Contemporary notebooks have many advantages compared to desktop computers – they are much smaller, they are portable and they are not much slower than most modern PCs. Yet there are many drawbacks in the notebooks that we use on a daily basis with one of them being that they can hardly be upgraded. In fact some components cannot be upgraded at all with notebook video cards being one of them. Isn’t this sad?
Well, if you own a certain Acer notebook you are in luck – the acclaimed Taiwanese company has announced the so-called Graphics Dock at the on-going CeBIT 2016 exhibition in Germany. The device has been designed from the ground up for the Acer Aspire Switch 12 S and Acer R13 notebooks and works as an external graphics card when connected to these two notebooks. Thus Graphics Dock significantly improves the 3D performance a notebook can offer.
Graphics Dock uses a Thinderbolt 3 connection to function properly but unfortunately the device does not support external desktop video cards. Instead Graphics Dock comes with a discrete mobile GeForce GTX 960M video card that runs at 1096 MHz. This is not the fastest mobile NVIDIA graphics card but it will offer much better 3D performance than the integrated GPUs inside Intel processors. Graphics Dock measures 245 x 130 x 22.8 mm and weighs 700 grams. It has an external power adaptor with up to 135W of output, three USB 3.0 ports, a network connector hub, two DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI port.
Acer’s Graphics Dock will be in stores next month. The device will sell for around EUR 350.
Source: Acer