An External Video Card for your Laptop - ASUS GX2 - CES 2016
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,152 words · ~5 min read
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so we'll begin as always with a shout out to Squarespace thanks for allowing
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us to be here at CES 2016 this my friends is the kind of
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stuff I get really really excited about portability and performance with no
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compromises I was trying to find another p word it didn't happen anyway this is
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the Rog xg2 very creatively named the x
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is for extrem the G is for gophers and
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the two is for second generation none of which is obviously right it's external
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Graphics I don't know what the two is maybe they had an internal project that
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got Ken somewhere along the way but this one looks like it turned out pretty darn
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well so in terms of the size I would say it's fairly comparable to that magma
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thing that I checked out about 3 years ago in terms of the functionality it
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Bears very very little similari so they've got one of those like badass
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like uh plasma tube things going on in
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the front this is a bit of a new look for them I'm not sure if that's going to
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make it into the final product or not apparently yes that will make it into
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the final product because this is not the final product look the whole thing
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just like comes apart so there's a couple cooling fans in the top and what
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they've got down there looks like a completely custom PCB that is converting
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two external DC power bricks so in this case each of them is about a 220 watt
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external brick into whatever connectors you want there's actually a 24 pin ATX
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connector in there although I don't know what that would be for in this form factor but what's actually connected to
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it now is two PCI Express power connectors and we have a GeForce
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gtx980ti running in here and it looks like ASUS has pretty much gotten around
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the restrictions in terms of space for gpus by just making the Box a little bit
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bigger so you can have tall cards you can have long cards you can have rear
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blower cards you can put in pretty much whatever you want but that doesn't mean
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that the entire ecosystem will be totally open ASUS has not yet determined
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If the product while being definitely not valid dated on other maker notebooks
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will be compatible or whether it will be locked out and I personally feel pretty
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strongly it shouldn't be locked out because if you're willing to buy the Box
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you've already given ASUS your money so let us know in the comments if you agree
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with me in the meantime let's move on a little bit further so it adds not just
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display connectivity to your laptop it not adds not just more GPU horsepower
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but it also acts as a USB hub and I wonder does it have a land port back
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here or did you not manag to squeeze that in there looks like no l Port
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unfortunately but that's okay so basically the way it works is it's using
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a USB 3.1 type-c connector with
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Thunderbolt 3 to get a PCI Express 4X
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3.0 link to your graphics card which is by the way more than enough that's about
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equivalent to a PCIe gen 1 160x slot
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which is still not a bottleneck today so they're running all kinds of benchmarks
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over here on a mystery system that quite frankly they're being total [ __ ]
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about and here it is so they're getting a score of
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14,000 in fire strike which is pretty darn respectable you'd probably have to
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have a quad core CPU for that yeah turns out they do so they've got a Skylake
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core i7 6700 HQ running on this machine
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it's got 32 gigs of ddr4 memory a 512
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gig NVMe PCI Express SSD it's got uh I
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don't know what else is they won't tell me anything about it they're letting me
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look at the system info in 3D Mark but
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what they will not tell me they'll tell me that the processor the quad core like
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3.3 GHz turbo processor they're telling me it doesn't throttle but they're not
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telling me how the crap they are doing it um I don't believe them that it's an
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early prototype blah blah blah project that doesn't even have a name it's
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[ __ ] because the hinge on this thing is gorgeous the build quality of it is
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immaculate this is not an engineering sample I don't buy it at all in terms of
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I/O it's got a mini DisplayPort it's got two USB type- C's so one of those is
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for data over to that external box and one of them is actually for uh for
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charging power it's got uh headphone jack it's got a couple USB 3 point
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probably ones I would guess but who knows they're probably not going to tell me that either it's got a m it's got an
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SD card slot and this thing is gorgeous they're telling me the display is 1080p
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I don't believe them because because it doesn't look it doesn't look like it
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keyboard feels key okay okay the keyboard's a bit mushy maybe that's
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something they still have some work to do on but basically if this is a quad
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core that doesn't throttle in this form factor with that external box then they
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basically nailed it now the one Holy Grail thing is whether it can survive
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being unplugged without causing a system crash because you've effectively just
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changed the graphics card of a system on
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the Fly you've hot plugged a graphics card and let's give them a couple
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seconds they're advertising that it is functionality that it will have they're
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not necessarily saying that it works now so maybe it doesn't work yet ah yes well
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I wasn't going to leave the ASUS Booth without breaking at least one demo so
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there you go I broke it but they've got hopefully at least a few more months to
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get that fixed and I think that pretty much wraps up the ASUS booth for me
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thanks for checking out this video guys and thanks to Squarespace for allowing
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us to be here at CE s 2016 covering the show if you guys are looking to build a
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website I think you know where to go squarespace.com Linus use offer code
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Linus and start building your beautiful website today