Asus just announced the world’s first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU

This smoky black translucent box isn’t a gaming PC — instead, it might be the most powerful single-cable portable docking station ever conceived. When you plug your laptop or handheld into the just-announced 2025 Asus XG Mobile, it promises to add the power of Nvidia’s top-flight GeForce RTX 5090 mobile chip, and up to 140 watts of electricity, and two monitors, and a USB and SD-card-reading hub, and 5Gbps ethernet simultaneously.

That’s because it’s the world’s first* Thunderbolt 5 external graphics card and one of the first Thunderbolt 5 docks, using the new 80 gigabit per second bidirectional link to do more things with a single cable than we’ve ever seen before.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

And if you’re keeping score, I’m pretty sure it’s also the first standards-based portable eGPU with an Nvidia graphics chip. While Asus’ last-gen XG Mobile also boasted up to an Nvidia 4090, you could only tap into that power with a proprietary port found only on a few Asus devices. (Its USB4 and Oculink rivals have mostly featured the AMD Radeon 7600M XT.)

None of that makes it the most powerful eGPU out there, as I currently have no performance figures from Asus, and you can definitely go further with bigger docks that can fit desktop graphics cards rather than mobile GPUs. But Asus rep Anthony Spence tells me that the Thunderbolt 5 link does give you up to 64Gbps of bandwidth for its Nvidia graphics — more than USB4 and tied with Oculink — and I’m wowed that Asus managed to fit all this and a 350W power supply (no external brick!) into a sub-2.2-pound package with a fold-out kickstand.

Asus says it’s even 25 percent lighter and 18 percent smaller than the previous proprietary model. It’s got HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 for video output and a pair of 10Gbps USB-A ports, in case you’re wondering.

Image: Asus

When it arrives later in Q1, it won’t come cheap. Spence says the top-tier XG Mobile with an RTX 5090 laptop chip will cost $2199.99 — meaning you could almost certainly cobble together a more powerful (but stationary) solution yourself. That said, Asus does plan to sell a lower-end $1,199.99 version with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 5070 Ti. Again, you’re paying for compact power here rather than maximum bang for the buck.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

While it should work with any Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 laptop or handheld, including Asus’ own ROG Ally X, you’ll likely want the still-rare Thunderbolt 5 to get the full GPU bandwidth here. Finding a Thunderbolt 5 computer that doesn’t already have a powerful discrete GPU might be tough, but perhaps some of 2025’s thin-and-light laptops will seize this opportunity to double as potent travel desktops.

*We are aware of one possible Thunderbolt 5 eGPU enclosure, to house a desktop graphics card, but that WinStar has barely even been detailed yet.