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MSI reveals first USB4 expansion card, delivering 100W through USB-C
- xg15 3y agoWhy the DisplayPort outputs? I could understand if the card took an existing video signal and spliced it into the USB-C ports via alt-mode, but just outputting it in a separate socket doesn't seem very useful. Also, where is the video signal coming from? I assume the card doesn't have a GPU, but I don't see any internal ports either. Or did the article get it wrong and the DP sockets are really inputs that are then spliced into the USB-C outputs?
- danhon 3y agoThe photograpgh of the card in the article shows the DisplayPort sockets labeled as _in_ fwiw.
- xg15 3y agoAh, I see it now. That makes more sense.
- rektide 3y agoUSB4 mandates every port have DisplayPort capability. I think it's quite likely indeed DisplayPort input we see here.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoI'm amazed how the report could get it utterly wrong considering it is literally spelled out in the only photo of the device they have. It has also been exactly the same in the previous MSI TB3 add-in card which has exactly the same port layout. Ah, and the source article https://www.techpowerup.com/309532/msi-first-motherboard-maker-to-offer-usb4-add-in-card-with-100-w-usb-pd https://www.techpowerup.com/309532/msi-first-motherboard-mak... got it right.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arghwhat 3y agoThunderbolt add-in cards have generally had DisplayPort inputs on the back to feed into the thunderbolt ports. It is a hack, but a side-effect of the adapter not having a GPU, and this becomes the most convenient solution (especially as GPUs puts their outputs in a similar location).
- dylan604 3y agoI always loved having a cable coming out of the GPU and connecting to another card. There have been many versions of this throughout my use of various expansion cards. This is excluding the SLI type of internal connections.
- fb03 3y agoThis made me remember of my first 3d accelerator card, the Diamond Monster 3D. It was exactly like that, a 3D-only card, that took over the 2D signal of your default video card when you activated it by daisy chaining the 2D videocard to the 3D via a short vga cable between both :-) Good times when 640x480x16bpp was enough to make me wow at something like GLQuake
- therein 3y agoI also remember my AVerMedia TV card had no way to output audio through the computer's speakers, so you'd have to take its audio out and plug it into your microphone input and enable playback of audio in.
- bombcar 3y agoI still to this day am not sure how the voodoo 2 actually worked with that analog link.
- irq 3y agoPass the system’s usual video signal through the voodoo unmodified when not generating 3D graphics. Replace the signal entirely with the voodoo’s own signal when generating 3D graphics.
- tiernano 3y agoWonder is this locked to MSI boards or could it work on any board?
- leipie 3y agoThese kinds of boards always require proprietary connectors directly to a supporting motherboard and the image shows some extra pins next the power connector. So I suspect this card isn't any different
- brigade 3y agoThere was some hope that someone would make a USB4 expansion card that didn't support PCIe tunneling, which wouldn't need those extra pins. If this card isn't it, then literally the only interesting thing about it is that it doesn't use an Intel controller. Which really is a negative.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoThe photos of this card show a header JU4_1 which has a different pinout than all MSI motherboards' Thunderbolt headers I know so far, so I think it won't even work in current MSI motherboards, just future ones.
- chx 3y agoAlpine Ridge didn't work without the proprietary header at all. Titan Ridge worked to an extent -- but usually it couldn't add PCIe buses so the number of PCIe devices connected to your desktop TB3 card at boot defined the limited until the next reboot. You could remove and add different devices as long as they didn't need extra PCIe buses compared to what got reserved at boot. Can't see why Maple Ridge would work differently.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoASUS has the same thing (since last year at least), so dunno why the propaganda https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/accessories/thunderboltex-4/ https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/ac...
- jeffbee 3y agoJust FYI for anyone tempted to buy this card: it does not work. There are multiple revisions and none of them work right. It stands a 50/50 chance of becoming terminally confused after a peer disconnect, will thereafter not work and hang the BIOS on reboot, only fixable by unplugging the machine. Absolute garbage. If you want TB4 I strongly recommend a machine with TB4 ports integrated, preferably from a major brand like Intel or Apple.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoThat's literally the same experience I have with the MSI TB3 card. You were talking about the ASUS one, I guess? The level of BIOS bugginess on recent motherboards is reaching astronomic levels. The MSI motherboard I was trying that on will literally _duplicate_ the entire ACPI DSDT whenever you enable TBT (Linux shows a hundred warnings when booting up, which MSI claims is fine)...
- jeffbee 3y agoYes. I never tried the MSI one. The add-in cards are an opportunity for some chronic underperformer from a 3rd-tier BIOS developer team to put bad code between you and an Intel thunderbolt chip. Just say no.
- rootw0rm 3y agoit's too bad AMD doesn't have first class TB4 support yet, at least not on the consumer hardware i've been looking at
- formerly_proven 3y ago> Just FYI for anyone tempted to buy this card: it does not work. There are multiple revisions and none of them work right. Ah, the ASMedia experience! Glad AMD picked such an experienced and well-regarded company to do their chipsets /s edit: Okay, the linked part actually uses an Intel chip, though the point still stands. ASMedia has so many other chips and bridges (including the mentioned AMD chipsets) and they're all pretty notorious for weird "huh that was supposed to work" kind of problems. Problems that generally don't happen on Intel platforms.
- George83728 3y ago>USB4 uses USB-C That's a relief I guess, I was afraid we were getting a new connector again. How do normal people keep all this USB crap straight? I consider myself something of a nerd but I find all of this cable/port diversity utterly bewildering.
- refulgentis 3y agoUSB4's been out for quite some time, USB3 is usb you're used to / we cut our teeth on if you're over 25. There's a vocal subset that argues *USB4 itself is confusing*, but 95% of the time they're referring to either: A) power (the crappy $5 Amazon cable from 3 years ago will not carry 100W for your M2 Pro Apple Silicon Apple MacBook Pro B) crappy 3rd party cables you can't trust because you can't trust crappy 3rd party cables, ever
- jeroenhd 3y agoFor what it's worth, I've tried to find a Thunderbolt/USB4 C-to-C cable that can also carry 100W. The only cables I've found (that weren't obviously lying in the ad) were Apple's cables. Even other laptop manufacturers have cables for charging and cables for high speed data transfer. Samsung's official cables seem to do either USB3 or high-speed charging, but not both at the same time. Lenovo has a Thunderbolt 4 cable (with no details on the power capabilities) or a USB 3.2 2x2 cable that can carry up to 100W. Dell Europe doesn't seem to be selling C-to-C cables. HP seems to sell a competent cable for one of their docks, but that's out of stock. Asus' cable is USB2 only. Acer doesn't seem to sell any cables as far as I can tell, except for a USB 3.1 cable for Chromebooks. If you want a fully-featured USB4 cable, your only options are either buying a cable from Apple or going for third parties and with the prevalent scams on online web stores and the risk of burning your house down if the cable turns out not to be up to spec, getting good cables can be a real challenge. Apple sells their cables for a ridiculous price (€150) but I wouldn't expect the average consumer to know where to reliably spend their €30-€50 for a charge cable. Device manufacturers really need to step up and sell some kind of certified cable that doesn't cut any corners.
- 3y ago
- londons_explore 3y agoWhen you plug a monitor into this, where does the framebuffer live? Is it in GPU RAM of another GPU in your system, with pixel data being DMA'ed over the PCIE bus? Does that mean my screen goes blank if I ever get contention on the bus? Could I put loads of these cards into a machine and run 20 independent displays, all with one GPU?
- jsheard 3y agoThe two DisplayPorts on the card are inputs, you run a loopback cable (or two) from the GPU to the USB4 card and it muxes the video into one (or both) of the USB4 outputs. Loopback cables are a bit clunky, but it does mean there's no pressure on the PCI-E bus from moving the pixels from the GPU to the USB4 card.
- londons_explore 3y agoThats kinda lame... I was hoping there was software support for the GPU to share the framebuffer RAM with the USB4 controller, and there being some way for the OS to prioritize some fixed bandwidth to make sure it doesn't get starved. Apple kinda has this in their M1/M2 SoC's where the GPU is entirely separate from the stream-data-from-ram-to-the-display logic.
- lxgr 3y agoSounds like something that would be a pain to get broad OS/driver support for – and all just for the sake of avoiding a small external loopback cable?
- londons_explore 3y agoWell it also means you can have as many displays as you like... And put displays onto hubs and cable extenders.
- mikepurvis 3y agoI bet if they put the displayport inputs on the inside with an optional passthru bracket in the box to get them out of the case as needed, we'd start to see GPUs offered with internal displayport outputs too. Basically the CD-ROM analog audio cable all over again.
- dist-epoch 3y agoHow can 100W be delivered through those tiny USB-C connector landings, especially since only a few of them are used for power?
- jeffbee 3y agoThe cable must report itself as being capable of 5A, which requires it to use 20-gauge wire for the VBUS. ETA: I guess your question was specifically about the connector interface, which is less of a problem because there are 4 power and 4 ground pins. 1.25A per pin is no issue.
- dist-epoch 3y ago20 gauge wire is 0.9 mm diameter. A USB-C contact is much smaller (seems to be around 0.5 mm). This is the part I don't understand. If you require a 0.9 mm diameter wire, how can you have it connect to a 0.5 mm landing strip?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iancmceachern 3y agoResistance is the function of conductivity of the material, cross section area of the conductor, and length. In the case of wires the length is long, so they need more cross sectional area to keep the resistance down, in the contacts the length is very short, so they need less cross sectional area to achieve the same Resistance. Often, they make the contacts from an even more conductive material than copper like gold or silver, so that helps even more.
- ilyt 3y agoAlso there are 4 connectors for ground and 4 connectors for power in USB-C connector
- Dylan16807 3y ago
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoNot an EE but 100w, that gives me The Fear. It reeks of trouble. Someone please set my mind to rest.
- jsheard 3y agoIn what sense? Putting that much power down a USB cable? USB-PD keeps the potentially cable-melting amperage capped at 3A or 5A (the latter only if the cable is explicitly marked as 5A capable) and moves more power by increasing the not-cable-melting voltage instead, so 100W is 5A at 20V. There's already laptops which charge at 140W over USB-C, it's fine.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoIt's a lot of energy. And close to signalling wires. Controlled by computers (What you describe is done by a CPU, not some simple foolproof system, I guess?) which can go wrong. In a small plug that can get yanked out easily and damaged. That kind of thing. Am I being paranoid? It just smells like a house fire in the offing.
- jsheard 3y agoThere's a lot of moving parts yes, but in practice it's proven to be pretty safe. Issues usually manifest as charging being too slow, rather than going too fast and causing a fire. Whenever you charge a device you're already trusting a complex computer-controlled system not to turn the lithium ion pack into an incendiary device, trusting a computer not to overload a copper cable is small stakes relatively speaking.
- ilyt 3y agoin practice we don't have all that many devices pushing it that much that are not "a vendor charger connected to vendor power supply". I expect there will be some surprises with cheap cables pretending they can handle full power.
- 3y ago
- amelius 3y agoThe only thing I want from USB4 is ECC.
- rafaelturk 3y agoI'll say this once and I'll say this again.. mixing Data + High Power never a good idea..
- lmpdev 3y agoIt's not really that high of a power rating though 48V is ubiquitous through POE et al And with 5A the gauge of the wire is important but it's not going to be running hot to the touch I doubt you'll see it go much higher though, especially the current
- eternityforest 3y agoWhy not? It doesn't seem to be starting fires(At least not enough to make the news) and it's digital data, with IIRC pretty good forward error correction. Interference doesn't seem to be an issue, it all seems to work fine. The only issue I see would be counterfeit cables, but that's the same issue you get with any low voltage system that allows separate cables, and 120VAC even has the same issue, people burn down houses with space heaters and extension cords incessantly, because we are apparently idiots who think it's fine to not have fuses in the cords.
- jackvalentine 3y agoI just want a graphics card with USB4 on it which hopefully(!) would make it more useful and reliable than these addin cards.
- Eisenstein 3y agoGPUs are already filled with ports and there is no demand for any manufacturer to put a USB 4 port on it. They also saturate their PCI-E slots so trying to shove more data through it isn't tempting. I doubt you will see such a thing unless it is made specifically for that purpose.
- btgeekboy 3y agoThey’re not hugely commonplace yet, but video cards with USB-C ports are available without being super specialized equipment. Nvidia had some on the 2000 series GPUs but dropped them with the 3000 series. This was part of the VirtualLink system which failed, but they’re otherwise fully functional. Some of AMD’s newest cards have USB-C ports on them now: https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-7900xtx https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-7900x...
- Eisenstein 3y agoCool. I thought they were dropped completely after the Turing series; I didn't know AMD picked them up.
- jackvalentine 3y ago> GPUs are already filled with ports and there is no demand for any manufacturer to put a USB 4 port on it. USB-C ports on graphics cards are already quite readily available. > They also saturate their PCI-E slots so trying to shove more data through it isn't tempting. No they don’t. Most cards and use scenarios don’t even saturate x8 PCIE4 let alone a full x16 PCIE5 slot.
- noobermin 3y agoWhile this is cool for the occasional use, 100W means a bit more of that must come from the wall, just for USB peripherals. I appreciate fast charging and all that but it would be good to somehow have efficient devices again.
- Sakos 3y agoWe're expecting way more from our USB peripherals than we used to. It's either drawing power from USB or having an extra power adapter connected directly to the USB peripheral, and thankfully we're shifting towards the more convenient option. I'm not sure what this has to do with efficiency.
- noobermin 3y ago>I'm not sure what this has to do with efficiency. Energy efficiency.
- eternityforest 3y agoThere's no theoretical reason I see why USB would be worse than an external adapter with the same wire gauges. The only issue is that an expansion card powered by the PC supply would have an extra conversion step to get the voltage to USB-C levels. That's solvable though, maybe they could route the USB through the power supply itself. Or a docking station can power both PC and monitor. Maybe the next generation of PC parts will run directly on 48v or 20v.
- pshirshov 3y agoUSB4 1.0 USB4 2.0 Yeah, what a reasonable naming convention.