Asus reveals world's first external GeForce 5090 with Thunderbolt 5

Asus continues to develop its line of external graphics cards. The GeForce 5090 can now fit in such a compact chassis, which can be easily connected to a laptop or mini-PC with a single cable.

In addition to the graphics card itself, the new Thunderbolt 5 provides up to 140W of power transfer, connection to two monitors (HDMI 2.1 and DP 2.1), 10Gbps data transfer from a microSD card reader or USB-A ports, and a 5Gbps wired internet connection.

The new Thunderbolt 5 standard provides a data transfer rate of 80 Gigabits per second in both directions. To put it in perspective, a full-length PCI Express 5.0 with 16 lines can maximise data transfer with an internal graphics card at 63.015 Gbps. That is, downloading another game on Steam or copying files from an SD card in parallel will not slow down the data exchange with the video card.

The previous line of 40 Series external graphics cards used a proprietary Asus connector to provide sufficient data transfer speeds. The current version is also 25 per cent lighter and 18 per cent smaller than its predecessor, with a 350W power supply integrated into the chassis.

TheAsus XG Mobile should go on sale in the first quarter of 2025, with the top-of-the-line version priced at $2199.99, and a version with RTX 5070 Ti is also planned for $1199.99. It is not cheap, but it is really compact and convenient.

The external video card will also work with the previous Thunderbolt 4 standard, which is important now that there are still critically few Thunderbolt 5 devices. And unlike the previous connector, the eGPU can now be connected not only to Asus laptops. And not only laptops, the Asus ROG Ally portable console has been working with external GPUs for a long time. In the future, this standard will realise its full potential.

Source: TheVerge