bandwidth, Thunderbolt 5 limits PCIe tunneling to 64 Gbps. This is approximately the bandwidth of four PCIe 4.0 lanes, whereas a desktop motherboard provides a graphics card with a full x16 slot. ASUS has not published performance numbers for the dock.
The ROG XG Station 3 aims to allow laptop users to connect desktop graphics cards for gaming, content creation and AI workloads. ASUS has not yet provided a price or a release date for the device.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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