[Denis Pierre-louis]

Hello Dave. I know that I’m late into this thread, but I need you to clarify somethings for me. I’ve watched your video over a dozen times by the way. My primary interest was the HP Thunderbolt-2 PCIe 1-Port I/O Card. I’ve read most of thread and I understand that it’s an 8 lane card which makes total sense. In your video, it looks like a 4 lane. There’s another card like it already in the market from ASUS called the ThunderboltEX. That card my friend is a 4 lane card which requires an Asus’s mother boards with a dedicated, proprietary GPIO interface (TB Header) for the PCIe card to function properly. These interfaces are, at this time, only on the z87 chipset motherboards. The point is…. I’ve looked into the motherboards of the HP Z820 & Z620. There isn’t a dedicated interface on any of those boards the would be compatible with any connection outside of Firewire, USB 3.0/2.0, or audio connectors. In addition, the z820 and z620 boards are with X79 chipset family. There isn’t an X79 board on the market that’s thunderbolt ready. I am aware that HP makes there own proprietary boards for their workstations, yet still, the boards in the 820 & 620 do not have that foreign interface. The card you displayed in your video was not connected in the machine yet you had a thunderbolt cable sticking out from the back. It would have been nice to show us viewers how you were able to get it connected to the machine. You right though, your card does differ from the one HP is shipping. However, the PCIe card itself has a dedicated GPIO header built into it which leads me to believe that it plug in somewhere. Or maybe the card will work off a 16x lane without the need of connecting the card directly to the motherboard. Usually mother board ports are used for front I/O panels and cards with these types of interfaces allow for front I/O panels to connect to if there isn’t any room on the board itself. HP also provides a lack of support for the device on their website. There aren’t any addition images on the web other than the one I’ve embedded here. Your video is the only actual proof that Intel wants thunderbolt in Professional PCs particularly those that support PCIe Gen 3 and beyond. I look forward to hearing back from you. Or even better, a follow up video to show how is the device getting the proper throughput.