Thunderbolt is way too complicated! 

Thunderbolt reminds me of having to have a card for everything back in the day and hoping your motherboard even supports the card.

I'm so glad you mentioned Firewire - this totally reminds me of my childhood playing multiplayer with my brother connected over firewire by our soundblaster cards!

1:56 Intel Thunderbolt 3 licenses are free. They got rid of the fees entirely half way through 2017. That can be found with 20 seconds on Google. The problem is that the hardware costs money. Even Thunderbolt 3 compatible cables are more expensive, especially longer ones, as the signal quality goes down with length.

I’m with you. It should come standard on all gaming and workstation motherboards as a back panel port. Someday...

I'm sorry but thunderbolt is basically what FireWire was going to be just more harder to get and way overpriced

Spent 90$ on a thunderbolt EX card. Needed it for my UAD black arrow. Took me 30 minutes to figure it out. The internet’s a great place.

Both FireWire and Thunderbolt have professional applications that keep them in use. I'm listening to your audio using FireWire and a Mackie Onyx-i mixer. Firewire can be used even for industrial applications since it supplies master clock sync and can be used for real-time applications. It's 5 years later and nowadays notebooks with thunderbolt is commonplace.

Aw man! I can't thank you enough, All day I freakin spent trying to get this THING to work. I found the same forum as you did but couldn't find the SECRET doorway in the aorus bios. I was just about to sweep up all the hair that I had ripped out of my head and take some pills when I found you Timmy. Thank you - all the best bud : )

my freinds 1000 dollar laptop with a 1050 has thunderbolt but i guess its only in the highends of highends

I love, I really love, your video! I am sitting on this for 3 days now and I can't find a card fitting my MSI z490 Mobo! Your whole video fits so much how I feel. I swear, I never related more to something

you really don't need a special card you just need to look for the right motherboards that actually support thunderbolt 3 natively.. gigabyte z390 designare and there's actually a decent amount more

Yeah I got a hp spectre the black and gold one. It only has thunderbolt 3. I can literally connect anything to any port, and even though you need dongles, you can plug hdmi through tb3, hard drives, sd, daisy chaining, egpu enclosures, and more. it’s proven more useful and travel friendly then I ever imagined. And each of the tb3 ports work as a charge port as well. Computer was 1000 bucks but it was designed around the technology. You either gotta wait for the tech to get older and cheaper or shell out the money for it.

Thunderbolt 3 is great for laptops, I'm sure it will become more mainstream in the next couple years. On a desktop at this time though, I think it is more of a nice to have, than a must have. My next laptop or 2 in 1 I purchase, will have to have at least one thunderbolt 3 port. If Microsoft would add one to their surface pro, I might actually consider buying one.

Keep up the good work on showing these kinds of fixes for things. Everyone that ever bought one of those cursed cards probably wishes they had seen this! Also there should be a big red instruction card in the box with the card telling you about that setting and where it may be on different boards. Things like this probably keep the tech support phones ringing off the hook!

I could feel your pain... I'm going through the same thing right now. It's so dumb how difficult this is.

tb3 put into mass production would basicly kill USB since it is much faster,charges better,dosen't bother you when you want to plug it in,smaller size,supports more features than USB which is why this thing is held up by intel and apple because they know this and buying those tb3 boxes would put you actual improvement since you would be able to copy massive things and that SSD tho it is capable of cloning entire 1 TB drive really quickly by its speed

You’re a lifesaver. I just got the Titan Ridge version of the card and was just about to send it back!

Just test with Crystal disk mark and select that drive to run the benchmark off of. That easy. No need to install another ssd

You should plug in the MB's 6 pin PCI-e connector, and enable that in BIOS, versus running off of the 24 pin.

Dude thank you so much! I've been searching everywhere to get this to work and it finally works!!!

I’m using an older Gigabyte motherboard and the only way to get the Thunderbolt menu to show up at all in peripherals in the bios is to load the optimized defaults or whatever that option is. Otherwise there are zero Thunderbolt options in the Bios. And if you save the config and reboot, if you go back into the bios, it’s gone again. And even when it’s there, the submenu you used to get it to work isn’t there anyway. The motherboard claims to be Thunderbolt ready and has the 5 pin connector for it. So what the hell? And why are the controls for it hidden in the advanced bios view? This is even stuff from the same company and it’s a mess to deal with.

Thanks, Timmy Joe I still haven't found any way to use my Motherboards built in Thunderbolt connection, and YES, it's frustrating, that I have 3 Motherboards with these onboard, and yet I don't know the right words to ask online to get the right parts to use them. Incidentally, I have an ASUS ROG Maximus Z270 Formula IX was made in, 2014, at that time it was new so no one even then had a clue how to set them up, so everyone I spoke to just said, "What the hell's that for"? Well now it's almost March 2022 and I still can't use It, but I'm looking. I "Subscribed", "Clicked the Bell" and chose "All" to get your content P.S. I don't know when you made this Video, RU-vid stopped posting the dates when they were made.

There is a price premium because there is a target market. Thunderbolt is miles and bounds better than any other standard for professionals in need of extremely high throughputs & expand ability. Just because you didn’t know you had to turn on a setting in your BIOS doesn’t make thunderbolt useless. With time, prices will drop, and new tech will replace it. But its still far better suited than USB for many, like myself.

Computer Parts!

It's a bummer that it's that much of a pain. HP's Zbook G4's use a Thunderbolt dock that is sooooo much better then the older versions. But like Timmy Joe said, they're super expensive. My work computer isn't of lease for a while, but last I looked at the new ones you could run multiple USBs, 1GB ethernet and 2 displays all through the dock/Thunderbolt connection.

I had the same issue, same card, same board! Fixed it using this bios power method a year ago, i also installed the Intel TB controller which you can launch once in windows to see what devices you have connected to the TB card. My next issue is to figure out how many lanes the card is taking up in relation to how many NVMe drives i have mounted on my motherboard, and if either the NVMe's or the TB card will be slower as a result. I only use the TB card to run a single Antelope Audio interface. TB is a pain!

What add-in cards are easy to use? Raid cards, the pcie ssds, etc are all a pita. But thunderbolt built into motherboards is great. Having such high bandwidth allows for so many more options on thin and light laptops, external gpu, or anything that requires a connection like pcie. And there are cheapish laptops with tb3. You can buy $800 dells with tb3.

wow thank you. bless your soul sir. ive been battling the my thunderbolt interface troubleshooting for a few months now

I entire agree. I though it would be only needed a cable for thunderbolt, but actually no. It is require PCIE slot. I hated it.

Thunderbolt 2 built into my old Gigabyte board has been a major hit-or-miss, even with Windows 10. MACs still seem to be the way to go for consistent Thunderbolt performance.

Over 3 years after this video was uploaded and this is still an issue for so many hahaha I bought a BlackMagic Ultra Studio Recorder so I could connect my cinema camera to my PC through an SDI cable for visual effects purposes. On the website and the box it states that it's thunderbolt and it'll work with Windows. I just figured that since it looks identical to a USB C plug, it'll just work on a USB C port already on my PC. Well didn't I make a mistake assuming that. I bought the thing, didn't work. Found out I need an actual thunderbolt cable. Already breaking the shrink wrapping, I know I'm not getting a refund or exchange because I made a stupid assumption instead of asking someone who knows more about it first. So I find out that my motherboard is compatible with Thunderbolt if I purchase an extra ASUS branded Thunderbolt EX3 PCI card. Great! Until I find out they've been discontinued! Days of hunting, I manage to find a guy in the US selling a 2nd hand one. I buy it, follow the instructions to install it and it's not working. So I don't know whether this process is super complicated or I've purchased a faulty/broken card. What a pathetically stupid system Thunderbolt is.

to test the read and write performance of the drive you could use a ram drive to copy to/from

New fangled thunderbolts 🤔 much love Timmy joe

You also need a Thunderbolt socket on your MB, those are also very expensive, I have a USB-C expansion card and all it need additionally is power

Troubleshooting is half to fun! Great vid TJ

Thunderbolt, its like Optane, only the people who have the money to have it, wouldn't use it anyway.

Thanks for review, and I want to add to your review, that not all MB supports thunderbolt. I have no idea about this.

If you want to show how fast the transfer speed is use a control like a ramdisk, which bounds it from above in speed.

truth to be told right now it up to the manufacture to implement it and gigabyte sure screw up on the instruction to how properly configure the card on the bios. in the future USB 4 will have thunderbolt features but the issues is it is up to each manufacture to implement the features. what is nice is that TB 3 will be implemented to future CPU architecture like the upcoming Ice lake that should make it much cheaper and easier to put TB 3 on mobo and make it more accessible.

I know someone who thinks that Thunderbolt is proprietary to Apple. I can see why someone would think that since they are known for having weird ports that are not always what you would find on a PC. What he doesn't know is that Intel owns it really and you just don't see a lot of desktop or laptop PCs with it. The *ONLY* reason is because Intel used to charge a royalty anyone wanting to use it had to pay and so it became somewhat expensive to buy any computer with it. I guess the added cost tricked some people into thinking it was just a fancy new Apple technology when Apple was only paying a royalty to Intel to include it and most likely passing that cost on to the customers.

Thunderbolt and USB-C gen x/y/z confuse me, especially since I have PCs and a Mac 😕 my new laptop has thunderbolt though, ASUS GU501, don’t really know what I’d use it for on there though since I just game on it 🤷‍♂️ I’m never going to dump $ into an eGPU.

I was looking at boards and noticed that the Gigabyte Z390 Designare has Dual Intel Thunderbolt 3 type C connectors on the backplane so no add on card needed. It's about $270. Also the Gigabyte Aorus Extreme has 2 x Thunderbolt 3 connectors (USB Type-C ports, with USB 3.1 Gen 2 support) on the back $549.99 MSRP (ouch!). Thunderbolt is interesting, it supports display, storage and networking over the cable. crazy

Best video on the internet! They should hire you and send you free devices

Wow you literally saved me hours of work. Thanks for the video. Amazon label print, return. I am literally shocked that you cannot simply plug in the card in a PCI slot and be done with it.

thunderbolt was really only meant for portable devices like laptops, its not for desktops really. because you have pci'e ports

It literally says "Thunderbolt(TM) Configuration". It even has a bright orange square next to it. How is that some secret hidden option?

Thank you for this video! my problem was a little bit different. at first I didn't even have a Thunderbolt option in my BIOS, so I had to update the BIOS. after the update the menu was there and GPIO was already enabled and everything just worked!

The asus TB expansion card designed to work with the TB header on my asus MB is twice the price of the actual MB. Was pretty excited to get me some TB when I bought the MB, but now not so much.

I just bought a Latitude 5491 to upgrade from my 7470 and it has a thunderbolt. I bought the dock too, expensive as the new laptop and dock was, I enjoy the rapid charging. Faster then my older eport dock. I just don't have any thunderbolt devices to really test the speed of this thing. I have a wireless keyboard, mouse, back up drives and two displays and it just works. But then again my 5491 has dedicated graphics and 16gb of ram. You would hope to do actual stuff with this beast. But that said I don't think I see much of a benefit outside of a faster charge that I USB c couldnt do. But it's an early technology. I remember these same ramblings with USB. I remember you had to have at least a 200 mhz cpu, 8mb ram, Windows 95 revision C. Even then it wasn't all that useful without actual peripherals to take advantage of them or the buggy software. It wasn't until Windows 98se/2000 did USB get decent support.

Thank you for this video, I know its older but you cleared that alpine ridge ghost out of my head. I have a new boxed ga z270x ud5 board with a still boxed 7700k lying around which proclaims thunderdolt compatibility. I think I will sell that since I jumped wagon to an x570s board with an 5800x since I never came to setup the z270 board. I recently obtained a usbc to m.2 housing and built in a 980evo, I think it makes any kind of thunderdolt dabbling obsolete.

Getting TB3 working is much easier on Asus and MSI boards, FYI.

It's so great feeling, when you've finally made something to work! :)

For others not having a Thunderbolt menu in the uefi I got it to read without further settings by just turning off Intel trusted platform. After that it just worked for me.

Newer X570 motherboards by Asrock all have the thunderbolt header.

The main advantage of Thunderbolt or Firewire over USB is peer to peer connection, no CPU cycles or RAM needed to manage the traffic. Even more the data transfer is both directional at once. All these ensure almost no latency. USB in other hand is everytime as slave, just one direction transfer at a time and needs tons of CPU cycles and RAM to manage. This introduces a latency.

I'm glad I saw this. I'm having issues with my 5 year old ASUS ROG G751JT and a JetDrive (external PCIe NVME SSD) and I'm trying everything to get Thunderbolt to work right.

The trouble is eventually the average user runs out of available PCI Express Slots and is stuck with a useless Legacy PCI slot. By the time you add a decent graphics card, which will probably block another PCIe x1 slot you run out of expansion. Yeah I have some PCIe x1's available but there isnt a bunch of support for those......Then you have to upgrade your motherboard, then the CPU, then the memory, so you are gonna spend some money.

Your fix helped get my MSI Thunderbolt M3 card working! Thank you!

Feel your pain. Sometimes tech stuff is very weird.

Lenovo ThinkStation P520(Xeon W-2125, 64GB DDR4 -8x8)... VROC key slot (BIOS RAID MoBo dual M.2 slots: 2 x Samsung 980PRO, RAID 0)... and Thunderbolt GPIO port... 500 bones for the OEM PCIe add-on card.

My Gigabyte Z170X-Ultra Gaming has TB3 and it works just fine.

Black Mesa on the desktop, respect Timmy Joe!

I remember the pain I went through to get thunderbolt working. the constant reboot loops caused by the card.Then I decided to reformat my computer and couldn't resolve the reboot loop again so I gave up.

You also made a huge mistake not getting a Titan ridge card. Then you need the bios option enabled

Thunderbolt devices are also expensive. Good technology crippled by Intel and Apple's greed.

you are really an amazing person if no one has told you that yet. THank you.

If USB was this difficult we would probably still be using 9 pin serial ports! They would be slow as heck but they work!

I guess they didn't get the "It Just Works!" memo...

Guys, buy motherboards with thunderbolt ports (not usb c) if you are coming from Mac and need to run external soundcards including FireWire. Also if you're a keen music producer stay on Intel based PC's as they own thunderbolt ;).

It's not USB-c, the connector is a usb type c connector, the protocol can be USB if you plug a USB device into it. Also, being that thunderbolt requires an extra controller, it makes sense that it would only be on mid to high end(it's not only on high end devices) if it's an extra cost. Also, I see it on laptops far more often since it allows for thunderbolt docs, EGPUs, etc while desktop computers have PCIe slots(literally the same protocol).

Tbh the technology is just getting better and better which is why a lot of third parties haven't adopted the standard. Thunderbolt came out in 2011, TB2 came out 2 years later, and 3 years later we see TB3 and I wouldn't be surprised if we see TB4 or the equivalent standard at the end of the year which doubles on TB3's performance like it did it's predecessors. I also really don't see any consumers making any use of TB protocol, but it's definitely fantastic in a recording studio environment or used for content creation in general. Wouldn't hurt my feelings if there was more thunderbolt though haha sorry for your troubles my dude

USB-C is a bitch too. * USB devices at 10Gbps (USB 3.1 Gen 2), 5Gbps (USB 3.1 Gen 1/USB 3.0), 480Mbps (USB 2.0 High Speed), 12Mbps (USB 1.0 full speed) etc. * Thunderbolt 3, up to 40Gbps * 20V power delivery up to 5A (USB 3 or Thunderbolt only) putting up to 100W extra strain on your PSU * 5V power delivery up to 500mA (USB 1 and 2 official rating) * Pass-through power to daisy-chained devices (optional) * DisplayPort 1.2 (Thunderbolt) or up to 1.4 (USB alternate mode) * Embedded HDMI over DisplayPort * Analogue audio over USB data pins alternate mode It can do some cool stuff, like powering a display and passing graphics data over a single cable (USB-C/Thunderbolt-connected monitors) but it is still crazy complicated. Even if Intel licensed the standard cheaply, it would be a nightmare for inexperienced device manufacturers to work with. It is a really stupid standard, invented for idiots (also note the reversible design instead of keyed plugs like every other sane connector style) by managers who wanted to just "plug it in and have it work" with literally everything.

Could have use disk mark to show us the disk performance? I am interested to see how much speed that is if its actually worth the hassle. I know TB has other uses but I was interested from the storage side of things. Which maybe its not worth the hassle in that regard, since I can just buy a cheap NVME drive and probably beat this thing.

God bless you, dude, I was losing my mind trying to figure this shit out and you saved me a lot of effort!

1.) You volunteered to test a thunderbolt 3 device and you did not know that you bought a motherboard without thunderbolt? 2.) Just look at that card, it clearly plugs in to a pcie x4 slot which has a max bandwidth of 16gbps. Thunderbolt 3 is 40gpps. How did you see that working?

Thunderbolt 3 will be included in USB4 so it will be a lot easier later this year

@1:56 Intel DOES license Thunderbolt "cheaply". It's FREE. Intel does not charge a license fee to use TB. A manufacturer simply has to submit their device for "certification" to use the TB logo. It can't get any cheaper than FREE.

At first i was expecting USB-C 3.2 to be able to output display to a portable monitor as both my phone,Mac, Nintendo Switch was working. but seems like i will at least need a Asus Addon card with discrete passthrough to get such setup working on a desktop pc. i totally agree this has really got over complicated

Thank you for this video.

Yea i live in Toronto and have an msi z390. I ordered an msi thunderbolt M3 from italy on ebay cost around $120 CAD. Took a while to figure things out since you can use it for multi displays for upto 10 displays or something.

Framework laptop are now Thunderbolt certified and are not in the higher casket of brand and very expansive laptops. You could have a look.

Wait til PCIe 4 comes out for AMD. double the bandwidth... Does this improve connection speeds or just reduce the numbers of PCIe lanes required for devices?

Hmm...I have a Gigabyte Z390 Designare with TB3 built in. I have the computer running Hackintosh and it runs perfectly. I have two TB3 ports in the back and added a header port to the front panel as there weren't any TB3 ports up there. BTW...I have a TB3 monitor so I can run video with TB3 and charge a MacBook Pro as well thru a daisy chain. However, I usually use the display port to run a monitor. I remember when Macintosh got rid of the floppy drive and the whole PC computer universe had their hair on fire. TB3 will be new standard as it can charge devices, push/pull video, print, and do anything a USB port can do. 40 g/bytes per second is the new standard. Only Gen4 pcie SSDs that bus directly to the processor have comparable speed. Sonny...get with the program.

I cant use an Asrock Thunderbolt 3 AIC with an Asrock Z790 Thunderbolt 4 capable motherboard with the latest BIOS. It has the right connectors, it lights up, all the Thunderbolt BIOS settings are enabled and it even powers on connected displays but Windows cannot see it. Contacted support and they say it isn't in the supported motherboard list. I assumed it WOULD be backwards compatible, but definitely not. So the solution is the generation of the Thunderbolt standard has to be the same, AND it has to be in the supported motherboard list to guarantee software compatibility even if the hardware is capable of the standard.

I was thinking of getting the add on card for my asus board. But I'd honestly just try a new board like an ASRock that typically have it built in

I know the video is old. but can inform that at least it has got a lot easier. with a new asus motherboard and ASUS ThunderboltEX 4, it still requires all the same connectors like the TBheader USB2.0 header and PCIe Power connector. but after that. only one option in the bios is required and is to enable TB. no driver and not other complicated settings was needed.

My Acer Predator has a thunderbolt port! I'M SPECIAL!! Of course I spent a good chunk of money on this thing and I've literally NEVER used the Thunderbolt port. It just sort of happened to be on the specs, when I got it.

Or buy a small Intel NUC, they have Thunderbolt 3 on i5 and i7 models

I'm glad you went through all this and made a video about it so I don't have to. When I see thunderbolt I will run away.

will this pcie work with amd ryzen 3900x?

I've got a G-Speed Shuttle XL RAID with Thunderbolt 2 that's quite expensive and was previously set up with a different computer. I want to use it on my X99 system, but it is extremely unreliable with the TB2 adapter that I got with it. It works sometimes, but doesn't work after restarting 99/100 times. After installing/uninstalling drivers, repeated failed boots and loops, system restores, and occasionally every USB controller going offline... it will randomly come back online. It's absolutely ridiculous. So, I'm left with either spending thousands of dollars on a new RAID that I can actually connect to, or thousands on a new system with integrated TB support that 'might' work with this thing.

I have an old Z170 Gigabyte Board with that card built-in basically. When C19 hit and I had to start working from home, I thought my Thunderbolt Dell display with built-in KVM would be perfect for switching between my home and office PC at the desk. How wrong I was. I had no idea Thunderbolt was such an unforgiveable terrible mess of withheld drivers and lazy OEMs that won't publish new ones, evolving Windows versions crippling and disabling older Thunderbolt drivers that the OEMs don't update, ugh. Seems like nobody wants to be the one on the hook for supporting this mess. I conclude that the only way to have a decent Thunderbolt experience is to buy a new laptop or Mac and get rid of it before its Thunderbolt drivers and firmware stop getting updated.

Sup Timmy Joe much love my guy

I've seen these cards advertised for both hackintosh and MacPro4,1/5,1 configurations. I have an x58 hackintosh (which doesn't have any THB-C headers) and thought since this works in the 5500 chipsets on a MacPro5,1 that this should work. It seems that genuine MacPro users jumper pins 3 & 5 on the card's header in order to make it show up as a PCI device. There's also a "warm reboot" requirement, it seems. Definitely a bit complicated on my end, too...

Scan fitted that into my audio pc with a Asus prime Z390!!! What's worse is that I haven't the faintest idea as to what it is for!

Funny, in my MOBO Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7 the Thunderbolt option completely disappeared in the latest bios update. Cannot find the damn thing.

So here it is more than halfway through 2020 and it's STILL THE EXACT SAME GODDAMN ISSUE. I built an i9-9900k last year with 64GB and 2TB of m.2 for less than half the cost of a Mac equiv but so many of the audio interfaces I want to use are "thunderbolt only" and adding Thunderbolt to my ASRock z390 is a NIGHTMARE. Like, you literally can't even find the card. Just NAH. No card. WTF?? Why is this so complicated!? I've spent my entire adult life working in tech fields and even I am pulling my hair out, I can't imagine how it must feel to someone who doesn't know anything about computers.

I don't know why, but for my Gigabyte MB UD4 X99 I couldn't get my computer work with TB... it got stucked in a reboot loop when the Alpine Ridge was connected... I went for Asrock brand (MB and the TB3 AIC) and it worked like a charm. I needed the TB connection for audio interfaces.

The Asus mobo Prime Deluxe II x299 has Thunderbolt onboard, no extra slot/card ! Port on rear of mobo.

Cant believe you did it, you absolute mad man! Go Timmy Jo!!