In other words, the concept of an external graphics card certainly sounds appealing at first blush, but once you analyze its actual use cases you can begin to see why the ViDock is really the only product of its kind. It’s better to look at the ViDock as something that you would leave at the office, like the Sony Vaio Z docking station - but again, who plays Crysis at work? And if your job involves 3D graphics, you’re going to use a proper workstation, not a laptop. Now, you could carry a secondary monitor with you - but then you could just buy a proper gaming laptop in the first place. The ViDock doesn’t allow you to feed graphics data back into your laptop: you need an additional monitor (or two) to reap the benefits of the external, desktop-class GPU.
Then there’s the need to carry an LCD monitor with you.
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A Thunderbolt version of the ViDock would alleviate this problem considerably, but even Thunderbolt only operates over 4x PCI Express 2.0 - and it isn’t understood whether an external graphics card would get the full 4x - bidirectional 16Gbps (2GB/sec) - or just 2x. The ViDock sounds like it could help on both counts, but there are two big problems: The existing ViDock uses ExpressCard, a socket that is only connected to the system bus by 1x PCI Express 1.0, which has a total throughput of 2.5Gbps - enough space for a graphics card that can beat an integrated GPU, but certainly not enough bandwidth for a modern graphics card like the GTX 560.
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For as long as portable computers have existed we have chased the laptop that is both powerful enough to play games and also light enough to carry without sustaining a back injury. There is no denying the allure of an external graphics card. Like the Thunderbolt Display it might also provide Ethernet and FireWire connectivity, which would be useful for MacBook Air or other ultralight/ultrabook laptops.
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The current top-of-the-range ViDock 4 Plus provides up to 225 watts and two six-pin connectors - enough to power an Nvidia GTX 560 - and presumably the upcoming Thunderbolt equivalent will provide the same wattage or even more. This would be a Mac-exclusive until 2012 when Thunderbolt ports begin to appear in Windows-powered PCs.Ī ViDock is simply an external case with enough space for a full-length, two-slot-high graphics card - or eGPU - and a convenient two-port USB hub. Village Instruments already has experience with its ExpressCard-connected ViDock graphics card chassis, which provides extra GPU juice for Windows and Mac laptops, and the Thunderbolt version is expected to be the same kind of thing - but faster. Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.
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