Sunday, October 20th 2024
ASUS Also Launches Thunderbolt 5 Add-in Card
Hot on the heels of Gigabyte, ASUS has also put its Thunderbolt 5 card up on its website, although there are some differences between the two. Obviously the physical appearance differs somewhat, but that's largely cosmetic. However, the one key difference is that the ASUS ThunderboltEX 5 only sports a single 6-pin PCIe power connector. ASUS still claims USB PD support of up to 130 W—a feature the company calls Flexible FastCharge—however, a single USB Type-C port is limited to a maximum of 96 W, which means you can charge your MacBook Pro at full tilt, but not some other laptops. Admittedly the 4 W discrepancy compared to the Gigabyte card is fairly minor, but the second port gets left with only 34 W, although that's still enough for charging most phones. Oddly enough, ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 card, allowed for up to 100 W on a single port.
ASUS has also implemented a single Thunderbolt 5 pin-header for the GPIO, SPI I2C and UART interfaces, plus a standard USB 2.0 header, for adding USB 2.0 support to the Thunderbolt 5 ports. Just as with the Gigabyte card, we find Intel's JHL9580 Thunderbolt 5 controller at the heart of the card and once again it uses a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and supports up to three DP 2.1 8K displays at 60 Hz, although ASUS mentions that this requires DSC. The card features three mini DP inputs and comes with three DP to mini DP adapters, as well as the two aforementioned USB Type-C ports. Note that if you use tree displays, you can only use two Thunderbolt devices with the card. ASUS only mentions Windows 11 64-bit support, so it looks like Windows 10 won't be getting a driver and so far it would seem neither is Linux.
Source:
ASUS
ASUS has also implemented a single Thunderbolt 5 pin-header for the GPIO, SPI I2C and UART interfaces, plus a standard USB 2.0 header, for adding USB 2.0 support to the Thunderbolt 5 ports. Just as with the Gigabyte card, we find Intel's JHL9580 Thunderbolt 5 controller at the heart of the card and once again it uses a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface and supports up to three DP 2.1 8K displays at 60 Hz, although ASUS mentions that this requires DSC. The card features three mini DP inputs and comes with three DP to mini DP adapters, as well as the two aforementioned USB Type-C ports. Note that if you use tree displays, you can only use two Thunderbolt devices with the card. ASUS only mentions Windows 11 64-bit support, so it looks like Windows 10 won't be getting a driver and so far it would seem neither is Linux.
19 Comments on ASUS Also Launches Thunderbolt 5 Add-in Card
Older add in cards I checked could officially only be used with certain mainboards, most likely also with certain mainboard uefi versions.
Most add in cards work only with their own brand. e.g. ASUS card with ASUS mainboard, MSI add in card with certain MSI mainboard , and so on.
Just be careful, there are a lot of limitations with those USB 4 / Thunderbolt add in cards. Look careful at the homepages and manuals and other hints please.
see phoronix:
www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.5-USB4-v2-Barlow-Ridge
Also regarding the skepticism of 130W usb-pd support due to 1 6-pin power plug, I would ask: couldn’t the card use supplemental power from the pcie slot to make up the difference ?
Not most, all Thunderbolt and USB4 cards only work with the brand of motherboard that makes the card, due to the cards needing GPIO, SPI I2C and UART connectivity with the host system to allow for things like device sleep and what not. None of the motherboard makers appear to have been able to agree on a common standard for that connector and don't label the connectors, which means you can't mix and match the cards. It's apparently possible to make the Thunderbolt data interface work without those interfaces, but if a device goes to sleep, it's impossible to wake it up without power cycling it. Things like hot-plugging is also hit and miss, or at least used to be, without the extra interfaces.I hadn't seen that, but Asus doesn't point to any kind of Linux support on their product page, which is why I mentioned it.It depends on the slot and card design, a x4 slot is meant to be able to deliver 25 W of power, but it doesn't mean the add-in card has to draw that much power. Also, the USB PD power appears to only come from the extra power connectors on these types of cards. Someone complained about the Gigabyte card having two connectors, but to me that simply appears to be for 100 W USB PD per port.
Plus, I'm not a fan of the 120Gbps mode because I feel like it needlessly complicates it like USB 3.x....when shopping for a USB3.x cable, there's a bunch of things your average consumer have to check for....i.e. what data rate is it capable of, what USB gen, how much power delivery, and many times those specs aren't obvious. I feel like the same thing will be with TB5....again, I'm talking for your average consumer, not an enthusiast.
Either way though, 5.0x4 (128Gbps) bandwidth would have created a lot more possibilities....such as eGPUs finally having basically no performance gap versus in the mobo slot (it's basically a 3.0x16/4.0x8 connection which is enough for the majority of videocards), docking stations with 10Gbase-T networking (or higher), an integrated 4.0x4 nvme slot, alongside HDMI 2.1 ports, etc.
How is that possible?
It's the only reason for it though.
Why would they add another UEFI section in the ASUS mainboard just for an ASUS USB 4 add on card? which is very specific for the usb chip on that card.
I did read the whole post
Also have no idea of what GPIO, SPI I2C etc are
I though with my little brain that, those are simple PCIe 4× cards, which go to the PCIe 4× slot, and
However, Intel clearly never made a standard connector decision on this, so Asus has one large connector, Gigabyte has two connectors, MSI has one large, ASRock appears to have different solutions for different cards...
And then you have HP...
I have no idea where the Thunderbolt cable would attach internally.
However, your board doesn't appear to have a Thunderbolt header or whatever Asus calls it, which means it won't work.
Asus only appears to have 18 AMD boards that support Thunderbolt/USB4 add-in cards.
www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/all-series/filter?Category=AMD&Spec=609
You're also writing Gigabyte, it's Gigabit, hence small b.