CES is jam-packed with announcements, and Asus has brought the thunder with a refresh of nearly everything under its gaming brands. That includes a world first, with an update to its ROG XG Mobile external graphics card. It’s received a major bump in specs, now coming with an mobile Nvidia RTX 5090.
The XG Mobile line has been around since 2021 and provides a means of equipping your laptop or PC gaming handheld, such as the ROG Ally, with a powerful GPU, without the need to fit the GPU inside your device. Instead, it uses a cable to connect to your device and provide its GPU processing power externally.
Originally equipped with a laptop-grade RTX 3080, Asus updated the product in 2023, equipping it with an laptop RTX 4090. However, both those versions of the XG Mobile required an XG connector. This proprietary connector fused PCIe and USB-C into one, and while it worked well, few devices had one. On the ROG Ally, it’s the large black connector on top of the device.
So meager was the connector’s support that when the Ally X launched in 2024, it didn’t even come with the connector, instead opting for two USB 4 ports.
All of which brings us to the new XG Mobile 2025, which jumps up to the mighty power of a laptop RTX 5090 and sees Asus change to using a Thunderbolt 5 connector. These connectors use the same physical port as USB-C but use a slightly different communication protocol that allows for a few more functions. Crucially, though the port is backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 4 and side compatible with USB 4 devices, opening it up massively to be used with a wide range of laptops, handhelds and more.
It should be noted straightaway, though, that you’ll need a fast version of the connector to get anywhere near peak performance out of the RTX 5090. External GPUs of the past have notoriously been underwhelming due to the bandwidth limitations of using an external connection, and the same could happen here. You’ll also need your device to have a decently fast CPU to again ensure it’s not a major bottleneck for the GPUs performance.
As to that performance, the 5090 inside is one of the newly announced RTX 5090 laptop chips, which although not as powerful as the full-fat desktop RTX 5090, is still a mighty capable chip. It houses 10,496 CUDA cores which is a small increase on the 9,728 CUDA cores of the RTX 4090, but you’re getting the latest high-speed GDDR7 VRAM – 24GB of it – and the various architectural improvements that come with the RTX 5090’s Blackwell architecture, such as DLSS 4 support.
Perhaps crucially for many potential buyers, the XB Mobile won’t only come in an RTX 5090 version. Asus is planning two cheaper versions, with a 5070 Ti model also on the way.
Asus isn’t just stopping at packing the XG Mobile eGPU with the latest graphics though. It’ll support DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1 for high refresh rate monitors, as well as act like a USB hub, passing all that data to your mobile device via the one cable. There are two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, a 5-gigabit Ethernet port, and an SD card reader.
One of the lower key best features is that Asus has managed to avoid a massive, unwieldy power brick this time around. Inside is a 350w power supply, making it much more portable.
Of course, as with many new hardware announcements from CES, there’s no precise release date just yet. However, we do have pricing, with the Asus XG Mobile price set at $2199.99 for the 5090 version and the Asus XG Mobile 5070 Ti priced at $1199.99.
CES has brought a tonne of announcements, and we finally have the full rundown of the Nvidia RTX 5090 and the rest of the RTX 5000 series too. As the show goes on, we’re sure even more neat additions to your hardware setup will make their way online.