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Asus has been selling external graphics docks under the ROG XG Mobile brand for years. But up until recently these eGPUs have all featured a proprietary high-speed connector that means they’re only officially compatible with a handful of Asus ROG laptops and tablets that have an XG Mobile connector.

The new Asus ROG XG Mobile (2025) is the first to feature a Thunderbolt 5 port instead of a proprietary connector. And that means the new eGPU should be compatible with just about any PC with a Thunderbolt port… although for best performance you’ll want a model with a Thunderbolt 5. First announced at the start of the year, the newest ROG XG Mobile graphics dock is now available for purchase in the United States… for a steep price.

You can pick up a model with an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti GPU for $1300 from Amazon or ExcaliberPC, while a higher-performance model with an RTX 5090 GPU costs nearly twice as much, with a $2500 price tag.

For those prices, you could probably just as easily buy a standalone gaming laptop with a built-in discrete GPU. But this type of external GPU in a box has a few possible advantages:

• You can plug it in when you need it, and remove it when you don’t. This allows you to turn an otherwise thin and light laptop into a full-fledged gaming laptop or video editing workstation… while still letting you unplug the GPU when you don’t need those features, giving you a lighter laptop while extending battery life.
• You can use the same eGPU with multiple devices – just plug it into any compatible laptop, mini PC, or full-sized desktop.
• If you want a higher-performance GPU in a few years, you don’t need to buy a whole new computer. You can just replace the eGPU dock.

That said, Asus positions the ROG XG Mobile as an all-in-one graphics dock: if you want to replace the GPU you’ll need to replace the whole dock. This differs from some other external graphics docks which are basically interfaces for a desktop graphics card, allowing you to bring your own GPU and upgrade in the future if you’d like.

So… it’s clearly a niche device designed for customers who are looking for a compact solution that brings a lot of extra graphics performance… but which may also cost as much as the computer you plan to plug it into, if not more.

What kind of performance can you expect from this kind of eGPU? While Thunderbolt 5 theoretically supports bidirectional data transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps (or up to 120 of asymmetric data), it only supports 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0, which means that GPU throughput will top out at around 64 Gbps… which is the same speed you’d get from an OCuLink connection.

In real-world testing, Thunderbolt 5 graphics docks appear to be a little slower than OCuLink, because OCuLink is just a cabling standard for external PCIe connections, while Thunderbolt 5 does a bunch of other things as well, so there’s a bit of bandwidth lost to overhead.

And while Thunderbolt 5 adoption may not exactly be widespread yet, it’s already easier to find PCs with Thunderbolt 5 (or UBS4 v2) ports than it is to find models with OCuLink ports. And you could theoretically use this dock with a PC that as a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port as well… it just won’t be quite as fast, since those versions of the Thunderbolt protocol top out at PCIe 3.0 x4 (32 Gbps).

In addition to a GPU, the Asus ROG XG Mobile (2025) dock supports up to 140W of USB-PD passthrough power to a PC, and has a set of ports that includes:

• 1 x HDMI 2.1
• 1 x DisplayPort 2.1
• 1 x Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbps for system input & 140W passthrough power)
• 1 x Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbps for device output & 27W USB-PD)
• 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (10 Gbps)
• 1 x 2.5 GbE Ethernet
• 1 x SD card reader (UHS-II 312MB/s)
• 1 x DC power input

The eGPU measures 208 x 155 x 30mm (8.2″ x 6.1″ x 1.2″) and weighs 932 grams (2.1 pounds) and comes with a 330W (20V/16.5A) power adapter.

via NotebookCheck and Lonely City Hardware (Weibo)

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