Blackmagic Forum

Dear BM Gurus,

As seen on your product range, there are a lot of thunderbolt driven devices.
I just changed from Mac to HP Workstations.
Can you recomend a thunderbolt hardware that allows all the windows users to run your products as well?

Thanks,

Felix Gorbach

As of now, you need a motherboard that has a Thunderbolt port(s) incorporated in the main board. I don't think they can put this on a PCIx board due to the speed requirements.

There's one article on the matter: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/23/thunderbolt-motherboards-on-their-way/

A quick google search of PC Thunderbolt will bring up a bunch more articles about it. I'd say another year or two before we see it mainstream on PCs.

Right now only certain Z77 boards have built in thunderbolt, the Asus P8Z77-V Premium and the Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH are 2 notable boards I know of. I would have suggested you wait for Ivy Bridge-E on LGA 2011 which most likey will have native thunderbolt support + X79's support for extra ram over Z77 but since it seems you or your company already bought new workstations thats not really an option.

Though now I can't find where I read it... I did find an article about a company attempting to marry two PCIe 3.0 cards to a thunderbolt interface. However, this still doesn't help us, being that the workstations you already purchased likely do not have PCIe 3.0. Like the ASUS above, some mobos are advertising it as "future ready". It's still going through testing.

Edit:
Found this after posting above:

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HP has committed exclusively to USB 3.0 as it sees no “value proposition” in Thunderbolt. That is bound to hurt the specification overall, as HP is the world’s largest PC maker by a decent margin. Second place Dell has so far been quiet on its plans, further adding to the uncertainty.

In another article, I read that HP expects thunderbolt to go the way of firewire within 3-5 years. Meaning - to go away.

Surely, another company will make a PCIe/thunderbolt card that will be compatible with most mobos. It'll take some time though. 2 years perhaps.

Hey! Blackmagic!!! Product idea: Why not make your own PCIe + Thunderbolt card that works for both PCs and Macs?

That would be a god send to companies who already have workstations, and who really love your products!