ITX motherboards with Thunderbolt 3

[dreballs]

Has anybody heard anything about Thunderbolt 3 coming to any Z170 ITX motherboards? Obviously I heard about Gigabyte's new line of mobo's with Thunderbolt 3 but none of them are ITX. I heard Asus was coming out with some too, but from the leaks they don't look ITX, so I was wondering if anybody else knows anything. Thanks

 

[dreballs]

wow great community, thanks guys

 

[DonkeyOatie]

You think that sarcasm is a way to encourage others to respond?

The intersection between Thunderbolt 3, Skylake mITX, and future rumors is very small. Patience, or Google.

 

[dreballs]

Thanks. Sorry, Im building a SFF and Im kinda on a deadline. My apologies

 

[DonkeyOatie]

I build a lot of mITX systems and eagerly await future developments. The board manufacturers 'float' ideas to see what the response it, so even rumors can be very nebulous.

What do you want to use the Thunderbolt 3 for? Perhaps there is another solution. You are very likely going to have to wait for the next wave of boards. Next year. mIXT is a niche board, Thunderbolt 3 is a niche features. Unless there is a specific market it may never happen. Only one of my mITX boards has Thunderbolt of any sort and very few manufacturers make mITX/Thunderbolt with Haswell. That does not bode well for Skylake.

The ASRock Z170 m/ITX/ac Gaming has a USB 3.1 C port for which a Thunderbolt 3 adaptor will work (I think)

 

[dreballs]

With any mITX build there's only one PCIe slot and I was looking at some adapters for GPUs that you can hook up to your PC externally and the best ones hook up via Thunderbolt 3 so I wanted to have the option to SLI some GPUs in the future. It might be tough to find an SLI bridge long/large enough to connect them, and it might not even be possible but I'd still like the option.

Several mITX skylake boards have USB 3.1 type-C and you might be able to connect Thunderbolt 3 devices to them since type-C and TB3 have the same port/connector but you'd only get USB 3.1's 10Gb/s rather than TB3's 40Gb/s which in the case of external GPUs would almost certainly bottleneck them.

It'd also just be nice to have TB3 since it's the fastest port by far, combines with USB, makes your I/O pretty damn future-proof and there'll probably be some pretty cool pieces of equipment down the road that require it

 

[Chayan4400]

Or you could avoid all that trouble and just get an mATX case and motherboard. What you are trying to do is complicated and most likely won't give you the full potential of each card. If I remember correctly, external GPU cards work at PCI-E x1 which means it won't be compatible with SLI.

 

[dreballs]

Or you could avoid all that trouble and just get an mATX case and motherboard. What you are trying to do is complicated and most likely won't give you the full potential of each card. If I remember correctly, external GPU cards work at PCI-E x1 which means it won't be compatible with SLI.

I need mITX cause i move around a lot. Also the good external GPU adapters are PCIe 3.0x16 so they could potentially SLI. It'd also just be good to have TB3 for the future