Asrock Z370 boards supporting Thunderbolt?

SanZ wrote: Hi, I would like to know which z370 board supports thunderbolt 3 via USB 3.1-C: on the site there's a "Thunderbolt Ready" logo but under the features it's not listed. I need to connect an Universal Audio card with a Thunderbolt 3 - Thunderbolt adapter Thanks!!

Thunderbolt 3 support depends upon the Thunderbolt add in card you use. If it's a Thunderbolt 3 card, it will have the appropriate USB C ports for up to 40Gbps bandwidth available from Thunderbolt 3.

If a Z370 board has a five pin Thunderbolt AIC connector, then it supports a Thunderbolt 3 AIC. That is easily checked in the Specifications, in the Connectors section, where you will find:

1 x Thunderbolt AIC Connector (5-pin)

These ASRock Z370 boards that I checked have the five pin Thunderbolt AIC connector, which are the full sized ATX boards. The smaller Mini and Micro ITX boards don't include the five pin Thunderbolt AIC connector in their Specs, you would need to check their manuals to verify if this connector is available or not.

Fatal1ty Z370 Professional Gaming i7

Z370 Taichi

Z370 Extreme4

Z370 Killer SLI/ac

Z370 Pro4

Fatal1ty Z370 Gaming K6

I cannot guarantee this will work for you, but try this. First go to the ASRock Thunderbolt 3 card product page, this is the USA website:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/product.asp?Model=Thunderbolt%203%20AIC

At the very top of the page on the right, find the Where to Buy link, click on that. Find the drop down list at the top of the page, just left of center, and choose a country. There is no entry for Europe.

Randomly choosing countries like Germany or Netherlands resulted in a list of distributors. Whether or not they have this item in stock is another story, but hopefully this will help you.

SanZ wrote: Thanks. One more thing: the pro4 has no pci expressx4. Is it safe to connect it in the x16?

Yes it is safe to connect a Thunderbolt 3 card to a PCIe x16 slot.

The Thunderblot 3 card only has electrical connections to four PCIe lanes, so won't connect to any more PCIe lanes.

Actually, while a PCIe slot is x16 physically in size, that does not mean that it has x16 electrical connections. The Z370 Pro4's PCIE4 slot only has x4 electrical connections, while it is x16 in size. Only the PCIE2 slot has the full x16 electrical connections. That is typical for Z370 boards, since the CPU only provides 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, all of them shared with the PCIe slots.

So the PCIE4 slot on this board is perfectly suited to work with the Thunderbolt 3 card.

Check section 2-4 of the manual. For Z370 Professional Gaming i7 it shows that all the x16 slots appear to share the 16 PCIE lanes from the CPU. So it appears that yes the video card in PCIE2 will only have 8 lanes (8x) if either of the other two x16 slots is used.

Looking at the Z370 Pro4 manual it appears the main x16 slot still runs at 16X when second x16 is running at 4x. The Pro4 may be a better choice for those wanting to use Thunderbolt with just one main video card.
Hopefully parsec can clarify this.

All external enclosures have an overhead and thus some performance loss. Take a look on youtube for reviews on Thunderbolt enclosures, I believe this has been tested. From what I remember, any bottleneck will be in the order of a few FPS (10 at most) with a high end GPU, nothing to be concerned about.