Asus appears to have quietly launched the ROG XG Station 3. As the name suggests, the external GPU (eGPU) enclosure is the third generation enclosure, but rather than encasing the GPU, the brand is going for an open-air design this round.
By that, the ROG XG Station 3 now simply has the graphics card docked directly on top of the system, in the same way one would mount it on a testbench. Below is the PSU enclosure, which surprisingly remains as the only thing that stays in encased. As usual, Asus recommends that consumers use a PSU with 750W or higher, and with an 80 PLUS Gold rating. Oh, and either an SFX or SFX-L form factor.
Connectivity is handheld through a rather generous number of ports, albeit being limited to the one current form factor, USB-C. That said, the ROG XG Station 3 is designed to support the latest Thunderbolt 5 connectivity – one for input, the other for output. On that note, you’re going to want to make sure your external display supports USB-C DisplayPort mode, otherwise, you’re just going to have make do with the laptop display.
On the subject of Thunderbolt 5, the ports provide data speed transfers of up to 80Gbps, with the Input port pulling double duty as a PD charger by up to 140W. Meanwhile, the output port provides up to 36W PD for mobile devices and peripherals.
And that’s just the back of the ROG XG Station 3. At the front, the eGPU comes with two USB-C 10Gbps ports, so you could use an adapter to split the responsibilities between your peripherals.
Regarding GPU support, the ROG XG Station 3 is fully compatible with any of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 50 Series and RTX PRO 6000 GPUs, AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 Series cards, as well as Intel’s Arc series GPUs.
At the time of writing, Asus has not mention local availability or pricing.
(Source: ASUS)
