If you’re a gamer or a multimedia professional, your Thunderbolt port may be about to get more useful. VillageTronic has begun work on a Thunderbolt version of their ViDock expansion chassis, which will allow you to hook up an extra PCI Express graphics card using your Thunderbolt port!
VillageTronic presents the ViDock as a docking station of sorts for your Mac:
Imagine using your thin and light laptop PC during the day on the job, at school, or at the local café then arriving home, or dorm room, plugging it into your ViDock and firing up your latest PC game on a large format monitor. Just plug in one cable into your laptop PC and you instantly have a powerful 3D workstation with a big display, a big keyboard and your pointing device of choice. You are ready for gaming, video transcoding, photoshop, 3D design, watching full 1080p HD movies, and more!
While the ViDock isn’t exactly a docking station, it does reflect a similar idea in some scenarios. I can certainly see the usefulness of this for some users – perhaps those that do work with graphics or video editing that want a thin, light laptop, but don’t want to have a second computer just for their multimedia work.
Further, VillageTronic is apparently going to release the new Thunderbolt-enabled ViDock in a more Mac-like brushed aluminum finish, and may add expansion ports such as USB and FireWire to the final device, thus making it a fully-functional docking station.
