Ground yourself, and then remove the PCIe card from the package. It will still set you back a lot less money than a real Mac. 4 HP Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Card Installation Step 2Installing the Thunderbolt 3 PCIe card 1. But honestly, unless you love to tinker, just save yourself some time and buy the Z390 Designare (not Z370), which apparently has brilliant Hackintosh support and has a superb Thunderbolt 3 implementation. The power delivery will work and DisplayPort pass-through will work. Thunderbolt 4 provides the fastest connection to any dock, display and. On the 7820 it is supported on PCIe slots 4 and 5. The GC-MAPLE RIDGE is compatible with GIGABYTE motherboards that featured a Thunderbolt header, refer the list as below. All that is required is the card and a DisplayPort 1.3 to Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 Cable (usually supplied with the card). It should work for pre-approved Thunderbolt devices attached at boot time (no hot plug). Add-in cards on the newer Precision systems that support Thunderbolt (xx20,xx30) dont require a GPIO cable/header like the third party cards do. If the card is awake during boot, then it should function as a USB-C host for USB devices. For everything to work as Intel intended, the BIOS has to declare resources for the PCIe port to which the Thunderbolt controller is attached, so that there are enough resources reserved at boot to cover any potential Thunderbolt devices being added later.

But that does not mean that everything will work. For example, Gigabyte thunderbolt cards 'need' to be plugged into proper gigabyte TB header along with PCU-E connection. You can get the Gigabyte GC-TITAN RIDGE add-in card (I have only tried rev.1 though) and it will appear as visible to any motherboard (compared to Alpine Ridge which remains completely invisible and does not work at all on unsupported motherboards). Headers are there for 'security' functions but it feels more like a feature that exists to lock down cards to their own manufacturer motherboards. Instead of them going on a rant about BIOS support and the like, they can just say to dumb consumers 'it needs a header, your motherboard does not have it, and that is why it does not work'. If you encounter this issue, ensure the Thunderbolt 2.0 card is installed in the correct PCIe slot. For the Precision Tower 3620, the Thunderbolt 2.0 card should be installed in slot 3 for it to function properly. I believe the main reason why it is there is so that they have an easy way of explaining why the PCIe card is only supported in some motherboards. The Thunderbolt Add-In-Cards Setup Guide indicates this card should be in PCIe slot 5 for both the Precision Tower 58. It does edge cases like force-power if controller is asleep in old implementations, some power / sleep management stuff, and for old implementations, lets the motherboard BIOS when a device has been added so it can run the SMM handler. The header is not inherently important for Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt add in card no header