One of the most interesting parts of Asus’ pre-CES 2025 presentation was the latest version of its ROG XG Mobile, a little brick that’s supposed to enhance your laptop with discrete GPU muscle. The new 2025 model doesn’t just use a new graphics card, but is now fully non-proprietary with a Thunderbolt 5 connection. And according to a new post, you’ll be able to order one starting February 25th.
The new ROG XG Mobile external GPU is basically, like the previous design, a laptop graphics card in a box. But a couple of new design elements make it much more appealing than previous models, starting with that hardware-agnostic 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 connection. (Previous ROG XG Mobile designs used a proprietary cable that could only connect with some Asus gaming laptops, tablets, and the ROG Ally handheld.)
This new one can enhance almost any laptop that supports Thunderbolt 5, which admittedly not many laptops have yet. But it’s also backwards compatible as long as your laptop’s USB-C port is of the fancy kind (USB4). PCWorld contributor Chris Hoffman was equally taken with the new ROG XG Mobile design thanks to some quality-of-life improvements, like an integrated power supply that makes it easy to pack, plenty of dock-style extra ports, and an SD card reader to extend the gadget’s utility beyond gaming.
According to ITHome (via VideoCardz.com), the new ROG XG Mobile will go on sale or pre-order February 25th. Options for the GPU within reportedly include the laptop versions of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti, at least going by the VRAM listed on Asus’ official spec page. Pricing has been a bit hard to nail down, but it looks like it’ll cost $1,200 USD for the RTX 5070 Ti version and $2,200 for the RTX 5090 version. That’s very expensive, but if you think of it as half the guts of a gaming laptop, it’s not completely unreasonable.
February 25th is the official pre-order day for new laptops with the RTX 5070 GPU, so it makes sense that similar Nvidia laptop hardware from Asus would also go up that day. Exactly when these eGPUs will be shipping isn’t clear, but “sometime in March” would be my guess — assuming they don’t sell out too quickly.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.