The PCI-SIG defined a standard for external PCIe in February this year, but not much has been heard about it since - until now.

MSI showed its "Notebook Station" external PCIe 16x solution back at CES; it will allow you to connect a dual-slot width graphics card (but NOT two graphics cards, although it is probably only a matter of time before someone makes a dual 8x slot external PCIe graphics bay).

The interesting part was that the external PCIe box was connected with an "ExpressCard" adapter - basically a faster PCMCIA card. MSI claimed that it provided plenty of bandwidth.

Now a bit of googling has revealed that an ExpressCard slot has 2.5GBits of bandwidth, implemented as a PCIe 1x lane - which is a far cry from even a 4x slot; however given how pathetic the 3D performance of most mobile chipsets is for gaming, it is not hard to imagine that an external video card hooked up to a 1x slot will be faster than the on-board GPU.