Featured

External Graphics: The Way Forward For Gaming Laptops?

MSI's GUS II providing discrete class desktop graphics through a Thunderbolt connection.

The graphics market is taking leaps and bounds every year in terms of performance, but not necessarily making great progress in the realm of power consumption. Consequently, most ‘Gaming Laptops’ are struggling to keep up with high performance graphics without sacrificing battery life or the size of the laptop itself. Given the fact Nvidia’s high performance GTX 580M card consumes around 100W of power and is equivalent to the GTX 560Ti 384 cores in terms of performance, this illustrates the fact high performance requires high power consumption.

Consequently, Gaming Laptops like that struggle to maintain battery life unless constantly plugged in. But since the majority of Gaming Laptops would be left plugged in when being used for gaming it makes sense to suggest that external graphics are a realistic suggestion, if your laptop is going to be plugged in anyway how difficult would it be to plug in an external graphics card docking station powered separately from your laptop. This not only boosts your gaming laptop’s performance, but also allows it to hold a ‘weaker’ graphics card onboard meaning in the times when it is being used unplugged or on-the-go it will not drain the battery as much. It also has a positive affect on the life expectancy of your laptop, a weaker graphics card mean less power is pulled through the system circuitry, therefore less heat which ultimately means components will last longer.

Currently this market is relatively ‘new’ so we take a look at what is on offer now and take a brief look forward with some of the prototypes we have seen over the past few months, most notably the external graphics card docking station MSI unveiled at CES 2012 in Las Vegas which is dubbed the ‘GUS II’.

Page: 1 2 3 4 5

Ryan Martin

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Possible Price Revealed

According to a new report, the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU will be very expensive. It…

18 hours ago

AMD Krackan Processor with 6 Zen 5 and Zen 5c Cores for Budget AI Laptops Leaked

A new AMD processor in the form of an engineering model has been leaked in…

18 hours ago

SK Hynix Begins Production of First 321-Layer NAND Chips

SK Hynix has claimed to be the first company to mass-produce 321-layer NAND memory chips.…

18 hours ago

Trust Gaming GXT 609 Zoxa 2.0 PC Speakers

SOUNDS GREAT – Full stereo sound (12W peak power) gives your setup a booming audio…

22 hours ago

PowerA Wired Controller for Nintendo Switch

Special Edition Yoshi design Ergonomic controller shape with Nintendo Switch button layout Detachable 10ft (3m)…

22 hours ago

Logitech G Saitek PRO Flight Rudder Pedals

Fluid Motion: These flight rudder pedals are smooth and accurate that enable precise control over…

22 hours ago