Thunderbolt's Last Stand: Thunderbolt-Ready Motherboards and PCIe Cards Available Soon

The Thunderbolt Saga continues. According to a press release by ASUS and a Techpowerup article, Thunderbolt 2.0 cards and "Thunderbolt-Ready" motherboards will begin shipping this December (2013). The first motherboard to enjoy the "Thunderbolt-Ready" moniker will be the ASUS Z87 Pro.

This is the second time Intel has certified PCIe adapters for motherboards with Thunderbolt technology. Last year ASUS Z77 Pro boards shipped with Thunderbolt 1.0 PCIe capability, yet the implementation was not widely adopted.

The issue remains that you need to purchase alot of extras. In addition to a Thunderbolt device, you also need a relatively expensive Thunderbolt cable and a Thunderbolt PCIe Card (branded ThunderboltEX II by ASUS). And your motherboard would need to have both a GPIO (general purpose I/O) slot and a DisplayPort to connect to the card, as well as an available PCIe slot.

The 2013 Mac Pro has 6 available Thunderbolt 2.0 slots- this would bring future motherboards up to that spec. It's unclear whether x79 Socket 2011 boards will ever get these types of upgrades- since they don't have any integrated graphics through the CPU. We will have to wait and see. As for the future of Thunderbolt technology- it's going to take wide public adoption to really take hold. It's way more flexible than other connectivity options, however the cost may ultimately marginalize it.

Source:
http://www.techpowerup.com/194538/i...ady-upgrade-program-for-motherboards-pcs.html

Finally.

tonymacx86 said:

It's unclear whether x79 Socket 2011 boards will ever get these types of upgrades- since they don't have any integrated graphics through the CPU.
Source:
http://www.techpowerup.com/194538/i...ady-upgrade-program-for-motherboards-pcs.html

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I hope they do eventually! Pretty cool either way!

If this is true, it could bring new life into the existing Mac Pro lineup. Sending this from my '08, all that it's missing is Thunderbolt!

I cant help thinking this is too little, too late in some ways.

Plugging built-in gpu output to a thunderbolt card makes little sense since there will still be a bottleneck. The TB card can throw pixels at your display at a rapid rate, I have no doubt of that, but the built-in gpu's simply dont have the oomph in the first place as I see it. Mind you, I do have a 27 inch cinema display (DP Version) here, so maybe Im a little spoilt.

To get decent output that way I think connecting it to a decent discrete gpu would be the real option. But that begs the question of why ? If you have the discrete gpu to begin with, I again see little point in diverting it through thunderbolt.

As for data connectivity, yes, I see a little more value to it, but I imagine cost will be the other downside.

Unless these cards, and the required motherbords, come in at a very reasonable cost overall, I couldnt see myself investing in it now.

The other thing which springs to mind is that obviously an additional PCIE slot will be required. So if I want to stick with mini-itx, which a lot of folks are doing these days, then Im forced to pick between this TB card or a decent graphics card, but not both.

Im afraid my initial excitement at the wonders of thunderbolt have long since been dampened here, and this announcement does nothing to re-ignite them.

WonkeyDonkey said:

I cant help thinking this is too little, too late in some ways.

Plugging built-in gpu output to a thunderbolt card makes little sense since there will still be a bottleneck. The TB card can throw pixels at your display at a rapid rate, I have no doubt of that, but the built-in gpu's simply dont have the oomph in the first place as I see it. Mind you, I do have a 27 inch cinema display (DP Version) here, so maybe Im a little spoilt.

To get decent output that way I think connecting it to a decent discrete gpu would be the real option. But that begs the question of why ? If you have the discrete gpu to begin with, I again see little point in diverting it through thunderbolt.

As for data connectivity, yes, I see a little more value to it, but I imagine cost will be the other downside.

Unless these cards, and the required motherbords, come in at a very reasonable cost overall, I couldnt see myself investing in it now.

The other thing which springs to mind is that obviously an additional PCIE slot will be required. So if I want to stick with mini-itx, which a lot of folks are doing these days, then Im forced to pick between this TB card or a decent graphics card, but not both.

Im afraid my initial excitement at the wonders of thunderbolt have long since been dampened here, and this announcement does nothing to re-ignite them.

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I can see your frustration.

Thunderbolt, is a great idea that was held back due to costs involved. Now, that sales are hurting it will be made a little more mainstream. Hopefully, in the future Mini-ITX will have a board with Thunderbolt and hence having a discrete GPU would serve it's purpose.

Who knows though?

Solidww said:

I can see your frustration.

Thunderbolt, is a great idea that was held back due to costs involved. Now, that sales are hurting it will be made a little more mainstream. Hopefully, in the future Mini-ITX will have a board with Thunderbolt and hence having a discrete GPU would serve it's purpose.

Who knows though?

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Its not only that. Even if there is a mini-itx board with onboard TB, will future generation chips allow the discrete graphics to route through onboard TB in the same way built-in graphics do now. Apple does it now in the Macbook Pros but i kinda suspect Apple will keep that little gem to themselves. Lucid Logix does it for Windows although from what I have read, its not that great.

Their website states :

'Once a game is invoked, it is assigned to the dGPU and displayed by the integrated GPU'

Integrated Thunderbolt controllers should have allowed this functionality from the start, and not just restricted to certain games, and not just in the Windows environment.

I'm dreaming now for sure....

WonkeyDonkey said:

Its not only that. Even if there is a mini-itx board with onboard TB, will future generation chips allow the discrete graphics to route through onboard TB in the same way built-in graphics do now. Apple does it now in the Macbook Pros but i kinda suspect Apple will keep that little gem to themselves. Lucid Logix does it for Windows although from what I have read, its not that great.

Their website states :

'Once a game is invoked, it is assigned to the dGPU and displayed by the integrated GPU'

Integrated Thunderbolt controllers should have allowed this functionality from the start, and not just restricted to certain games, and not just in the Windows environment.

I'm dreaming now for sure....

Click to expand...

I think it will come about and start to expand as time goes on. Apple, may keep somethings to themselves but remember Patents don't last forever.

We use Thunderbolt a lot in the Mac IT world and love it. I hope it really picks up in the consumer world soon. The real power is in it's flexibility and throughput. It can be a display, it can be ethernet, and its the best way to transfer a 16TB RAID! They just need to get the cost down!

my 2 cent if any of the Gigabyte developer scoop by :

all of us dream on a LGA2011-3 twin socket with 4 PCIE3 16x slot and 8 DDR4 memory slot and 2 thunderboltV2 plug.

like this we could drop in =

2 x 8 core xeon
2 titan
2 areca 1882I : one with 8 small ssd in raid 0for the system and the scratch disk, one with 6 x 2Tb in raid 6.
the red rocket and the FC hba can go on outside enclosure via thunderbolt.

128Gb of memory would allow for a more than efficient 60 gb ramdisk for the caches

and 18 core of xeon power would eat anything you would trow at it like fun.

in premiere and in after effect two titan would just scream.

so let's do some math here =
server LGA 2011-3 motherboard = 1000$
2 xeon = 1800$ x2 = 3600$
2 titan = 900$x2 = 1800$
128 Gb ram = 1500$
8 x 60gb SSD = 800$
8 x 2Tb HDD = 500$
2 x 1882I = 700$x2 = 1400$
4 u rack CASE = 200$
2 x water Cooler = 600$
1 x 1200w PSU = 400$

true, for 13 000$ you could have a hack that would outperform any of the curent and upcoming Mac Pro for the next 4 year but if you can drop 13 000 in a computer you will just probably go to the apple store an buy the maxed out mac pro every year

now turn this to a single CPU LGA 2011-3 remove the expensive titan and replace them with 2 GTX 780, just go for a OWC pcie SSD, replace the twin 8 core XEON and replace it by a 8 core haswell-e , put a single 1882I with cheaper 2TB drive in raid 6 and you will still have a machine that outperform the new Mac Pro and witch is upgradable.... for less than 4500$....

all we need is a LGA2011-3 motherboard with thunderbolt 2 and support for 8 core upcoming processor...

for most of us who already have a good case, a strong PSU, PCIE SSD , good video card, AND thunderbolt drive and accessory it would be about buying a new mobo, processor and memory.

I could definitively picture myself spending 2500$ for that upgrade that would make my machine more than twice as fast.

we need to be able to go over 32 gig of ram, once you have tasted ramdisk for cache, you can't go back
we need to be able to plug 2 pcie3 x16 video card at their full speed
we need to be able to put a raid card on top of that
we need an extra PCIE3 x 16 slot for card like the red rocket or the black magic.
why not throw in the package a onboard UEFI hardware raid controller doing Raid 5 and 6 on at least 4 sata 6g drive...I wouldn't mind paying an extra 2-300 $ to get the mobo controller able to do hardware raid 6 on my hack.

and this needs to be cheaper than a Mac Pro.

I haven't upgraded my GA77Z-TH5 and I7 3770K because the gain of 10-20% i would see won't make such a difference for the hassle it is of rebuilding a new machine and spending 1200$ on that.... i just replaced my twin 660TI by a twin 780 and added 2 extra SSD in raid 0 for the cache, and there you go the machine is way faster for what i do = editing, lightroom, after effect.....

I need thunderbolt because when I have to move 500Mb project around, it is just faster to move them on a thunderbolt SSD.

USB 3 is just not a reliable interface for professional media hard drive, I already had issue with cheaper usb3 raid, and with USB3 card reader. they work fine until you realise that it has corrupted some of your files.
and no matter what they say my usb3 raid 5 was nothing close to half the speed of my thunderbolt raid 6 .