Thunderbolt Motherboards

[box bundy]

Can someone please give me the run down on Thunderbolt technology? What is it? What's it used for and what do you need to take advantage of it? The whole lot.

 

[Janus67]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

Feel free to ask a question after reading

 

[ATMINSIDE]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

Here's the non-mobile link.

 

[box bundy]

Have any of you had experience using a thunderbolt to sata adaptor? what speeds would I expect compared to sata speeds?

 

[Janus67]

Never used one, but you would still be limited to SATA speeds.

The fastest hard drives (read: SSDs) only go up to the SATA3 speeds anyway. So outside of a RAID0 of multiple drives you wouldn't get any additional throughput through a single port.

 

[EarthDog]

Sorry, just got your PM's... looks like you have been taken care of well here as expected.

That said, I wouldnt buy a board with TB on it as there are barely and (affordable) TB devices to begin with. The technology has been out almost a year and hasn't even taken off yet.

I wouldnt worry about buying a mobo with TB on it personally.

 

[Janus67]

Sorry, just got your PM's... looks like you have been taken care of well here as expected.

That said, I wouldnt buy a board with TB on it as there are barely and (affordable) TB devices to begin with. The technology has been out almost a year and hasn't even taken off yet.

I wouldnt worry about buying a mobo with TB on it personally.

^^ That too.

 

[box bundy]

do you know of any quality or performance differences between the Asus pro and expert other than thunderbolt? I am leaning towards Asus's boards mainly for their fan controller but wished they had an esata port like the gigabyte boards. I figured I could always just run a sata cable hanging out the back of the PC case instead or use a thunderbolt to esata adaptor. I have HDDs for a docking station I have connected to the PS3 for movies etc that I want to connect.

 

[EarthDog]

There are no performance differences between motherboards (that you will notice).