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External Graphics cards a possibility with USB 3?

W

whitedragon101

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 11, 2008
1,349
339
Several manufacturers have tried to produce external graphics card boxes to connect to your laptop. Most have given up, but it seems the only real barrier is bandwidth.

MSI have this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Graphics-Upgrade-Solution-ATI-External,10527.html

using the Expresscard 34 (max 2.5Gpbs) and say they will switch to USB 3 (4.8Gbps) when it goes mainstream.

Do you think 4.8Gbps is enough to make connecting high end external graphics cards to your laptop a possibility?
 
Possibly, albeit a low one, I wouldn't expect anything really high performance and forget gaming. For comparison, IIRC, each PCIe 2.0 lane allows for up to 500MB/s (or about 4Gbps) or 250MB/s / 2Gbps for PCIe 1.0. The vast majority of desktop chipsets use a 16x link and most IGPs use a 4x+ link (could be wrong here...); that's 8Gbps of potential bandwidth to use at the low end.
 
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