ASUS's recently announced ROG XG Mobile graphics dock which features NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 GPU has hit retail in Japan for $3000 US.
ASUS ROG's Proprietary XG Mobile Graphics Dock Comes With A NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU & Costs A Hefty Premium
Announced back at CES 2023, you can think of the ASUS ROG XG Mobile graphics dock as an eGPU enclosure but rather than featuring a desktop graphics card, it comes with the laptop variant. That may sound underwhelming and to be honest, it kind of is considering the price that's being asked for it.
Starting with the specifications, the ASUS ROG XG Mobile dock is only compatible with ASUS's ROG Flow laptops. It houses an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU which houses an AD103 GPU core with a total of 76 SMs or 9728 CUDA cores which is the same core configuration as the desktop-class RTX 4080 and comes with TGP options in the 150W and up to 175W (+25W Dynamic Boost) range. The 150W TGP target will be configured with a 1590 MHz Base and 2040 MHz Boost clock range. Furthermore, there's an additional 25W Dynamic Boost that allows for even higher boost clocks. The GPU features a 16 GB (256-bit) memory configuration.
In terms of design, the ASUS ROG XG Mobile has two modules. One houses the 330W integrated adapter while the other houses the GPU and the I/O. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU itself is cooled by a vapor chamber heatsink with a blower-style fan that pushes air out of the chassis via the exhaust vents. I/O includes HDMI 2.1, DP 1.4, USBN 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-A + Type-C), an SD Card reader, a 2.5G Ethernet LAN port, and a power input that can supply up to 330W of power to the dock.
Connection to the ASUS ROG Flow laptops is made via a proprietary PCIe connector that is said to offer uncompromised gaming without any bandwidth bottlenecks. It most likely operates over the PCIe Gen 4.0 protocol.
Now for the pricing, the ASUS ROG XG Mobile graphics dock is listed by Yodobashi, a Japanese retailer, for 399,800 Yen which equals close to $3000 US. This pricing includes tax so we found another listing from Memory Express in Canada which lists it for $2500 CAD or around $2000 US. Based on this pricing, you are paying at least 25-30% more than a desktop RTX 4090 card while getting performance close to a desktop-grade RTX 4070 Ti which retails at around $800 US. Now the point of having this dock is to boost the graphics performance of the ROG Flow laptops which are limited to RTX 4070 Laptop GPUs. But it would only make sense if the pricing was decent, to begin with.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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