Along with ASUS ‘announcement of its latest 13-inch ROG Flow X13 gaming notebook, it also unveiled an interesting new external graphics dock to accompany this notebook. Called the ROG XG Mobile GV301, the external graphics dock was designed to increase the capabilities of the ROG Flow X13, transforming it into a lightweight and powerful portable gaming device. And although the graphics slots themselves are not new, this one stands out for its portability, with the slot being similar in size to a second laptop.
From a high level perspective, the graphic dock lives up to its name. At its heart, of course, is a high-performance GPU, with ASUS taking advantage of NVIDIA’s new RTX 3070 and 3080 laptop adapters, both of which will be a significant improvement over the Flow X13 integrated GeForce GTX 1650 graphics adapter. Along with this, the dock can power the Flow X13 – thanks to its integrated 280 W power supply – and offers several ports including HDMI and DisplayPort, a Gig Ethernet connector, 4 USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a card reader Integrated SD.
Notably, like some previous efforts to provide graphics stations for thin and light laptops, ASUS is going with a proprietary connection here instead of relying on Thunderbolt. The unnamed connector is divided into two segments, one carrying PCIe 3.0 x8 data while the other segment is a USB-C connector for carrying USB power and data. This significantly limits dock compatibility, but provides twice as much PCIe bandwidth as Thunderbolt 3 or 4 would.
As mentioned earlier, one of ASUS ‘design goals for the ROG XG Mobile is portability, so it can be loaded with the Flow X13 instead of serving as a relatively static dock at home. To that end, the dock is 29.6 mm thick, with a 208 mm x 155 mm footprint, making it comparable in size to a second laptop. It also weighs similar (if a little denser) at 1 kg (2.2 pounds). Appropriately, ASUS is providing a case with Flow X13 to charge the laptop and XG Mobile, simplifying this process a little.
The thermal solution on ASUS ROG XG Mobile
The ROG XG Mobile is launched this quarter, with a price to be announced.
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