Notebook Technology : External Graphics Card

So you have a new laptop for which you shelled out good money or got lucky and got one as part of work. And then you decided to check out what gaming is all about and why everyone seems to be addicted to some game or the other. You decided to indulge and check it out for yourself. So you went to a store to pick up a game or perhaps sourced a pirated copy from somewhere. Titles like Hitman Blood Money, Doom 3 and Half Life 2 appealed to you. Or maybe you belong to the class of racing freaks and decided to check out the latest Need for Speed Carbon. Now you have the game and all that you need to do is install it and start indulging.

But this is where things go wrong. You start seeing error messages like "This game requires a Direct X 9 graphics card" or maybe "This game requires an Nvidia GeForce 5x00 series or the ATI X8xx series of video cards with minimum 64 MB Video RAM. Please check the system requirements on the box of the game". A lucky few of you might not get to see these error messages, but once you start playing, you feel like you are dodging bullets like Neo in Matrix. The game is very slow, not responsive and seems to flicker on the screen. This is called framing, the gaming nightmare. Now you curse yourself for having spent the moolah and wonder why you paid so much for your new laptop when you can't play a silly game which everyone else seems to be. You wonder why your latest Core 2 Duo with 1 GB of RAM and 80 GB of hard drive space stutters and stumbles. Welcome to the world of poor graphics cards being tortured by graphics intensive games.

Games are the most computationally intensive applications that a consumer can run. It can stress every component in the computer all the way from processor to memory to hard drive to network (multiplayer or online gaming) to graphic cards. Now, while you might have the best of the breed hardware for everything but the graphic card, you still won't be able to play that uber looking game which you have been dying to experience. The graphic card is the most important hardware factor in gaming. All the jazzy graphics you see on screen are mathematically intensive. Billions of mathematical operations are done every second to generate what you see on the screen. And to put it mildly, all that a graphic card does is do maths. The subject you probably dreaded all through your education. And now its back to haunt you when all you want to do is play a game. The reason we need a graphic cards to do the math, while you wonder why you have a processor which is supposedly intended to do math, is that a regular processor has other important things to do other than the math and hence gaming needs a dedicated maths processor. To be more specific, a floating point maths processor.

Laptops are designed for portability with focus on battery power saving. So they do not come with fancy hardware like powerful graphic cards (this excludes high end gaming laptops that we commonly do not see around us) that not only occupy space, consume power but also generate a lot of heat, burn your lap and kill the portability of your laptop. So now you have spent the money on the laptop and don't want to sell it. But you want to game as well. What do you do? Fear not, technology is hear to help.



Introducing Asus XG Station EN7900GS - The world's first external graphics cards that plug into your laptop. Now you can go out (very soon) and buy a graphics card that sits outside your laptop and plugs into the the express port and does all the maths you don't care about. Inside this box resides the Nvidia 7900 GS graphics chip that pumps your frames for a smoother game play. Also integrated into this device is a Dolby Digital headphone Jack support along with an LCD display that gives information on the current GPU (the 7900 GS Graphics chip) temperature, GPU fan speed and master volume. Plug this into your existing laptop (ensure you have an express port to plug it in) and say good bye to cheap graphics in your laptop. Enjoy gaming at its best on a portable device. The product is expected to start shipping starting Q2 of 2007. Once this is launched, expect other companies to launch similar devices and make your computing experience cheaper and fun. Enjoy!