Amilo SA3650 with Graphics Booster review

Today we'll sidetrack a little ..   away from the hardcore uber gaming rigs towards ... a laptop.

But of course in the tradition Guru3D, it has to be gaming related in some way, so how does a laptop with an external graphics card sound ? Aah, so I have grabbed your attention, haven't I?

See, a common problem with a laptop is .. well, they are not really designed for gaming aren't they ? And sure there are some solutions out there with a more mainstream embedded GPU, yet often that is not completely affordable, let alone upgradeable.

AMD in corporation with Fujitsu Siemens Computers recently release their Amilo SA3650 Laptop with XGP Graphic Booster. XGP here is short for External Graphics Platform. .

See when you are at home fooling around with that laptop, you run into the restriction of the internal graphics chipset. Often it is way too slow to play modern age games with, with some very expensive exceptions aside though. XGP is a first good step to change that. With the help of a data cable an external PCIe bus is created. And while such a solution for many items like latency and data signaling this is not optimal, you however can achieve some interesting results. We were surely surprised to see PCIe x8 compatibility over a cable.

And that sums up XGP pretty well. The XGP graphic solution allows connecting an external graphic card to a laptop over its own port, which  takes over the graphic rendering tasks of the built in graphic chip. And that is intersting.

Connected to the other end of the cable, is a small breakout box, it's labeled as the Graphic Booster, and pretty much is an external Radeon HD 3870. Not only can you hook up 3 or 4 monitors, all of the sudden you can playback 1080P Blu-ray movies and actually play games relatively well, the way you are used to from an average to budget PC.

Interesting stuff I'd say. And though we think it might take a couple of years to really get the technology off the ground, we are fascinated by this idea alone.

Therefore a small insight into the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo SA3650 Laptop with XGP Graphic Booster. Mind you, this is merely an overview, rather than an in-depth review. Just a couple of pages to get you acquainted with this new technology to see if this at all has a future.

Next page please.