I seem to be one of the few people who has managed to get my hands on an XG Station 2, with it being the only external GPU option(it's the only one available in Australia) I thought I'd give it a go. Unfortunately it has been an overly frustrating experience, with nothing working. Let me preface by outlining how I intended to use the XG Station. My dream was to have a portable laptop(in this case a dell XPS 15 9560), which when at home could plug into an egpu dock so I had extra graphical oomph at home. My dream was shattered when I first tried plugging them in, they didn't work together!
Let me outline what I have figured out thus far:
The XG Station is based off a TI83 controller(confirmed here
http://imgur.com/a/SGMTB). For people like me with Thunderbolt 1575 controllers that 'don't support' egpu's(even though the controller does), in theory it's game over unless our devices get updates supporting them. However, competing products like the AkiTio Node and newer Powercolor Devil Box run off the same TI83 controller and have
had updates allowing them to work anyway. How? They add support for devices that don't officially support egpu's(like my XPS 15). Now, I can't even get onto Asus support because their email us page won't recognise my serial number(it's needed to send an email), and they aren't replying to any tweets I send which makes it quite hard, to say the least, I'm getting frustrated. All I want to know is if I have to return it due to a lack of any future firmware updates adding support.
Aside from glaring software problems, the actual device is well built for the most part, I don't like how the case folds apart, I can imagine the lock being a weak point, everything important is well built though. The style isn't for everybody(although if you're here you probably like it) but it looks ok enough, less flashy in person than I expected. Of what I could test, it's fast. Really fast. USB and ethernet are quick, easily matching my desktop(~280mb/s copying off an USB SSD). I like the idea of an extra USB type A, if I had a GPU I'm sure the extra bandwidth not allocated elsewhere would help.
Anyway, this is just a post hoping to draw attention to a glaring issue with the new Asus ROG XG Station 2, which will probably put a lot of people off buying it. I'd really appreciate if anybody who knows how to get onto support without using that web form to give me a nudge in the right direction too!
