Note that you are actually shorting pins 1 and 3. On the Gigabyte GC-TITAN RIDGE (one of the most popular cards for Thunderbolt hacking) it is regularly reported that you can “short pins 3 and 5”. One of the pins on the mystery Thunderbolt header interface on the rear of the card is an “enable” (technically ‘force power’) signal. Common Problem #1: It doesn’t work at allĬard not detected, nor any attached devices, nada. I have spent the past few evenings trawling through many forums, reading about the many different experiences people are having, and have also purchased some hardware to play around with myself, so we can dig into these problems and see what (if any) solutions there are.
It’s not a secret that these cards may work in a motherboard which isn’t supported, but full functionality is not a given. Apparently regular looking PCIe expansion cards, but shipped with a mystery interface cable to the motherboard, of which there is a small list of supported models. I’ve long been intrigued by Thunderbolt add-in cards. The situation is no better for Thunderbolt 4 however many technical details differ from what is written on this page.
Presently everything here concerns Thunderbolt 3 add-in cards. It does not assist with basic Thunderbolt troubleshooting. This article is written for people from a technical background who are seeking to retrofit Thunderbolt to older / low end PCs.