nibbles

Even some kind of metal plate adapter to transform a "naked" (deboxed) Akitio into a mITX sized board (complete with back I/O shield for a clean look with just the 2 thunderbolt ports) would be enough for me. Wouldn't be difficult to manifacture or particularly pricey. As for SATA ports, currently one could fit a couple of daisy chained Lacie 9000186 hubs inside the PC case and use eSATA to SATA cables. Hell one could even fit a whole MacMini inside the same case and have a real "all in one" with - MacMini 2014 (two TB2 ports) - naked Akitio board - eGPU - lacie eSATA hubs and multiple HDDs - silent PSU to power the eGPU and HDDs With a bit of elbow grease, maybe some industrial strength heat resistant velcro, a 3D printed I/O shield, a long enough pcie riser, all of this is very possible even without a proper mITX/mATX/ATX akitio board. But yes everything would be easier with one. Problem is, I think most people want compact solutions, so it would be pricey to produce ad hoc bigger akitio boards for a little niche of users. <style id="pageBrightnessCustomCSS">body{zoom:125%!important;}</style>

Cumulative graphs are handy but game-specific graphs tell a different story. Look at games like Ryse, even at 1080p the performance hit is dramatic. Even with TB2 and the full 4x pcie2.0 lanes (16Gbps), you get 45fps at 1080p. With a gtx980. There must be some technical reason behind it, but there are definitely some games that benefit from every Mbps of bandwidth you throw at them. So always go with TB2 if possible. And cross your fingers for TB3 (pcie3.0 4x) to become available as soon as possible.