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HP Thunderbolt-2 PCIe 1-Port I/O Card

T

telequest

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 1, 2010
185
43
NJ
Is there any chance this card, or something like it soon, could work in a 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro? I recall reading many posts on the general subject of adding Thunderbolt to a PCIe Mac Pro, and the consensus seemed to be that no options were likely ... but HP is doing it now with their Xeon-based workstations.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora...w/thunderbolt-2-speeds-your-hp-system-much-4x

I'm guessing the first step would be to make it work in a MP running Windows 7 or 8 ... and that it would be a bigger hurdle to make it work under Mac OS, probably involving no drivers being available ... and who would have the incentive to write them?

If a Windows-only solution, nice, but of limited interest to me.
 
beaker7 said:
No.
Click to expand...
Ok, ya got me. Care to elaborate? I didn't realize that a Thunderbolt PCIe card even existed. If it can work in a HP tower in a PCIe slot running Windows, why not in a MP tower running Windows?

OK, CASLondon says it's the motherboard. Fine. Never mind.
 
CASLondon said:
LoL!

The motherboard has to have the capability, its not about drivers. Nevah Gonna Happen, the great dream is dead.
Click to expand...

The card has an extra 5 pin connector that goes somewhere. The cheese grater probably doesn't have that "somewhere" to connect it.

It also has to be plugged into the PCIe slot meant for it - only one slot in the Z-series will accept the card.
 
CASLondon said:
LoL!

The motherboard has to have the capability, its not about drivers. Nevah Gonna Happen, the great dream is dead.
Click to expand...

The motherboard doesn't have the capability. So there comes the card.
You have to elaborate more to support your point.
 
Prince134 said:
The motherboard doesn't have the capability. So there comes the card.
You have to elaborate more to support your point.
Click to expand...

No I don't. It is discussed in every one of those links Flowrider posted. I'm not making a legal argument, I'm stating a fact. Thunderbolt capability has to be present in the chipset/logic board, even for these aftermarket cards.
 
Prince134 said:
The motherboard doesn't have the capability. So there comes the card.
You have to elaborate more to support your point.
Click to expand...

the motherboards in those HP computers were specifically designed to allow this thunderbolt add-on card with the proper chips built into them, any other motherboards including mac pro's do not have the capability to support this card. Asus has done a similar add-on thunderbolt card, but again it will only ever work in motherboards that were designed to use it.
 
flowrider said:
This question has been asked and answered many many times:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1728332/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1716612/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1707496/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1652368/

Lou
Click to expand...

Did my best with the forum's search function and it didn't provide any of those threads. Apologies for bringing it up again. I hadn't seen HP's PCIe card until it showed up in a B&H ad that I just received today, so thought it might be something new.
 
As others have noted the HP Thunderbolt card is for HP workstations and requires a connection to the motherboard GPIO connector; this is not a standard connector on generic motherboards, and certainly not present on Mac Pro computers with PCIe slots.

Same can be said for the ASUS Thunderbolt card; only works with certain ASUS motherboards.
 
The chipset needs to be able to support it (and reallocating PCIe lanes to thunderbolt probably).
 
Not ever going to happen. As many brands/kinds of Thunderbolt cards could be released and none of them are going to work with the cMP.
 
There is a robust ecosystem of Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt2 devices, including storage, displays, and media devices that will greatly aid the videographer, graphic designer, or digital archivist
Click to expand...

Robust ecosystem of... displays ? :mad::rolleyes: I wouldn't call 2 displays "robust"...
 
Help me Lou to understand a couple of things please

flowrider said:
This question has been asked and answered many many times:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1728332/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1716612/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1707496/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1652368/

Lou
Click to expand...
..........................
Thank you Lou for the references.
It has been always clear to me that Thunderbolt could not be implemented in a oMP since the logic board has not such a feature.

1) Since the logic board of any oMP is not intended for USB3 either, I do not quite understand why ANY USB3 PCIe card could offer that speed :confused:
Still many people refer to different USB3 cards supposed to deliver it.
How???

2) AFAIK the logic board of any oMP is built with SATA 2 and therefore the 4 internal HD cannot deliver SATA 3 speed even if the drives themselves could!
So how can people say that using in a oMP a special PCIe card with SSD mounted on it...gives them SATA3???
:confused:

Thanks in advance for helping me understand those 2 matters. :)
Regards
Ed
 
Riwam said:
..........................
Thank you Lou for the references.
It has been always clear to me that Thunderbolt could not be implemented in a oMP since the logic board has not such a feature.

1) Since the logic board of any oMP is not intended for USB3 either, I do not quite understand why ANY USB3 PCIe card could offer that speed :confused:
Still many people refer to different USB3 cards supposed to deliver it.
How???

2) AFAIK the logic board of any oMP is built with SATA 2 and therefore the 4 internal HD cannot deliver SATA 3 speed even if the drives themselves could!
So how can people say that using in a oMP a special PCIe card with SSD mounted on it...gives them SATA3???
:confused:

Thanks in advance for helping me understand those 2 matters. :)
Regards
Ed
Click to expand...


1.) Thunderbolt requires that routing the Display output through it as well.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/thunderbolt/thunderbolt-technology-developer.html
Therefore you cannot retro fit Thunderbolt.

USB has no such requirement simply need a USB3 controller. You buy a USB3 PCI-Express Card, that has a USB3 controller and interfaces on it. Only the ports on the USB3 card are USB3. The USB2 on the Mac Pro boards are still USB2.

2.) Same as with USB3 card. I have two Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD Cards mounted in my oMP. These cards are SATA3 controllers and the SATA interfaces on those are SATA3. The Onboard SATA controllers on the Mac Pro board are still SATA2.

The built in sleds slot onto SATA2 ports however if instead you run a cable from a HDD to a SATA3 Controller Card then the HDD in the sleds will be SATA3 as the HDD now connected to a SATA3 Card.
 
mcnallym said:
1.) Thunderbolt requires that routing the Display output through it as well.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/thunderbolt/thunderbolt-technology-developer.html
Therefore you cannot retro fit Thunderbolt.

USB has no such requirement simply need a USB3 controller. You buy a USB3 PCI-Express Card, that has a USB3 controller and interfaces on it. Only the ports on the USB3 card are USB3. The USB2 on the Mac Pro boards are still USB2.

2.) Same as with USB3 card. I have two Sonnet Tempo Pro SSD Cards mounted in my oMP. These cards are SATA3 controllers and the SATA interfaces on those are SATA3. The Onboard SATA controllers on the Mac Pro board are still SATA2.

The built in sleds slot onto SATA2 ports however if instead you run a cable from a HDD to a SATA3 Controller Card then the HDD in the sleds will be SATA3 as the HDD now connected to a SATA3 Card.
Click to expand...

...........................
Does this imply that you can add USB3 support and SATA3 ports to any computer not having it in a native way?
For instance insert a PC Card in any older notebook with a PC Card slot and get USB3 speed or SATA3 connections? :confused:
 
Riwam said:
...........................
Does this imply that you can add USB3 support and SATA3 ports to any computer not having it in a native way?
For instance insert a PC Card in any older notebook with a PC Card slot and get USB3 speed or SATA3 connections? :confused:
Click to expand...

I don't think that you would find that PCCard spec would necessarily provide the bandwidth, when adding a PCI-E card into a Mac Pro then even if is PCI-E x1 then has 500MBs available. The PCCard spec was based on PCI 32bit slot which may not provide enough speed into the rest of the system making it pointless.

You would have USB3 speed but only as far as the card itself.
 
Has anybody actually examined the card to see if there is a Thunderbolt Host Controller on board? I wouldn't be surprised if it has everything on board and only uses the 5 pin connector to perform a handshake to verify that the motherboard is actually from a HP Z workstation. We might be able to hack it.
 
Yes, it has Falcon Ridge, Thunderbolt 2 controller on the card.

There also is a video-input so the video signal from separate video controller can be integrated into the Thunderbolt output.
 
g4cube said:
Yes, it has Falcon Ridge, Thunderbolt 2 controller on the card.

There also is a video-input so the video signal from separate video controller can be integrated into the Thunderbolt output.
Click to expand...

What if a PC thunderbolt card with link speed but without display function?
Not everyone think display on TB is necessary (as you have dp already), but link speed might attract to some?
 
T-Bolt Link speed isn't that great

Prince134 said:
What if a PC thunderbolt card with link speed but without display function?
Not everyone think display on TB is necessary (as you have dp already), but link speed might attract to some?
Click to expand...
.

If I need to connect external disks to a system, for $349 I can get a PCIe card with two 24 Gbps SAS connectors.

For about double that price there are 40 Gbps Ethernet cards available.

For high performance PCIe SSDs - just plug them into the PCIe slot in the system!
 
Once again, TB, the answer to a question that nobody asked.

Yes, there could be a TB card to do the data part in about 30 seconds if Intel and Apple wanted to make life easy.

But they don't. They prefer "profitable" and so they have placed a bunch of completely unnecessary limitations on TB that make it far less attractive.

As Aiden has pointed out there are faster interfaces.

Check out this question just sent to me by a past customer:

"You sold me a GTX 470 in 2011. It has worked well, but I just upgraded to a new Mac Pro (late 2013, black cylinder) and have the card in a Sonnet Echo Express Thunderbolt 2 enclosure, with the card powered by an EVGA 600 external power supply, and it's not working. Here's what happens:

-- When the GTX 470 is in the enclosure, the machine won't boot up... it just hangs on the white screen
-- But if I take the card out of the enclosure, leaving just my Blackmagic card in, that works fine
-- I updated to the latest Cuda Driver for Mac.
-- Cuda-Z will not detect any Cuda device
-- If I plug in the Thunderbolt enclosure after startup, it all seems to power up fine, but with the GTX inside, no PCI cards are detected by System Profiler (without it in there, any other card shows up fine.

Any idea what's going on and/or if there's any work around I should try? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer."

So, another pointless exclusion to sell stuff, GPU artificially excluded in OSX to sell stuff. Looks like my customer followed logic which said he could slap his GTX470 into an enclosure and use CUDA. Would make perfect sense that this would work. A few grand later and I have to tell him the CUDA party is over.
 
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