Thunderbolt or USB C pcie card for z840

Sysadmins
1

Hey guys,
Has anyone found a good decently priced thunderbolt or usb-c pcie card they are using on an HP running Rocky 8?

I bought a “CG-Maple Ridge” thunderbolt card, but I’ve never managed to get it to work.

Thanks,
Fegan

2

Did you check that this card is compatible?

Intuitively one assumes any PCIe card should work in a suitable open slot. True for 95% of peripherals.

However TB cards usually require a separate header cable and only work on specific MBs. So unless this card is specifically supported on that workstation, that’s likely your problem.

Even the HP cards don’t work on all models.

3

The ROI on achieving functional thunderbolt connectivity with add-on cards on linux is negligible.

It all looked so promising once upon a time, but:

  • NVMe in an internal PCIe slot is faster.
  • GPU in an internal PCIe slot is faster.
  • 25Gb, 40Gb ethernet solutions are much more reliable.
  • 56Gb infiniband infrastructure can be found in your local dumpster.
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4

Generally true.

There are a few exceptions worth considering:

Connecting external NVME drives for quick ingest
Connecting some I/O devices, like BlackMagic or AJA. They have card equivalents, but if you have existing hardware, it can be cheaper to add a TB card than buying a new I/O interface.

1 Like
6

Sorry, I should have said inherited it not bought

7

I haven’t tried a maple ridge controller but i have several titan ridge add-in cards for TB3 support across a variety of machines.

If its not working, I’m imagining you might not have a thunderbolt header on your z840 motherboard? if you don’t you, need to jump pins 3 and 5 on the add-in card. this will allow devices to connect but you will not be able to hotplug.
(see attached pic for an example, not mine)

IMG_5200
IMG_52002000×1500 256 KB

if you do have the header, then maybe install boltctl on rocky. you can probe whats happening further

i think usb-c devices should just work though, the usb controller on the card doesnt need any of the funny handshake-y stuff that tb devices need.

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8

Hi, I have this card and it works fine on my Gigabyte MB on Rocky 8.7. But as allklier said, there must be Thunderbolt header on motherboard. I know that one trick to make it work on HP workstation was to connect display port from TB card to graphics card, this enabled some kind of pass through and made visible connected storage (make no sense, I know :face_with_spiral_eyes:).

1 Like
9

Yeah I read that. I’ll give it a try.

10

I ended up buying a usb c card off amazon, and it works fantastic. Easy plug and play with a bunch of ports,

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