thunderbolt [GUIDE]Thunderbolt with 12th gen Motherboard and 25m Corning TB3 Cable with Docking station

Tatsu · November 11, 2022

Hello! I asked month ago for help related to getting the 25m Corning Thunderbold Cable to work with win11 and 12th gen Intel relating to addon cards. I want to detail my experience and way to making my setup work for future reference for anybody searching for this Topic because I had a Hard time getting anything to work.

I first got a relatively cheap gigabyte board with TB support which I tested all the available thunderbolt addon cards(Titan ridge and maple ridge) with over weeks. Nothing worked I spent days tweaking the settings but it did not go anywhere.

Next I wanted to give it a try with a Motherboard with direct support for TB so I bought the ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WIFI and after that at the start not working again I gave myself another weekend to sink in and started searching for anything related to thunderbolt on google and that is where I found a post regarding a BIOS setting about IO Lanes which sometimes is set to 0 for no apparent reason.

It turns out other the enabling the Thunderbolt discrete support I also had to go into the thunderbolt device settings and set the IO-Lanes reserved to 16.

This is super wild and while I think I understand the settings I found exactly one reddit post mentioning it and that is what in the end helped.

The Docking station NEEDS to be connected at boot otherwise I get weird things happening.

Regarding to the docking station I tested the Lenovo ThinkPad Universal Thunderbolt 4 Dock, the Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 4 Dock and I am using the i-tec Thunderbolt 3 Dock right now. In theory every TB3 and TB4 Dock should work but I did not have the funds to test any more sadly.

I can not really reccomend this for anybody without the specific need to use Thunderbolt especially since Linus showed some fiber optic extenders that work way more reliable and are not so bad documented.

My setup is having 3 optical 25m display cables and the Thunderbolt Cable running from my closet, going thru a room at the top and in the end coming out of the wall to my room where I have 3 monitors (1440p, 165hz) I use with the optical Display cables and I use the Thunderbolt DP for my VR Headset.