External GPUs are super freakin’ cool, at least to me. Plugging an ultraportable laptop into USB-C and then getting the phenomenal cosmic power of a gaming desktop is my pure, platonic ideal of personal computing. Asus has been at the front of this very small market, and its newest design for full-power desktop GPUs has got me drooling.
The ROG XG Station 3 breaks from previous designs that had a fully encased GPU, instead opting to simply let you plug a card into a PCIe slot on a sturdy base and let it breathe free in the open air. That might cause some noise issues, but it gets rid of any size restrictions, as frame-style designs from smaller vendors have discovered. Tucked into that big beefy slab is a 330-watt power supply, though you can upgrade it with any SFX-compatible unit.
If you’re wondering where the power rail is, the promo shots are using an Asus BTF card with a custom power delivery solution that can plug into the motherboard/dock. The XG Station 3 can also use a standard 12V 2×6 connector for wider compatibility with non-Asus BTF cards. So between the PCIe slot and the flexibility options, it should work with any card on the market right now, though you might need to swap out the power supply if you want an RTX 5090 or similar.
Asus
What about connecting to your laptop? The dock uses Thunderbolt 5, the newest, fastest standard that’s… actually really hard to find on any recent gaming or productivity laptop. Well, that’s a bummer. But the fact that Asus is making this product, even for an admittedly tiny niche of power users, would seem to indicate that the capability will be coming at least in the same general timeline, sometime later this year or in early 2026. Call it “future-proofing,” if you can stomach the term.
With 80Gbps of throughput, it should be more than fast enough to take advantage of the most powerful cards, even at a lower level than a conventional desktop with the same hardware. Photos posted to Twitter/X (via VideoCardz) show at least three USB-C ports on the rear and two on the front, which should be enough to handle any external hardware you need on top of monitors, albeit with some adapters or extra docks. Of course, you’ll also need enough juice in the power supply to power both the GPU and your laptop at once if you want a one-cable solution.
We don’t know the ROG XG Station 3’s price, release date, or availability. It wasn’t included in the US-focused press releases for Computex. The previous version was announced way back in 2016, so I wouldn’t even hazard a guess.