News MSI unveils GS30 Shadow laptop, GamingDock

MSI, who have recently released a wide range of laptops with 800M GPUs must be pissed at nVidia for skipping the 800 desktop series and skipping straight to 900 with 900M parts also on their way. As soon as this was announced there have been plenty of comments from consumers saying that they were now going to wait for the 900M parts to hit before upgrading so I can see MSI having tons of stock left over very shortly. Hopefully though on the inverse of this, a decent bargain may be had when/if the 800M products are reduced to clear...

 

So do you put any gpu you want in there or is there a specific one it comes with

 

I have been waiting for this for many years. The ideal solution for portability and speed when you need it at home.

 

According to MSI you can put any graphics card in the dock of your choosing, so to me it sounds like there will be some bundles sold with GPU's already installed, and bundles with no GPU installed.

http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=67012

It is a interesting idea and one that could see me go this sort of thing in the future if only they made it with a decent cpu and a larger screen.

 

I'd be surprised if they recouped the R&D costs on that tbh. It is a nice idea, but seem a bit niche to me. To get the best out of it you would need a mouse and a bigger screen and..wait..might as well get a cheap notebook and buy a modest desktop. Who would wanna game on a screen that size anyway?

I'm clearly not the target audience though. I can just see them gathering dust under someones bed, or sitting in the loft keeping the spiders company.

 

R&D costs? Lol, they added a PCI-E port to the bottom of a laptop. The enclosure acts like a ribbon cable for a desktop except it has its own PSU.

 

Think I'll wait until I can just plug my phone in to a docking station/graphic card box thingy and use my 42" tv and gamepad or keyboard & mouse to game on.
I'm sure it's just around the corner

 

It would be great if they could start making all their laptops compatible with the dock so if your laptop dies you only need to look at buying a new laptop then just plug it into your old GPU dock.

 

R&D costs? Have you seen it? Some engineer has built a boxy prototype and said 'Look what I can build!' and some marketing team has said 'You build 'em like that and we'll sell 'em'.

I too think it's maybe a bit too niche to survive though. If it (somehow!) was a dock that could work with a wide selection of laptops then great... but it's specific to one brand / model and therefore very very niche.

I'd love to be able to take my desktop GPU and use it with my Macbook. My Apple has a faster SSD, a faster CPU, more and faster RAM and is already my main machine. I could do it with thunderbolt docks but the price is too high and the complications are too many.

Maybe one day we'll have enough bandwidth on our generic IO ports to make this an easy solution but me thinks we're not there yet!

 

I think some of you are underestimating the amount of work involved with high-speed data signals. The engineering involved in that is no cakewalk. PCIe is a seriously fast internal bus, and the signal lines aren't really meant to go that far. Externalising the connection and maintaining the high-speed signal integrity would need some serious work at the component and PCB level. Evidently they can pull it off, but I doubt this was the work of one clever engineer tinkering around in his spare time.

Next time you've got your case open, take a look at the PCB traces going to the various sockets on your motherboard - PCIe, RAM, SATA, etc. See how they're all wiggly sometimes and look really complicated? That's because they have to be designed and laid out in such a precise fashion in order to keep the data rate high and avoid data corruption. And those are just the traces you can see on the top & bottom layer of the board; I wouldn't be surprised if modern motherboards have up to 6 or 8 internal layers (probably more), and who knows what's going on in all those layers.

That doesn't mean that I think this is a good idea, it's just not quite as trivial as some people seem to think it is .