After announcing the first Thunderbolt 5 external GPU earlier this year, Asus is doubling down with a Thunderbolt 5 external GPU dock. The ROG XG Station 3 is only the second Thunderbolt 5 GPU dock I've seen, and I had a chance to see it up close at Computex. It's a looker, that's for sure, but more importantly, it brings Thunderbolt 5 to whatever graphics card you can slap into the PCIe slot.

Asus' ROG XG Station 3 is bringing Thunderbolt 5 to a GPU dock

And the performance looks incredible

Thunderbolt 5 on its own is a big deal for external GPUs. It's been more than a year since Intel released the Thunderbolt 5 specification, and adoption is starting to pick up on laptops and desktops. The XG Station 3 gives you something to do with all of that bandwidth. Similar to something like the Minisforum DG1, this is an external GPU dock that can accept any graphics card, so long as you're able to provide it sufficent power. It even supports Asus BTF graphics cards, allowing you to use the dock without an external power cable.

The dock itself is fairly large, and that's because it includes space for an SFX power supply under the unit. In addition to the 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 connection, the dock includes three USB-C ports that support up to 10Gbps speeds. There's a touch of RGB lighting under the dock, as well. The center of the dock is slightly raised, so the RGB lighting provides a soft under glow. And, of course, it works with other Asus devices via Aura Sync.

As for performance, Asus shared some numbers about what you can expect. Using an RTX 4090 as reference, the ROG XG Station 3 provided over 90% of the performance in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as 85% of the performance in Alan Wake 2 and 80% of the performance in Black Myth: Wukong. Outside of gaming, Asus says the GPU maintained 95% of its performance during a Blender render, as well as around 90% of its performance when running Meta's Llama locally.

Asus hasn't shared any pricing or release details for the ROG XG Station 3 yet, but if the updated XG Mobile Asus announced earlier this year is anything to by, it'll probably be a gradual rollout. Regardless, it's great to Asus revisit the XG Station concept with Thunderbolt 5 at the helm. It's been years since Asus updated this product, with the previous XG Station 2 locked to Thunderbolt 3.