Review: Asus XG Station Pro

Conclusion

On the face of it, an external graphics enclosure for an Ultrabook makes perfect sense. Mating a high-performance GPU via Thunderbolt 3 brings proper gaming into play, and today's latest external boxes can cater for best cards on the market.

The Asus XG Station Pro aims to bring this external graphics goodness without making a styling fuss. Well-built, attractive, and reasonably compact due to an external PSU, installation of even a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is a cinch. Lighting is muted, cooling is reasonable, but one concern is with the lack of connectivity present on the back. Surely a unit such as this deserves to have Ethernet capability at the very least?

Performance is still some way off a decent desktop system, though, and the lower-resolution framerate drop-off is in obvious evidence on some titles, but that's the clear trade-off when connecting over Thunderbolt 3 to a lower-wattage CPU. In this regard, the XG Station Pro performs entirely as expected.

The market for external GPU enclosures hasn't really taken off, most likely due to the high cost. Priced at £300 and primed for practically every graphics card, the XG Station Pro is a step in the right direction, though we do wish it would provide more connectivity and, for that matter, charge an Ultrabook at the same time.

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TBC.

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