ASUS makes its palm-sized 16GB Radeon eGPU official, but its chip runs at about half speed

A thin laptop or a gaming handheld can now borrow a real graphics card without opening the case. ASUS has formally announced the XG Core, a small box with a Radeon RX 9060 XT LP and 16GB of GDDR6 inside that connects over USB4.

The trade-off is power. The enclosure limits the GPU to 75 W, and the updated spec sheet spotted by Notebookcheck puts the chip at 1,010 MHz in games, peaking at 1,600 MHz. AMD’s reference RX 9060 XT is rated at 2,530 MHz and up to 3,130 MHz, so this chip runs at roughly half the desktop frequency, although it keeps all 2,048 stream processors, the 128-bit bus and 20 Gbps memory. The OC profile in ASUS’s GPU Tweak III raises the clocks only slightly, to 1,030 and 1,620 MHz.

The box measures 144 x 117 x 39 mm and fits easily in a bag. USB4 gives it up to 40 Gbps to the host, and older Thunderbolt 3 machines are supported too. ASUS lists its own ROG Ally X and ROG Xbox Ally X among compatible handhelds. HDMI and DisplayPort outputs drive a monitor straight from the dock, and power comes in through a separate USB-C port.

ASUS also sells it as a local AI helper: the company says the card handles image generation and language-model inference in apps such as ComfyUI, LM Studio and Ollama, with results that depend on the model and setup. For a laptop with integrated graphics, 16GB of dedicated video memory is a serious upgrade; anyone expecting desktop RX 9060 XT frame rates will be held back by that 75 W ceiling.

ASUS first showed the XG Core in June and has promised over 60 fps at 1440p in some AAA titles, without explaining how it measured that. What it still has not shared is a price or a release date.

Reported by ASUS, Notebookcheck. Compiled with AI tools.