Most people gave up on external GPUs years ago. ASUS apparently didn’t get the memo.
At Computex 2026, the company quietly showed off something worth paying attention to: the XG Core, a compact external graphics dock that packs AMD’s brand-new RDNA 4 architecture into a box you can connect to practically any modern laptop over a single USB-C cable.
What Makes This One Different
External GPUs have always had one big problem — compatibility. The old ROG XG Mobile was fast but locked to specific ASUS laptops through a proprietary connector. The XG Core throws that model out entirely. It connects via USB4 Type-C and also supports Thunderbolt 3 systems, which means it should work with a much wider range of devices than previous ROG XG Mobile hardware. Plug it into a MacBook, a Zenbook, a gaming laptop, a mini PC — if it has USB4 or Thunderbolt 3, you’re in business.
The GPU inside is where things get genuinely interesting. ASUS fitted the XG Core with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT LP — a low-power variant of AMD’s RDNA 4 chip — with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That’s a lot of VRAM for an external dock, and RDNA 4 is AMD’s most current architecture. The chip itself features 2,048 stream processors and 32 Compute Units.
For reference, the ROG XG Mobile — ASUS’s existing premium eGPU that currently sells for around $1,599 — uses laptop versions of Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5090. The XG Core goes a different direction, using a desktop-class low-power chip instead. Less raw power on paper, but potentially much more affordable and far more portable.
Not Just for Gaming
This is the part that separates the XG Core from every eGPU that came before it. ASUS is explicitly promoting it for gaming, content creation, and local AI workloads — with support for AMD AMUSE, ComfyUI, LM Studio, Ollama, and PyTorch all listed in the specs.
Running large language models and image generation locally on a laptop is genuinely painful right now unless you’re lucky enough to have a high-end discrete GPU. Sixteen gigabytes of GDDR6 on an RDNA 4 chip changes that math considerably — you’d be able to run serious local AI workloads on pretty much any thin laptop just by plugging this thing in.
The Catch
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet. The RX 9060 XT LP chip was previously expected to be offered only to OEMs in China, which makes its appearance inside a globally-shown product at Computex a bit of a surprise. Whether the XG Core ever actually ships outside of Asia — and at what price — is still an open question.
But the concept is solid. A compact, universally compatible external GPU with 16GB of VRAM and genuine AI chops, for people who want desktop-level performance without a desktop. That’s a real product for a real need. Now ASUS just has to actually sell it.