TR Forums

Short:
• Anyone have experience with the ViDock products and/or their competitiors? Would you share you experiences for the curious among us?

Long:
• I was contemplating my next build / purchase, and find that I'm tired of towers; I've owned 4 in my life and nothing else aside from smartphones. What I want next is a laptop (or a tablet perhaps) that has a boat load of memory and processing power, but lightweight and with integrated graphics. When I get home I want to be able to plug into a NAS, GPU, and large format display for a desktop experience and high quality gaming. ViDock is the only thing that I've come across in short order that looks to make this possible, while keeping open an upgrade path. Has anyone here lived this dream, and care to share?

I'd never heard of such a thing, but now that I've looked into it, I'm extremely intrigued.

Curious about performance over ExpressCard though - doesn't that run at like 1x PCI-e? Still, a ViDock 3 + a Radeon 7750 would make a pretty mean little box.

This is what Thunderbolt is supposed to enable, but that future is slow in arriving.

Odd 1st post. Almost like you are wanting to build buzz about ViDock......

But your chosen name has me totally convinced everything is on the up and up.

derFunkenstein wrote:

I'd never heard of such a thing, but now that I've looked into it, I'm extremely intrigued.

Curious about performance over ExpressCard though - doesn't that run at like 1x PCI-e? Still, a ViDock 3 + a Radeon 7750 would make a pretty mean little box.

The ExpressCard slot is 1x, but it gains the advantages of the native chipsets version of PCIe (1.0, 2.0, 3.0). That helps its bandwidth considerably.

It's unfortunate that ExpressCard slots on laptops - from my perception - are getting rare.

My latest DTR didn't even come with an ExpressCard slot and many of the models I reviewed before purchase also lacked them. I suspect it has to do with the thin profile craze or maybe the limited number of peripherals that one would bother to install into an ExpressCard slot.

I have a Latitude E5520 that has a Sandy Bridge i5 and an Express Card 54 slot. They do seem to be somewhat rare, but they can still be had if this is important. I had assumed when I searched for ViDock that it'd be a Thunderbolt device like Ubergerbil suggested, but seeing it's native PCIe that's really cool.

No personal experience with a ViDock, but I have seen it before and seem to recall seeing several forum members on the notebookreview.com forums sharing their experiences. I highly recommend the NBR forums if you're looking in to less well covered laptop models or devices like the ViDock that are a bit unknown. It's been invaluable lately as I'm considering a DTR and there's a serious lack of attention to the segment.

Ryu Connor wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

I'd never heard of such a thing, but now that I've looked into it, I'm extremely intrigued.

Curious about performance over ExpressCard though - doesn't that run at like 1x PCI-e? Still, a ViDock 3 + a Radeon 7750 would make a pretty mean little box.

The ExpressCard slot is 1x, but it gains the advantages of the native chipsets version of PCIe (1.0, 2.0, 3.0). That helps its bandwidth considerably.

It's unfortunate that ExpressCard slots on laptops - from my perception - are getting rare.

My latest DTR didn't even come with an ExpressCard slot and many of the models I reviewed before purchase also lacked them. I suspect it has to do with the thin profile craze or maybe the limited number of peripherals that one would bother to install into an ExpressCard slot.

I never heard of ExpressCard until last night, but saw that they've updated the spec at least once.

Wikipedia wrote:

The ExpressCard 2.0 standard was delivered March 4, 2009 at CeBIT in Hannover. It is expected to have a raw bandwidth of 5 Gbit/s (transfer speed 500 MiB/s or 0.5 GiB/s),[13] which is ten times USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s or 60 MiB/s),[14] and includes USB 3.0 (5.0 Gbit/s or 625 MiB/s or 0.625 GiB/s).[15] It complies with PCI-Express 2.0 and SuperSpeed USB, which is part of the USB 3.0 specification. It is backwards compatible with current ExpressCard modules and ExpressCard 2.0 modules will work in current slots. ExpressCard 2.0 products are expected to be in the market in late 2010.

Washer wrote:

No personal experience with a ViDock, but I have seen it before and seem to recall seeing several forum members on the notebookreview.com forums sharing their experiences. I highly recommend the NBR forums if you're looking in to less well covered laptop models or devices like the ViDock that are a bit unknown. It's been invaluable lately as I'm considering a DTR and there's a serious lack of attention to the segment.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

TheEmrys wrote:

Odd 1st post. Almost like you are wanting to build buzz about ViDock......

But your chosen name has me totally convinced everything is on the up and up.

Well, if I'm gonna be accused of soliciting... I wish ASUS would've released the XG Station outside of Australia!
http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/Exte ... G_Station/

In all honestly, I did about 10 minutes of research on a smartphone before I went to bed last night. I'm sure there's other solutions (and even asked for competitiors in the OP), but the ViDock stood out as fitting the bill for what I had in mind.

Generic wrote:

I never heard of ExpressCard until last night, but saw that they've updated the spec at least once.

Wikipedia wrote:

The ExpressCard 2.0 standard was delivered March 4, 2009 at CeBIT in Hannover. It is expected to have a raw bandwidth of 5 Gbit/s (transfer speed 500 MiB/s or 0.5 GiB/s),[13]

Yep.

PCIe 1x 1.0 = 250MB/s
ExpressCard 1.0 = 250MB/s

PCIe 1x 2.0 = 500MB/s
ExpressCard 2.0 = 500MB/s

PCIe 1x 3.0 = 1GB/s
ExpressCard 3.0 = 1GB/s

Based on the lack of press releases on the ExpressCard site since 2009 I'm not sure when they'll make ExpressCard 3.0 or more precisely ExpressCards that can speak PCIe 3.0.

Three years without an update may say something about the status of this technology.

Expresscard is a form factor more than a real tech by itself.

Its effectively nothing more than a minicard connector inside a shielded case designed for hotplug.

Minicard is doing just fine in laptops...and minicard itself is just a defined set pins for pci-e, usb and some other buses

For external use the cabling at higher signal rates is the main issue, TB "gave up" on this and went with $50+ active cables instead.