The lack of Thunderbolt support on the AM3+ platform has now been fixed by ASUS. At Computex 2012 ASUS has been showing off 990FX AM3+motherboards with Thunderbolt connectivity. The “New” motherboards are simply old boards with added Thunderbolt support, these include the Crosshair V Formula-Z (990FX + SB950), M5A99FX PRO R2.0 (990FX + SB950), Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 (990FX + SB950) and M5A99X EVO R2.0 (990FX + SB950). What all these motherboards have in common, is a header labeled “TB_HEADER,” which connects them to ASUS’ Thunderbolt EX add-on card.
The ASUS Thunderbolt EX card is driven by Intel’s Cactus Ridge 2C Thunderbolt controller. The TB_HEADER is a low-level connection between the motherboard and the add-on card, which transacts power state, signaling, and device hot-plugging events to the system BIOS.Some of ASUS’ recent 7-series LGA1155 motherboards can be retrofitted with Thunderbolt the same way, and feature the same header. The card has a nice EMI shield running the entire length of its PCB. Its rear panel has one full-size DisplayPort, which is actually an input from your graphics card, and one Thunderbolt + mini-DP output.
Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that its games were played for over 11 billion hours…
Steam's annual end-of-year recap, Steam Replay, provides fascinating insights into gamer habits by comparing individual…
GSC GameWorld released a major title update for STALKER 2 this seeking, bringing the game…
Without any formal announcement, Intel appears to have revealed its new Core 200H series processors…
Ubisoft is not having the best of times, but despite recent flops, the company still…
If you haven’t started playing STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl yet, now might be the…