14 DAY TRIAL // One woe that all laptop owners are faced with when buying a mobile PC is the knowledge that they will not exactly be able to upgrade the machine very easily, if at all, in the future. This fact mostly limits a mobile PC's ability to keep up with the latest software, especially games, which, as is well known, are the main reason why consumers periodically upgrade their configuration. Knowing that the main factor behind a PC's ability to play games is the graphics card itself, Shuttle has come up with a device that will enable desktop graphics cards to be used by notebooks.
Known as the i-Power GXT Mini, the new, insufficiently detailed product from Shuttle is an external adapter that can allow any system to use the graphics capabilities of standard desktop graphics cards. The product is described as an external PCI Express/USB adapter and it is aimed mainly at laptop owners that want better gaming and multimedia capabilities. There is no mention of a limitation that makes the device incompatible with desktops, of course, but there is little use for it in such situations, for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately, the unit could not exactly be designed with portability in mind simply because its purpose relatively excludes this. Desktop graphics, especially stronger cards, are quite large, thus the adapter itself is only slightly smaller than a netbook, if at all.
As such, the Shuttle gadget won't be usable on the go, especially considering that it uses an external power supply of 90W. Still, in order to somehow make up for this limitation, the hardware maker gave the i-Power GXT Mini support for other types of extension cards, such as USB 3.0.
As has been the case with the larger part of the products on display at the expo in Hanover, Germany, the price and availability of the device are still unknown.
Live report by Traian Teglet from CeBIT 2010 in Hanover, Germany.
