Thunderbolt Questions

[DAGGER51]

Hello LTT community,

 

I had a quick question for you all.  I was wondering if you can use a Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card without using a Thunderbolt header on the motherboard.  In theory it could work because they already use the PCIe bus, so do you need another header for it to work on a motherboard without one?  Any information is welcome, and I looking more specifically at Thunderbolt 3, because Asus has an add-in card aalready available.

 

Thanks,

DAGGER51

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, DAGGER51 said:

Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card without using a Thunderbolt header on the motherboard

Nope.

[DAGGER51]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Nope.

Okay.  But could I use a USB header or serial port to use a GPIO breakout board, like for a Raspberry Pi, because the Thunderbolt header pins are labeled on the add-in cards as GPIO?  Any thoughts?

[Electronics Wizardy]

32 minutes ago, DAGGER51 said:

Okay.  But could I use a USB header or serial port to use a GPIO breakout board, like for a Raspberry Pi, because the Thunderbolt header pins are labeled on the add-in cards as GPIO?  Any thoughts?

It needs to work with some stuff at a lower level, and and to enable hotswap

 

It is gpio, but you can't use any gpio header. You could probably reverse engineer it, but its not gonna be easy.

[DAGGER51]

8 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

It needs to work with some stuff at a lower level, and and to enable hotswap

 

It is gpio, but you can't use any gpio header. You could probably reverse engineer it, but its not gonna be easy.

Okay.  So it could work in theory, but it would take some either BIOS or Windows file modification in order to get it to work.