How does thunderbolt on a desktop work?

[Geowas]

So I am thinking of doing like linus and buying a thunderbolt dock to plug a bunch of things into but I am quite unsure on how it works.

I have a Asus X99-A that you can buy a thunderbolt card to that plugs into the motherboard, if I buy a thunderbolt dock that support 2 monitors does it work by just connecting the dock with the card? I know nothing of thunderbolt really as I am not a mac user but my line of thinking is that you need to plug your monitors into your GPU but does your computer manage this routing for you if you add thunderbolt or am I missing something here?

[KaminKevCrew]

4 hours ago, Geowas said:

So I am thinking of doing like linus and buying a thunderbolt dock to plug a bunch of things into but I am quite unsure on how it works.

I have a Asus X99-A that you can buy a thunderbolt card to that plugs into the motherboard, if I buy a thunderbolt dock that support 2 monitors does it work by just connecting the dock with the card? I know nothing of thunderbolt really as I am not a mac user but my line of thinking is that you need to plug your monitors into your GPU but does your computer manage this routing for you if you add thunderbolt or am I missing something here?

You're definitely missing something here. Basically, you need to not buy the thunderbolt dock...

 

Your graphics cards would still need to be hooked directly to a monitor. Basically, on a laptop, when you use a thunderbolt connector, the graphics card is outputting a Display Port signal, and the only reason that they support so many monitors is that the cable itself is physically capable of an extremely high data throughput. 

 

In your apparent use case, you would see ZERO benefit from a thunderbolt dock. 

[thekeemo]

Thunderbolt cards that output a display have an input for your GPU using a short DP cable