Ahhh the ROG XG 2 Station, announced last June 2016 Computex to pair with the versitile ASUS Transformer 3 Pro to be the external graphics.
While visiting the ASUS office, it was handy that we were using the Transformer Pro 3 TF303UA so we got to test it with out unit.
The ROG XG 2 Station houses a PCIE slot to accomodate either an NVIDIA or AMD based graphics card, in our experience we were able to test with the NVDIA GTX Strix 1080 and AMD Radeon 480.
The XG 2 Station fits only one graphics card which is powered efficiently by a 750W 80 Gold rated power supply, so no worries for the power department.
Once you insert the graphics card of your choice, the XG 2 station interacts via Thunderbolt USB Type-C. So make sure the device you will connect to has Thunderholt USB 3.0.
The XG 2 Station also has ROG Aura built-in, it collaborates with the other AURA LED to deliver unified customization.
At the front of the XG 2 is a plasma coil that looks really cool. It reacts to the electricity creating a plasma coil looking tower, a real conversation starter to be honest.
Aside from the lighting department, of course the XG 2 aims to give graphics power to your unit.
As our experience was not that long, we can only show light details. But don’t worry as we will try to get more information experience if possible.
Testing the XG 2 station required installing a specialized software to detect the dock, update of Thunderbolt interface and the graphics driver itself.
Once we’ve been successful at installing the dock, it was flawless as the Strix GTX 1080 was detected immediately.
We tried playing Dota 2 at 2k resolution, high details which resulted to around 55 to 65fps. Pretty good already considering the 2880×1920 resolution of the TF 3 Pro at high settings.
We also tried to downscale the monitor resolution to 1920×1080 for an easier processing and it resulted to a good fps in average.
Lastly, we tried using the XG station the through a G-Sync enabled monitor which is the PG258Q. Results were promising at stable 80fps, not much difference but details were more crisp and less tearing which is still respeable for a g-sync monitor.
Perhaps with the current setup, the bottleneck is already the processor as the CPU is an i5 dual core 6200U processor. But compared to the internal graphics, we preper the XG 2 station anytime.
For convince, the XG 2 Station also features 4xUSB 3.0 ports, 1 x Type C Thunderbolt, USB Audio and RJ-45 for LAN.
Overall its neat that the XG 2 Station acts like an extension of your PC. Go home with more power for gaming and rendering. But if you aim this kind of setup, we suggest use a i7 processor as much as possible.
Right now the XG 2 Station has no definite price, but it is estimated to revolve around $600. Local SRP isn’t announced yet, but look like its coming soon
Update: Official SRP for the XG 2 Station if Php28,995 with no graphics card included.
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