Asus has just announced the world’s first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU: the 2025 XG Mobile

This translucent smoke-black case isn’t a gaming PC – instead, it could be the most powerful single-cable portable docking station ever made. When you plug your laptop or handheld into the just-announced Asus XG Mobile 2025, 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 5 Gbps Ethernet simultaneously.

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

None of this makes this the most powerful eGPU on the market, as I don’t currently have any performance numbers from Asus, and you can certainly go further with larger docks that can accommodate cards desktop graphics rather than mobile GPUs. But Asus rep Anthony Spence tells me that the Thunderbolt 5 link gives you up to 64 Gbps of bandwidth for its Nvidia graphics – more than USB4 and on par with Oculink – and I’m impressed that Asus has managed to integrate all of this. And a 350W power supply (no external brick!) in a case weighing less than 2.2 pounds with a flip-up kickstand.

Asus claims that it is even 25% lighter and 18% smaller than the previous proprietary model. It has HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 for video output and a pair of 10Gbps USB-A ports, in case you were wondering.

When it arrives later in the first quarter, it won’t be cheap. Spence says the high-end XG Mobile with an RTX 5090 laptop chip will cost $2,199.99, meaning you could almost certainly cobble together a more powerful (but stationary) solution yourself. That said, Asus plans to sell a low-end version at $1,199.99 with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 5070 Ti. Again, you’re paying for compact power here rather than maximum value for money.

While it should work with any Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 laptop or handheld, including Asus’ ROG Ally X, you’ll probably 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 can be difficult, but perhaps some of the thin and light laptops of 2025 will seize this opportunity to become powerful travel desktops.