You go ahead and build a powerful rig, but realize you can’t take the whole thing with you to show your friends how awesome it performs (eventually, they’ll all come at your place to see it as if it were a sacred shrine). Anyway, wouldn’t it be cool to boost up your office (or any other PC, including laptops) only by adding one single feature like a portable graphics card? Asus did something like this, but it didn’t really cut it.

The Asus XG station was a good idea but was actually based on the PC-card slot, something that didn’t prove to be good enough for graphics. It seems that ATI knows a good concept when it spots one. They took the Asus idea and now plan to release an external card that performs comparably to a PCIe card.

The external card is based on the current RV670 chip (next-gen, please!) and it is curiously codenamed Lasso. Apparently, the Lasso is scheduled to be available by the time the Puma platform launches. Although it sounds right on paper, we don’t exactly know which type of connector the Lasso will support. Most likely, older laptops won’t be able to connect with the Lasso, and as such, it will be marketed as the right solution for the graphics performance option for future notebooks.

ATI also announced that it will showcase this technology at Coputex or some time before or after the show, while volume production should be scheduled for July/August.