Multiple Thunderbolt PCIe Cards on Intel Motherboard?

[littlefooch]

Has anyone attempted to install 2 Thunderbolt cards in one Intel motherboard?
An example of something similar would be the mac mini which has 2 thunderbolt controllers on the motherboard (and hence 4 ports).

I've always assumed this is not possible.
Any further info appreciated.

LF

 

[etorix]

I've seen a report of two Thunderbolt cards working on an Asus C422 motherboard, although only one could be connected to the Thunderbolt header. So it seems possible.
The questions is why you'd need so many Thunderbolt ports and where you're getting the PCIe lanes from.

 

[littlefooch]

The idea is to replicate what is done on the macmini (and mac pro), two TB headers/4TB ports on one motherboard

With 4 TB ports it's then easy to create a peer to peer network w/o Hubs.
On Windows, the early white paper creates P2P with TB via bridging (which is with current 11 pre release possible but not easy) or routing (routing via W10-11) doesn't seem to work at all.

Thunderbolt Networking is 'supposed' to include P2P networking a la the white paper (attached)

That's the goal.

 

[Edhawk]

This may be possible on a Workstation motherboard, which can provide 40 or more PCIe lanes. But using a Workstation board brings a whole set of different issues, depending on which version of macOS you want to run.

Most desktop boards have 32 PCIe lanes and would struggle with 2 x TB cards, a discrete graphics card, an NVME drive and the CPU's requirements, never mind any other peripherals being installed. Due to the smaller number of PCIe lanes available on a desktop motherboard.

 

[littlefooch]

I understand the dependency of the AIC on the PCIe bus.
I want to do this on an Intel MB and simply asking if anyone has done it.

Given that Apple does it and has done it on the MacMini and MacPro, unless they have some additional TB magic that Intel boards do not, I don't see why it's not possible (unless the board manufacturers haven't thought of doing it to implement it via the appropriate headers in the MB design)

People in this group seem to be aware of how to get AIC's of various types to work with various MB's with and w/o headers and so I thought this would be a good group in which to pose the question.

Going back to the 'why' question, and perhaps the 'how' question to set up a TB P2P group, I have 3 macs and 1 windows machine connected to the 4 mac mini ports and each machine can see every other machine with the easy and fast movement of large files via the TB bus.

This is supposed to be what Intel/Apple were talking about when TB was invented to include the Thunderbolt Networking feature.

 

[etorix]

Fair enough. But unless you're nostalgic of LocalTalk (and of the joy of hunting down the broken link in a ring network ), hubs are not that bad!
Put a 10 GbE add-in card (preferably SFP+) in each machine, all connected to a MikroTik CRS305 or CRS309 and you have your network—at Thunderbolt speed.

Apple is not doing any magic, beside providing a comprehensive Thunderbolt implementation. Each Thunderbolt controller needs a x4 PCIe link; the MacPro has lines to spare and the 2018 Mini has no dGPU, freeing CPU lanes. Even without a header it's possible to make a Thunderbolt AIC to work by shorting two pins on the Thunderbolt header.
But there's a catch. If I'm not mistaken, Thunderbolt networking on Mac requires an active Thunderbolt bus, which in turn requires flashing a controller chip on the card, which requires a ch341a programmer which outputs the proper 3.3V (or a Raspberry Pi) and a a SOIC8 clip—and being comfortable with the almighty command line. Instructions are in @CaseySJ 's Z390 Golden Build thread.
(And then comes the hardest part: To get a full Thunderbolt implementation under Windows.)

 

[littlefooch]

I understand the dependency of the AIC on the PCIe bus.
I want to do this on an Intel MB and simply asking if anyone has done it.

Given that Apple does it and has done it on the MacMini and MacPro, unless they have some additional TB magic that Intel boards do not, I don't see why it's not possible (unless the board manufacturers haven't thought of doing it to implement it via the appropriate headers in the MB design)

People in this group seem to be aware of how to get AIC's of various types to work with various MB's with and w/o headers and so I thought this would be a good group in which to pose the question.

Going back to the 'why' question, and perhaps the 'how' question to set up a TB P2P group, I have 3 macs and 1 windows machine connected to the 4 mac mini ports and each machine can see every other machine with the easy and fast movement of large files via the TB bus.

This is supposed to be what Intel/Apple were talking about when TB was invented to include the Thunderbolt Networking feature.

Answering my own question

I've installed two TR cards in one Win box and both appear to work properly for TB Networking.
This is a total of 4 TB 3 ports in one box, akin to MacMini, 4 ports/2 controllers