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Anyone ever seen one of these Asus Thunderbolt 2 PCBs?


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Hey everyone, so I made the maybe unfortunate mistake of waiting until I had more free time to put together an Akitio Thunder2 build only to find out that 3rd party sellers are now selling it for $269. I was able to contact Akitio and they will sell one for $219 so if you are still in the market, that is the way to go. But while I was trying to decide what to do and waiting to hear back from Akitio I put a post up on reddit looking for a used one or just the PCB and found a guy who had something fairly interesting that I had never seen before.

 

The person in question writes or wrote for tweaktown.com and had received an Asus Thunderbolt 2 PCB to write an article about. According to him, he went on to use the PCB for an eGPU via thunderbolt 2 on his macbook. I have been searching for this PCB online and the only place I can find it mentioned or pictured is in his article so I am starting to think he may be one of very few if not the only person with this pcb. Given that he said it was working for him as for an eGPU and that he was selling it super cheap, I went ahead and bought it off him. I've attached the picture from his article though I have other pictures that he sent me before I purchased it. Anyway, it will be arriving today so I'll post more info or pictures if/when I get it working.

 

http://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/content/6/2/6249_20_thunderbolt_2_ready_for_windows_with_the_asus_thunderboltex_ii.jpg

 

Note that the article isn't really about the PCB, but thunderbolt 2 and other chassis's so don't get confused by the url there, this is NOT the thunderboltex ii.

Edited by Alarming0
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4 hours ago, Dschijn said:

Can you link the article? I have never seen such a board.

Well like I said, the article doesn't discuss the PCB specifically, just references it with a picture. It is not the same pcb that is in the Lacie box pictured at the top of the page (naturally):

 

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6249/thunderbolt-2-ready-for-windows-with-the-asus-thunderboltex-ii/index4.html

 

(It's on page 4 if it auto-redirects back to page 1)

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2 hours ago, Dschijn said:

The article is about a PCIe card for PCIe to give them TB ports.

Well I just got the PCB in the mail 30 minutes ago and it works! One thing I am unsure of is how to get the eGPU to run using the internal LCD of the iMac though so any help with that is appreciated before I go calling this a complete success.

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3 hours ago, Dschijn said:

Wow ok... would you mind taking some pictures?

Sure, but be prepared to laugh at my setup. I will be putting this into a mini pc case once everything is properly working. But yeah, I've been looking around and haven't found a solution to my problem yet: how do I go about using the eGPU to power my iMac's (late 2013, GT 750m dGPU) internal screen. Is this even possible?

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3 hours ago, Dschijn said:

You would have to disable the GT 750m and let the display beeing powered by the Intel GPU.

Having trouble emailing myself pictures from my phone so I will have to post pictures later when it ends up working, guess my mail is down. I disabled the 750m and it is clearly now running on internal graphics because everything is terribly choppy. What should I do now? Are there any guides out there or am I just missing something obvious here?

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@Dschijn Here are the pictures:
 http://imgur.com/a/s4ju7

 

Still haven't gotten the eGPU going on the internal display but I've benchmarked it on an external and it is running exactly as fast as the same GPU on a laptop via hwtools PE4C (mPCIe). Had to use the PSU the PCB came with to power it and the akitio mod for a Dell DA-2 to power the 6-pin PCIe slot.

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@Dschijn Yeah, looks like I got insanely lucky. Only paid $50 USD for it and it has the exact same functionality as the Thunder2!

 

Can you confirm that Optimus is disabled in Windows 10 on computers with dGPUs? Went to bed last night under the impression that the best course of action for running this eGPU via the internal LCD of the iMac is going to be via installing windows 8.1 instead of 10.

Edited by Alarming0
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3 hours ago, Dschijn said:

Sorry, no idea how/if Optimus is working on Macs with a dGPU.

Alright, well I will figure it out and post a full build once things get working. Thanks for your time!

Edited by Alarming0
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Where did you get that thing from? I'd really like one (or two) to play around with.

 

Just a note. I found something similar here:

http://graniteriverlabs.com/thunderbolt-flint-river-boards

 

The TBT-FR on the Asus board probably stands for ThunderBolT Flint River, where Flint River is the codename for the Falcon Ridge controllers (in this case, the L5520 variant with 2 TB2 ports).

 

It looks to be an development board of some sort. Granite River Labs only sells these to "licensed Thunderbolt Developers". I wonder what the costs/conditions for that are.

Edited by Yukikaze
More info on TBT-FR added
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