Tuesday, January 28th 2014
ASUS ThunderboltEX II Add-on Thunderbolt 20 Gbps Cards Now Available
ASUS rolled out second-generation add-on Thunderbolt cards for its motherboards, the ThunderboltEX II series. It includes the single-port ThunderboltEX II, and the two-port ThunderboltEX II DUAL. The two are based on Intel's DSL5320 and DSL5520 chipsets, respectively, and support the Thunderbolt 2.0 standard, which offers 20 Gb/s of bandwidth over a single cable.
The cards aren't completely independent, and can't just be plugged into any motherboard with a PCI-Express 2.0 x4/x16 slot. It requires a special header that's used for timing, and low-level system interface, and optionally, an end-to-end DisplayPort (if you want to relay display from your graphics card through the common Thunderbolt pipe). A list of compatible motherboards can be found on the product page.
Source:
Hermitage Akihabara
The cards aren't completely independent, and can't just be plugged into any motherboard with a PCI-Express 2.0 x4/x16 slot. It requires a special header that's used for timing, and low-level system interface, and optionally, an end-to-end DisplayPort (if you want to relay display from your graphics card through the common Thunderbolt pipe). A list of compatible motherboards can be found on the product page.
18 Comments on ASUS ThunderboltEX II Add-on Thunderbolt 20 Gbps Cards Now Available
or will it be like the first ThunderboltEX add-on card they made, showing it, but not available...
Btw, this both external and internal cabling garbage reminds me of 3dFX's VooDoo and VooDoo2 cards.
P.S.
LOL, only 8 motherboards supported :))))))
Keep in mind that the Thunderbolt chip and circuitry is on the add-in card itself not the motherboard. So his board (as you put it) isn't a first generation Thunderbolt board since none of these boards actually have Thunderbolt on it.
The functionality of the Thunderbolt header "TB_Header" may have changed from the never released defunct ASUS Z77 series ThunderoltEX option to the new ASUS Z87 series ThunderboltEX II. Keeping in mind that Intel refused certification for the ThunderboltEX but presumably collaborated with ASUS on the resultant ThunderboltEX II option,.......which they obviously certified,....
So something has changes,......
www.asus.com/Motherboards/ThunderboltEX_II/
MAXIMUS VI EXTREME
SABERTOOTH Z87
Z87-PRO
Z87-PRO(V EDITION)
Z87-PLUS
Z87-PLUS(VivoMouse EDITION)
Z87-A
Z87-A(NFC EXPRESS EDITION)
I dont have an earlier Asus based Z77 motherboard so i don't really care if earlier Z77 motherboards are supported or not. I have no vested interest in this either way in this respect. I was only trying to answer the question for people with older Z77 Asus motherboards and my guess is that these ThunderboltEX II cards are likely not supported on older boards regardless of whether they have a "TB_Header",....or rather will not function.
The supported Asus Z87 motherboard list is self explanitory. Although I was already well aware of which Asus Z87 motherboards had the "TB_Header" well before Asus made a supported motherboard list availble,........so it was easy to tell which Asus Z87 boards would be supported in the future.
So I had no questions in that respect,....
My questions were:
If the Asus ThunderboltEX II cards are now available (like in the title of this thread) then where? The Asus product page doesnt offer a point of sale. Its not on Amazon, Newegg and so on,.....
Edit:
Also note that the Asus ThunderboltEX II Dual add-in card has a much shorter compatible motherboard list then the ThunderboltEX II consiting only of the Asus Z87-Deluxe:
www.asus.com/Motherboards/ThunderboltEX_IIDUAL