GIGABYTE Announces Dual Port Thunderbolt 2 Certification

[HardOCP News]

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced official certification of the latest dual port Thunderbolt™ 2 technology on the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD7 TH motherboard. Code-named ‘Falcon Ridge’, the new Intel® Thunderbolt™ 2 controller supports an incredible 20 Gb/s aggregated data transfer simultaneously across two channels per port.

 

[Poseur]

There are almost no peripherals for Thunderbolt and most of them are made for Macs. Chicken and egg scenario. Thunderbolt needs products that people actually want and I can't think of anything at all.

They'd be far more successful making 10 Gb/sec ethernet devices reasonably priced. Switches and NICs (mostly built in now)...

 

[Cheetoz]

Makes sense for laptops. But can't think of a reason on a desktop with the pci-e slots right there.

 

[parawing742]

I bought the Asus board with Thunderbolt 2 a couple months ago. I honestly have no need for it, but since I keep computer builds long-term (4-5 years), it's nice to know I'll have the functionality should I want it. Remember there isn't any real way to add Thunderbolt to existing computers right now even through a PCI-E slot.

 

[rat]

I bought the Asus board with Thunderbolt 2 a couple months ago. I honestly have no need for it, but since I keep computer builds long-term (4-5 years), it's nice to know I'll have the functionality should I want it. Remember there isn't any real way to add Thunderbolt to existing computers right now even through a PCI-E slot.

I remember feeling the same way (way back in the day) when I manage to score a nice motherboard that had firewire built in.

Never used the port.

I tried... and equivalent FW devices either didn't exist or didn't justify the price premium.

Unless the device needs more than 20MB/sec throughput... USB2 is going to be fine (and a hell of a lot cheaper) for the majority of the stuff out there. It's hard enough to find USB3 devices aside from flash drives and enclosures.

I suppose on Macs it makes sense to support TB as they don't have nearly as much built in as PCs do. Why do we need TB for Gigabit Ethernet (first thing that came to mind that would benefit from a much higher speed bus than USB) when that's practically standard on even the cheapest netbooks out there? (My $200 Chromebook even has it for fuck's sake)

So now it just seems that TB is only useful on the Mac side of things due to Apple's habit of withholding features.

 

[RGFrog]

MacPro class Hackintosh, where I can have Nvidia gpu's.

Much more preferable to the black trashcan.

Only thing better would be dual cpu...