e dock bandwidth?

What do we know about the e series dock connection? Are the devices on the dock (like a separate audio or USB or network controller on the dock) or is it just a passthrough? Are there any PCI-E lanes going through that connection?

[And mostly,] Might the dock be suitable for an external GPU(s) in the future (PCI-E v2 x8 or greater available bandwidth through the dock connection)?

 

If i'm not mistaken the e-dock is connected through PCI-e 1x to the system bus. According to Sandra software all the PCI-e ports are 1X aside from the 16X graphics port. Curiously Sandra also reports that this one is PCI-e version 2.0, but the rest ones are PCI-e 1.1 1X. Since intel P45M chipset supports PCI-E v 2.0, all the PCI-e ports should be 2.0 with double per lane bandwidth. I wonder why the port dedicated to graphics is v.2.0 and the rest are 1.1 . It does not make sense.

 

probably because the devices don't need as much bandwidth (250MB/s is a lot for most things) and you get twice as many.

Anyway, this looks interesting along the lines of what I was thinking. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=397667

 

The docking station does not have any kind of PCIe interface that is externally available, and even if it were a PCIe-x1 interface is not going to cut it for graphics.