Photos - FSC Amilo SA 3650 with Graphics Booster (2)
The necessary data exchange is is managed over a PCI-Express 2.0 8x port by help of a data cable. Quite frankly, that's a lot of bandwidth over merely a cable. The cable is hooked directly into the laptop.
Here we have the setup connected and fired up. An important detail, if you use the XGP device, the image display can only run over an external monitor. So that's a massive negative, as you can not plug in the graphics booster and game on the internal LCD of the Amilo laptop.
What am I trying to say here, the notebook monitor can still be used but 3D graphics are only possible on an external display. The COD4 you see running, therefore now runs over the slow Radeon 3200 embedded GPU, resulting in an uberslow framerate.
But let's spice things up a little. One major advantage of a setup like this is the fact you can hook up multiple monitors, the XGP ecosystem supports up to 4 monitors in total. Very handy if you are on the road and need to present / demonstrate something with the help of multiple screens.
As you can see we have now three screens activated. The desktop is extended, we have the LCD on the laptop, a small 17" monitor, and to verify if the external solution can drive a dual-link DVI monitor, a 30" dell at 2560x1600.
Pretty impressive stuff really. We'll get into gaming in a minute as we'll test the performance a little. And though we can't expect anything really extreme, we were able to play some of last years games pretty well.
What is also fun is the fact you can playback Blu-ray movies at 1080P at full resolution, again .. over an external screen. The external GPU can fully decode the the bit-stream and post process the movies. The result is very little CPU usage; that's especially handy with a Laptop.
Though an asking price of say (US $1,799) we feel is steep, AMD claims it's worth the premium, calling it an "unprecedented fusion of performance and mobility." But only one can judge that validity of that statement, and that's you .. the end-user.
Anyway, let's run some tests.
