Friday, January 19th 2024
ASUS Reveals its USB4 Add-in Card with 60 Watt USB Power Delivery Support
Back at Computex last year we got a look at the first USB4 add-in card, which was from MSI. Some six months later, ASUS has finally revealed its USB4 add-in card that simply goes by the name of USB4 PCIe Gen4 Card. The general design of the two cards appear to be more or less identical, at least in terms of outputs and inputs. As such, both cards feature two USB4 outputs and two DP 1.4 inputs for those that want to use the USB4 ports to connect to a display. Other inputs include a USB 2.0 header, a custom USB4 header for communication with the motherboard—similar to Thunderbolt add-in cards—and a 6-pin graphics card type power input. The card supports up to two monitors and three devices or one monitor and four devices when daisy chained.
ASUS has gone for a shroud on its card, so it's impossible to make out any real details, but based on the manual, ASUS has installed a heatsink on the ASM4242 USB4 host controller from ASMedia, albeit a smaller one than MSI. However, ASUS has only gone for 60 W USB Power Delivery compared to 100 W for the MSI card. If this makes any useful difference in a desktop PC is up for discussion though and would depend on specific use cases. On the other hand, ASUS allows for 60 W through both ports, whereas MSI only delivers 27 W through its secondary port. The card should work with any ASUS motherboard that has a TB/USB4 header. As ASUS has only just put up the product page, there's no word on pricing.
Source:
ASUS
ASUS has gone for a shroud on its card, so it's impossible to make out any real details, but based on the manual, ASUS has installed a heatsink on the ASM4242 USB4 host controller from ASMedia, albeit a smaller one than MSI. However, ASUS has only gone for 60 W USB Power Delivery compared to 100 W for the MSI card. If this makes any useful difference in a desktop PC is up for discussion though and would depend on specific use cases. On the other hand, ASUS allows for 60 W through both ports, whereas MSI only delivers 27 W through its secondary port. The card should work with any ASUS motherboard that has a TB/USB4 header. As ASUS has only just put up the product page, there's no word on pricing.
16 Comments on ASUS Reveals its USB4 Add-in Card with 60 Watt USB Power Delivery Support
PC laptops and Apple devices fully embraced USB-C long ago -- why are desktops so behind that these after-market solutions are the only way to get more than 1 or 2 ports? Yeah, the needed lanes are at a premium with so many other demands (especially for full-spec USB4 and Thunderbolt) but let's figure this out.
Any usecase scenario would be helpful
I'm all for using power delivery to it's full capabilities but all in all 60W is not that bad, there's not many devices you'd plug to your computer that would need that much power or, if they do, that support being powered that way.
thunderbolt card use power supply connector
I thought that req. was specific to Intel Thunderbolt, not USB :mad:
Why has every TB3, TB4, and USB4 card required a stupid proprietary header? Since when did we need mobo-level support for a friggin USB card?
Also, a lot of X570 boards lack the header, but not B550 -what the hell?!
Edit:
Can the header req. be worked around? What signals are possibly needed above what a PCIe slot offers? (PCIe already has SMbus/JTAG pins)
edit2:
Looks like it
egpu.io/forums/builds/thunderbolt-3-with-threadripper-on-a-asrock-x399-fatality-motherboard-help-needed/#post-59565
For starters, you can't hot-swap devices without that extra cable.
It's using various "slow speed" interface that are required to communicate information that isn't sent over the PCIe bus, although I don't know the specific ones, but it's things like GPIO, LPC, SMBus, I2C etc.
So if the card can't communicate over those interfaces as needed, your system might crash when you unplug a drive.
www.mattmillman.com/hacking-thunderbolt-part-2-retrofitting-pci-hot-plug-to-the-uefi/
Part 1 here xpander.mattmillman.com/files/linked/hacking_thunderbolt_part1.pdf
Yes, this is old, but still applies.
There as an old HP card that simply listed the header as TBT GPIO, so it does at the very least rely on that.
Pinged someone I known at ASMedia and got a quick reply.
So the extra pin-header is not just about hot swapping, but it's also related to suspend and sleep, which won't work correctly without the extra connector.
This could result in the system crashing when woken up. Apparently there's a certain amount of UEFI integration here as well, so it's not working in the same way as previous USB generations.
This is related to how Intel implemented things with Thunderbolt and as USB4 builds on Thunderbolt 3...
This makes me wonder if somewhere back in history, the SMbus on PCIe became 'depreciated in use'?
As far as I knew, PCIe slots were supposed to be able to communicate with the motherboard's Super I/O device. Which, handles a lot/all of those mentioned signals and tasks.
So, I'm still at a loss as to what exactly the header is for; why can't the USB4/TB host communicate over PCIe's SMbus for all those functions?
From what I've seen 'in the industry', I cannot help but feel like this is purposeful for some reason, beyond "technical limitation". (especially, when we look-back @ how Intel/Apple 'handled' ThunderBolt*.)
*To be clear, I'm not insinuating foul play on Asus', ASmedia's, etc.
I'm implying that there are 'left over'/'holdover' proprietary design elements within the TB3-derived USB4 standard, that complicate compatibility/integration.
My own guess here is that Intel didn't intend for add-in cards like what we're seeing when they developed Thunderbolt and that's why we have a janky implementation now.