ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 with Intel® Thunderbolt™ 4 JHL 8540 Controller, 2 USB Type-C Ports, up to 40Gb/s bi-Directional Bandwidth, DisplayPort 1.4 Support, up to 100W Quick Charge, Black

Works great if you hook it up correctly! Using an ZikeDrive Model Z666 USB4 M.2 Nmve case (they claim the fastest M.2 Drive Case): and an Fanxiang S880 4TB M.2 Nmve I get the fastest speeds of 3050.32 MB/s read, 2689.04 using Crystal Disk Mark 8 speed test. Running the Orico TCM-U4 Thunderbolt4 USB4 case with an Fanxiang S880 4TB M.2 I get the speeds: 3049.98 MB/s read, 2689.04 MB/s write. The Orico TCM-U4 is cheaper, but has a cooling problem with its top installed - but works great with thermal strip and copper heat sink and no top installed - it is reliable. But the ZikeDrive Model Z666 USB4 M.2 is slightly faster, has excellent cooling so far - better heat sink metal case with plastic over it - but the ZikeDrive is not as reliable when running thru my Plugable TB4 USB4 Hub (cant boot computer with it hooked in w/o error - sometimes errors if it is plugged in after computer booted? Seems to be working ok now.) The above ZikeDrive Model Z66 with Fanxian S880 4TB when plugged into Plugable TB4 USB4 Hub to Asus ThunderboltEx4 will get 2977.65 MB/s read, 1893.94 MB/s write for anyone who is interested. This same Fanxian S880 4TB when plugged into my Asus Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 Card or my Asus X670E-E motherboard M.2 PCIe 5.0 slot runs at 7271.24 MB/s read, 6187.19 MB/s write. So you can see the bottle neck is not in the M.2 I am using. It is cable of this speed, but Thunderbol 3 or 4 or USB4 is not cable of that speed. (I can't wait for Thunderbolt 5! I hope it works with my motherboard!) I am running Windows 10 & Windows 11 dual boot. Tests were done in Windows 10 on a Asus X670E-E Motherboard with AMD Ryzen 7950X3D CPU and using the GPU: MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB OC Edition "BGB GDDRR6X". And 96 GB DDR5 RAM (GSkill) 5400Mhz. So this is a top notch AMD computer build and is quite fast. I boot from an XPG 4TB GAMMIX S70 Blade PCIe Gen4 M.2 2280 Internal Gaming SSD Up to 7,400 MB/s in the PCIe 4.0 internal M.2 slot on the Asus Motherboard. (It has 3 PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots too reserved for future Raid-0 for video recording/editing and audio, etc.) To get this to work properly you MUST plug it into the proper PCIe X4 slot, plug the included cable from the USB 2.0 port on it into the USB 2.0 header on your motherboard, and plug the included cable from Thunderbolt Header on it into the Thunderbolt Header on your motherboard. If you don't hook it up to the USB 2.0, USB Devices can work on it, but no Thunderbolt. I have an Orico TCM-U4 Thunderbolt4 USB4 case with an Fanxiang S880 4TB M.2 in it, it was running at 1063.91 MB/s read, 1057 MB/s write, when the ThunderboltEx4 was not hooked up from its USB 2.0 to the USB 2.0 header on the motherboard. But when the ThunboltEx4 was hooked up correctly (USB 2.0 on it to USB 2.0 header on motherboard) then it was running at 3049.98 MB/s read, 2689.04 MB/s write, using the Fanxiang S880 4TB M.2.

I was hesitant to get one of these because of some of the reviews here and elsewhere. But, I am happy to report it works perfectly in Ubuntu 24.04. Driver support is built into the kernel so you can ignore the driver CD. An empty PCI slot, hook up the thunderbolt, USB, and power connectors, enable it in the bios, and it's ready to go. I'm successfully using it with an eGPU. I haven't tested speeds so I can't comment on that aspect from other reviewers.

Pros: Has given my AMD B550 Motherboard fast and reliable Thunderbolt connectivity. Have zero complaints about it once I got it working. It actually has been more reliable with my Thunderbolt 4 hub than a another PC with onboard support for Thunderbolt 4. I'm using dual DisplayPort pass-through to monitors running at 4K, with no issues. I have a bunch of USB devices connected through the hub including a 4K webcam, which also work with no issues. Everything connects and is functional from either cold boots or sleep and I've not had any issues with devices randomly disconnecting. Contrary to other reviews, once this is set up correctly, I get the BIOS splash screen on monitors connected via a Thunderbolt hub and I'm able to use a keyboard/mouse connected through the hub before the OS boots. Cons: The documentation provided with the card is woefully incomplete, so I'm here to get you up to speed. Installation: The card requires an available PCI 4x slot, a dedicated Thunderbolt header on your motherboard, an available USB 2.0 header on your motherboard, and a six-pin PCIe connector from your power supply. Installing the card is as easy as connecting all of those things. Simply installing the card isn't enough, and this is where the documentation really fails. After installation, you will need to enter the PC's BIOS and enable Thunderbolt support. It is not enabled by default! This varies by motherboard, so it will involve searching all of the "advanced" settings. After you find the right settings, enable them, save settings, reboot. At that Windows should recognize the card and you can install the driver. One reboot later and Thunderbolt should be fully functional. Which Thunderbolt port to use: The Thunderbolt ports on the card were clearly designed with daisy-chaining in mind and it impacts their functionality. Port 1 (the closest to the edge of the card) seems to be intended as the "Thunderbolt In" port. I wasn't able to get my hub to work with this port. Port 2 seems to be the "Thunderbolt Out" port. My hub works without issue when connected to the second port. Port 1 is powered, so it seems like you'd want to connect it to peripherals anyway, but again it's not explained in the documentation. Other thoughts: My only other (minor) compliant is that the DisplayPort-in ports are DP1.4 and only support a single monitor per connection. There's two DP-ins, so it's not a big deal as long as you have two available DP connectors on your GPU.

After installing the card, connecting the TB/USB headers (opted to skip the PCIe as I don't need the PD functionality), and enabling TB4/USB4 (under AMD BPS for X670E BIOS), and downloading the TB manager from Asus' site it works exactly as expected. I can now swap my mouse/keyboard, 10Gig ethernet, and monitor (3440x1440p 175hz HDR) between my windows and macs with a single cable. The fit on the thunderbolt ports seems to be very loose, bumping the cable at all seems to result in a disconnect. There are also some quirks with Windows, sometimes it won't display HDR at 175hz at my native res (it will always do so if I drop to 144hz), and it doesn't seem to want to reconnect to the OWC Thunderbolt Pro Dock if I unplug and reseat the cable without powering the Windows machine off. (This may have been a Windows 10 issue, it now lets me disconnect/reconnect without power cycling just fine on Windows 11) At the end of the day, this has greatly simplified my current desk setup and I'll definitely be buying a motherboard with included Thunderbolt next time I'm in the market for an upgrade.

Hardware is fine (though misleading), support documentation is probably the worst headache I've dealt with coming from an established company such as Asus. I purchased this card to use with my standing desk setup - I wanted to clean up the cables a bit, and the best solution for me was to install a thunderbolt card. Having an Asus motherboard that properly supports this device, I bit the bullet and invested a couple hundred dollars in an entire thunderbolt setup. After countless hours troubleshooting the card (and researching online forums about trouble with this card in particular), I figured out why it's been so difficult to get it the way I wanted it to work: - Port 1 is a full-fledged thunderbolt port, meaning you get high-speed USB, PCIe tunneling, and all of that. Problem is, it seems to be a PURELY hot-swappable thunderbolt port, with the intentional design being that it does NOT work at all during boot (displays are a hit or miss), and that you can only use USB devices after the OS has loaded and the thunderbolt drivers are initialized. Every boot with peripherals connected to this port will throw a "No keyboard detected" bios error at you. - Port 2 is.. another thunderbolt port, which DOES work immediately during boot (all USB devices are accessible and displays have never failed me), but it does not have full thunderbolt capabilities - biggest issue being that it does not support anything above USB 2.0; I have no idea if PCIe tunneling works because quite honestly, it's discouraging to troubleshoot more after dealing with this garbage. This has been a HUGE inconvenience, because I have a Focusrite audio interface that requires a USB 3.0 connection to be stable - Considering that port 2 is the only usable port during boot (sure, power cycling the thunderbolt dock / hub works after boot, but this is not preferable at all - ESPECIALLY when most of the time, displays aren't usable until OS is running meaning you can't even access the BIOS), I'd have to power cycle the interface once every ~5-15 minutes, which sucks just as much. Worst of all? No manual for this device mentions this at all. The only reason I could come to this conclusion is through all those hours of research on forums for this device - every single negative comment I've seen have had the exact same issues that I've had, being that you'd have to power cycle the thunderbolt dock to make it work after a cold boot (on port 1, which is usually not mentioned but understandably feels like "the port" to have everything connected to), but nothing about port 2 being limited to USB 2.0 (I only found that out by checking USBView with that Focusrite interface connected to the dock by swapping it between the TB card's port 1 and 2; port 1 read that it was "SuperSpeed capable" [USB 3.0], port 2 read it was just "High-speed" [USB 2.0])

I am running an ASUS Z490-E motherboard, which is not listed as compatible with this model thunderbolt controller. The ThunderboltEX3 controller however appears to no longer be in production and in general costs twice as much as it should on the second-hand market, so I thought I would give this a try. The Z490-E has a thunderbolt header on it, so installation was reasonably straight forward. Was then able to activate the controller in BIOS (updated to most recent as of this review, 2601). Installed the software, and it appeard that it worked. However when plugging in deivces there would be no notifaction popup, and they would not appear in the thunderbolt control panel. If I booted with the devices plugged in they would show in the control panel, but as "Not Connected". Tried the various TB security settings (auto connect, user approval, etc), make no difference. The TB control panel did state PCIe tunneling not enabled, and I could not find any way to enable it in BIOS (perhaps its not on Z490). USBC devices mostly worked, but I wasn't after two more USBC ports. Spent a couple days trying different things and finally gave up returning the card. [My star rating is fairly irrelevent, I suspect it works just fine in correct hardware, and I tried it on unsupported motherboard.]

Worked as advertised. But I did have to do my research first. Downloaded the newest bios and turned on the correct settings within the bios. Also checked my motherboards compatibility with this device. Know I have thunderbolt-4 and usb-4 ports on my pc for quick cf-express type b offloads.

I normally don't do reviews, but some steps need to be taken to get this to work. I installed a Z690 Prime board from Asus january 2026. Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200 build 26200 THINGS YOU'LL NEED: empty flash drive WARNING: to install this on an updated bios (if you are on 13th/14th gen, you need to update bios anyway for microcode or your processor is rapidly degrading itself) you also need to update the firmware on the TB card if you are using in windows. theres an issue with a security handshake between the new windows 11 versions and thunderbolt 4 addon cards. go to the "Asus ThunderboltEX 4" website and download the driver, and in another tab theres a firmware update. You need to extract the contents of the zipped firmware update to the flash drive. I RECOMMEND READING THE "README" FILE WITHIN THE ZIPPED FIRMWARE UPDATE FOLDER TO DOUBLE CHECK MY INSTRUCTIONS, DO NOT JUST BLINDLY TRUST A DUDE IN AMAZON REVIEWS LOL. FORMAT the usb drive to FAT32 and follow the readme instructions within the file: TBTFwUpdateToolEfi V1.3 is Update PD and Thunderbolt Firmware Tool for THUNDERBOLTEX 4 Add in card ※Please note that this motherboard must be supported [ThunderboltEX 4] add in card and should be confirmed thunderbolt function had work properly Update step 1.Please extract the TBTFwUpdateToolEfi V1.3 file and copy it to a USB Drive. 2.insert USB Drive on motherboard 3.press the [Power key] then press and hold the [F2] into BIOS setup meun 4.Click[Advanced mode] 5.Select [Exit] and [Launch EFI Shell from USB drive] into shell mode for the update process There is also a apparrently security issue within BIOS. when you go into bios to enable usb4 tunneling over PCIE it will likely show you need to enable iommu during boot.. you technically SHOULD do this, and I should not advise otherwise. But when I tried it, things didn't work, and when I disabled it, things DID work. So maybe check on your side, but if you disable this, make sure nobody plugs any TB cable into your PC cause uh yeah, someone with 20gbps connection and bad intentions plugging into your pc is a recipe for a very bad time.