Ayaneo’s Sci-Fi Themed Starship Graphics Dock Comes Into View Ahead Of Launch

hero ayaneo ag01 starship

Just like the gaming handhelds that use them, graphics docks are popping up everywhere promising improved gaming performance and increased external connectivity for the little handheld PCs, as well as modern laptops with minimal I/O. The latest company to reveal its GPU dock is Ayaneo, who is now taking pre-orders for the AG01 Starship graphics dock on its website.

The Starship is part of Ayaneo’s Remake brand, and the company says that like the rest of the Remake collection, it is inspired by retro-futurist ideas, particularly the space fantasy films of the 1970s and 1980s. The exterior of the dock certainly has a look reminiscent of utilitarian spacecraft from science fiction in that area. Don’t be fooled by the renders; it’s all-aluminum, not plastic.
rx 7600m xt specifications

Inside the dock is a Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU. This potent mobile graphics processor has enough horsepower to handle basically any game in 1080p resolution, and could push some titles higher as long as you make judicious use of FSR upscaling. Interestingly, the dial on top of the Starship is a “Dual-Engine Turbo Knob” that allows users to tweak the GPU’s power limit from 100W to 120W, increasing fan noise, but also improving performance.
connections ayaneo ag01

Another nifty feature of the Starship is that it supports host connections using USB4, Thunderbolt, and the unusual OCuLink connector that has only really ever been used on gaming handhelds and their associated graphics docks, at least in the consumer realm. Ayaneo says that the AG01 Starship can dynamically switch between Type-C and OCuLink connections, which is to our knowledge a first for these devices. There’s no vendor lock-in here; you can use the Starship with competing gaming handhelds, laptops, or even a desktop if you were so inclined.

docked ayaneo ag01 starship

Besides the USB4/Thunderbolt and OCuLink host connections, the Starship boasts four display connections—two each supporting DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1. The device also includes an RJ-45 port for Gigabit Ethernet and a USB 10Gbps Type-A port. We would like to have seen more USB Type-A connectivity, but we’re not done talking about the features yet, because there’s also storage expansion.

Indeed, there’s a MicroSD slot that supports transfer rates up to 300 MB/second, and an M.2-2280 slot that supports PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs. In addition to everything else, the Starship serves as a 100W charger from its USB4 port, and that works even if the GPU is in use thanks to a 330W power supply for the dock. That’s enough power to charge up even larger notebooks, like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge that we reviewed.
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If all of this sounds pretty darn sweet to you, you can pre-order the Ayaneo AG01 Starship Graphics Dock right now for $599 at the Ayaneo website. The company says that it expects the first orders to begin shipping at the end of November.