External Graphic Expansion for Notebook: ViDock Gfx

Nowadays notebook price become more and more affordable compared to few years back. With portable advantage, wifi support and wireless broadband, it is better choice compared to desktop PC. There is one thing notebook always lose to desktop, graphic performance. Many notebook still has limited power of graphic processing power. Most of it cannot play advance 3D games and HD video.

Now more and more company try to offer external graphic upgrade for notebook and one of it is Village Tronic with ViDock Gfx. It support multiple display functionality, better performance 3D applications and games and HD 1080p video playback. It multiple display support 2 analog or 2 digital display at 2560 x 1600 each.There are three models for ViDock Gfx series:
ViDock Gfs Business Edition
ATI X1550 or NVidia GF7200GS
128MB DDR2

ViDock Gfs Pro Edition
ATI HD2600 Pro or NVidia GF8600GT
512MB DDR2

ViDock Gfx Mac Edition
ATI X1550 and 128MB DDR2

ViDock device is using ExpressCard interface which has a limitation in term of bandwidth. The ExpressCard bus is functionally very close to the ancient AGP 1.0 standard, about a quarter the one-way bandwidth of AGP 4x and an eighth of AGP 8x. This bandwidth limitation is most certainly going to limit the performance of an external graphics solution using the ExpressCard interface.

Where the ViDock shines and becomes very attractive is for the user who already has a laptop but wants all of these features—multiple display functionality, increased graphics performance, HD video playback, and the convenience of a docking station—all in a single package.

Unfortunately, interested buyers must already have a laptop with an integrated GeForce or Radeon chipset, and perhaps even a specific operating system, so the ViDock’s market is somewhat limited out of the gate.