Hardware stub

MSI GS30 Shadow External Graphics Card Dock for Laptops

Posted on January 6, 2015

Among the final pieces of our coverage from MSI, the GS30 Shadow laptop and its accompanying docking system remind us of a SilverStone/ASUS creation from last year: The XG02 external video card enclosure for laptops.

MSI's GS30 Shadow 13.3" gaming laptop includes a PCI-e enabled dock for external graphics card hardware, supporting AMD & nVidia devices. The GS30 can fit everything up to a Titan Black, hosts a 3.5" HDD bay for games storage, and pushes all video content to an external display once docked. This means that the external video card does not re-pipe the graphics back into the 13.3" screen, instead requiring a peripheral monitor. It's a normal docking station in this fashion, it just includes external GPU support for high-end gaming at home.

The GS30 Shadow laptop itself is fairly powerful, though -- it's equipped with Iris Pro graphics, an i7-4870HQ CPU, 16GB DDR3L 1600MHz RAM, and RAID 0 128GB SSDs (x2). Resolution sits impressively at 1920x1080 on a non-reflective screen. The laptop uses a PCI-e 3.0 x16 passthrough from the GPU to the back of the laptop, where the dock receives the laptop and forwards the signal. The dock also hosts large, built-in speakers in the event you don't already have an external audio solution.

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This places the GS30 firmly in the position of an ultra-portable daily use machine, but affords great processing power for gaming at home. You generally won't be able to play AAA games at higher settings with the stock Iris Pro (though it is impressive in its perf-per-watt), but it'll handle daily tasks until the dock is nearby.

Users select the GPU they'd like to install in the dock, then install it by hand with a few screws (as normally).

MSRP is $1700 for the laptop and the dock together. It's certainly not a bad price -- the laptop on its own would be way overpriced at $1700, but the included dock makes for a more reasonable tag. Just note that once in-hand, you'd next have to go out and buy a worthwhile GPU to include in the dock, which could easily put the price tag upwards of $2000. At that point, it might be worth considering whether or not you really need the functionality; buying a gaming PC for $800 and a laptop for $1200 might make more sense, depending on the use case scenarios.

See our other CES coverage -- including MSI's gaming laptop with a mechanical keyboard and CyberPower's "Tri-Force" Case -- over on the CES section.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.