Lenovo shows off speedy external GPU at CES

Lenovo has announced a powerful new external GPU at CES 2024. It’s niche, but it could provide storming laptop GPU performance.

We’re wrapping up our CES 2024 coverage here on the site, which entails grabbing some of the more interesting yet overlooked products from the show. It’s easy to do, especially for larger companies offering a deluge of product announcements.

Take Lenovo, for example. In amongst the 40-odd devices it announced, it was easy to miss the fact that it announced a brand new external GPU solution that could outperform anything we’ve seen before.

The ThinkBook Graphics Extension dock is a decidedly limited offering, as it only works with the (also newly announced) ThinkBook 14 i Gen 6+ laptop at present. The reason for that limited nature is kind of the whole point here though.

It hooks up to the aforementioned laptop via its proprietary TGX port. This ensures exclusivity, but also a barnstorming 64Gbps data throughput.

Lenovo seems to be making a lot out of the way that the ThinkBook Graphics Extension can significantly boost AI (are you paying attention, CES 2024 bingo players?) computing power. It mentions how the Nvidia RTX GPUs that it supports “excel at parallelized work required to run generative AI models, such as Stable Diffusion accelerated by Nvidia TensorRT”.

The ThinkBook Graphics Extension external GPU will be offered in a bundle with the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 i Gen 6+ for $2,199 in the second half of 2024.