The big Republic of Gamers (ROG) event out at Computex in Taipei has thrown out some serious new hardware from ASUS. Though not a brand new announcement, the ROG XG Station 2 is the company's latest attempt at adding desktop graphics power to devices which would never normally be used for PC gaming. The name is a bit of a mouthful but essentially what you're looking at is a box that plugs in to a laptop over Thunderbolt 3, housing a full sized, desktop graphics card within.
And at the Computex event ASUS was proud to show it off making gaming possible on the new Transformer 3 Pro. A thin, light and very sleek 2-in-1 PC.
Computex has been our first chance to check it out in action, and naturally ASUS is giving it a big push again with the arrival of its own Strix GTX 1080 graphics cards. Something it would love for you to slot inside this thing.
"ROG XG Station 2 is an external graphics-card dock that turns a laptop into VR-gaming powerhouse. A 680W power supply is designed inside and supports the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX and AMD Radeon™ graphics cards. ROG XG Station 2 is equipped with Thunderbolt™ 3 and an exclusive proprietary connector that improves performance up to a further 15%. It's easy to connect and can be unplugged without restarting the laptop — and includes four USB 3.0 ports and a gigabit LAN socket for extended connectivity and convenience."
Visually it's very much an ROG product, with lashings of red and an aggressive design that resembles its G-series desktop PCs. The XG Station 2 will use all the power of Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C to not only drive that graphics power, but it'll also make sure you keep your laptop charged while you're in the thick of the action.
Of course, it's not exactly a portable device, so the likelihood is that it'll form the center of a home setup with a monitor. The Transformer 3 Pro is a great device, but it's not a gaming PC. At least it isn't until you hook up one of these. Be sure to browse our roundup of the best graphics cards available for great GPU options.
