Ghepes Doru

Hello, i am new here, actually this is my first post. I used to have had a x230 + bplus technology pcie to express card + 770 gtx and it was a very nice experiment, and worked quite well for my needs. After reading the macbook + 780ti post and seeing the video, i was tempted to get a new macbook for myself (got the late 2013 standard retina 15) and try out a similar solution. This being the case i am a bit out of $ to complete my new egpu, and started to look over alternatives (europe is overpriced by a margin unfortunately). As so i got all excited when i saw this topic, and started to look around for the described asus part. In reality asus are not the only to make this kind of expansion boards, HP has one also with the expected premium http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/iss-adapters/product-detail.html?oid=6254963#!tab=features and of course they use a tb_header also, as specified by Intel here: Intel announces. In reality the little port is a GPIO interface, and it as any other interface is programmable (for linux kernel documentation on GPIO https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/gpio/gpio.txt). Now the actual thing is i can't figure out what could the 2 companies have done with the given GPIO, and how safe is to assume one could undo/redo the given setup (sorry if I seem overwhelmed by the GPIO stuff, i am a web developer, and as such have no extensive knowledge of system/kernel/driver development). Maybe Tech Inferno Fan or someone else with a few more ideas and knowledge can make some sense out of this. (on a personal side, i do not have the time to invest at the moment in this project, and for the time being neither the required $ for a pure test, otherwise i might just bought them and test what can I do with them in the current state things)