By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

A few years ago, I proclaimed this the decade of the external device. Once it became easier to plug in an external hard drive (or three) and simply move your data to your next PC, it seemed inevitable that the days of opening the case were quickly slipping away for most mid-level computer users. On my own system, I added a better sound card, upgraded my graphics card, and popped in a Firewire board, but that was over a year ago. And for most folks, if you can plug it in and go, there is absolutely no reason to open a PC’s case anymore. Popping the case is a computing tradition, which is why I always thought that that graphics board would be the last surviving reason, until today.

Ladies and gentleman, behold the external graphics card.

NVIDIA has just released a monster external graphics solution for people who have exceedingly high demands for pushing pixels. The Quadro Plex 1000 is a set of graphics processors enclosed in its own box, capable of rendering 80 billion pixels per second and powering multiple monitors with a combined resolution of up to 148 million pixels. It doesn’t come cheap: prices start at $17,500, and it is intended primarily as a networked rendering solution. It requires one or two free PCIe slots (yes, you can buy two and run them in SLI mode) to connect it to your computer. Source: Arstechnica

We Say: It was inevitable. Plus, all the cool kids are getting them. Ok, so $17,500 is not a number we plan on settling on. And you still need to open the case. But consider this your first glimpse at a real hardware trend. I’ll predict that external boards in a more affordable range will start hitting store shelves by 2008.