Z97 Extreme6 I5-4670 w/ Dell Thunderbolt 2

[smoothmove]

Boredom. I bought a $25 Dell Thunderbolt 2 card (7HMHP).

Made a board to board 5 pin wiring connector out of old Dell fans. Had to buy a DP 1.2 to DP 1.2 connector from Amazon. Unfortunately, it was 6 feet and not 1 foot.

Activated the BIOS setting on default settings.

Recognized it natively. Powers my Second Thunderbolt monitor.

I am using the onboard graphics. It is a little blurrier than I would like. When I used a RX 480 8GB, the picture is crisp.

I need to get out of the house, lol.

Quarantined in Texas

 

[cobe98]

Hi, I was looking at the exact same solution, and I would appreciate your input for Dual Thunderbolt Displays.

I have a single Thunderbolt display working beautifully on a 7HMHP card and is not connected to the header on the motherboard. The card has a DP to DP connection to dGPU. For the second display all of the USB ports, Facetime camera, etc., show up but not the display. I assume because the Dell card only has a single DisplayPort?

After seeing your post, I ordered a second 7HMHP card. Would you please advise how do I need to connect the 2 cards together? Is it using the motherboard header cable port? And if not, would you kindly share the pinouts?

 

[smoothmove]

I am not sure if you can use two cards. There is only one thunderbolt header on the board. I am only using one monitor now and my USB, camera and mic are non functional. I have yet to figure that one out.

I misworded my last. My Second monitor is a thunderbolt, first is a Dell using an HDMI. I have disconnected the Dell monitor as I use the Apple monitor more.

 

[cobe98]

ah ok, got it. I am going to try and insert the second thunderbolt card to see what happens.

Incidentally I tried with a Alpine Ridge Card, Apple TB3 to TB2 and daisy chained both displays. Worked great in Windows but macOS would never recognize it.