ASUS didn't have a big booth with a lot of traffic at this year's CES, instead they chose to fill a big meeting room with all their new products. This helped reduce the traffic a lot, so you could actually see something and talk to the people.

XG Station

All current ultra portable notebooks have a major problem, their graphics cards sucks. For example my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad X60s can barely play Quake 3, but it weights only 2.5 lbs. Sometimes I wish there was a way to at least game a little bit when travelling. To accomodate these needs, ASUS has created the XG Station. It is an external video card, that is connected to the laptop via Express Card Slot. The video card inside the XG Station is a EN7900GS, the whole project has been developed together with NVIDIA.


The large readout has been inspired by Star Trek it seems. It can display FPS, GPU temperature, fan speed and GPU clocks. The XG Station does more than just rendering, it also has a true 5.1-channel surround sound card onboard that is using Dolby Headphone Technology.


Internally the device uses a PCI-E x1 bridge to extend the notebook's internal PCI-E bus externally to the XG Station. While x1 may not sound like a lot of bandwidth and the latencies are increased, it does not matter that much during actual gameplay. Remember, bus bandwidth is mainly needed during upload of textures and geometry which usually happens at game start. From then on everything is rendered from the video memory. Compared to a 945 integrated graphics, the performance speed up is expected to be close to factor 10. What I think is more important, is that you can run games using Shader Model 3.0 and HDR on your ultra portable notebook now and enjoy all the eye candy. All you need is a laptop with Express Card slot, which are becoming more and more common.

The XG Station is fully Vista certified and scheduled for a Q2 release. Pricing is yet unknown.

ASUS Sideshow

The ASUS W5Fe notebook is the world's first laptop that comes with the Windows Vista Sideshow feature. The 12" TFT notebook is based on a C2D, i945GM chipset, with the usual features like Wireless LAN and Bluetooth. You also have an Express card slot, for the ASUS XG Station for example, an integrated 1.3 MP webcam and 1 GB of NAND Flash.


What makes this notebook revolutionary is the little 2.8" QVGA LCD which is designed for Vista Sideshow.

Sideshow is a secondary display that you can use to show emails, calendar and other data from MS Outlook. Also you can do some light-weight gaming, mobile navigation, or cycle through photos. Sideshow is a whole platform, which means that it can be built into any other kinds of devices, like cellphones or PDAs. For example, Logitech will announce a Harmony Remote Control soon that comes with Sideshow support.