MSI fell behind when it came to providing a Thunderbolt 4 (TB4) solution for its motherboard models that didn’t offer integrated TB4 support. Which mostly just included its DDR4-supported models. Because of this, many of its customers had to go without Thunderbolt access. For Alder Lake adopters, it’s been nearly a year. However, that has finally come to an end now that MSI’s expansion card has finally made an appearance and I’m sure there will be a decent number of people scrambling to get their hands on one.
It is elusive though, just like the company’s Thunderbolt 3 (TB3) card. Although the TB3 card is almost impossible to find now, where the TB4 card is readily available (for now). It’s just at MSI’s website and nowhere else. There is no telling if it will make it to other retailers like Newegg or not.
That being said, we got our hands on MSI’s new Thunderbolt 4 PCIe Expansion Card (Model: THUNDERBOLTM4 8K) and we said if we did, we’d let you know what we think about it. So here it goes!
The card comes tucked into a small simple box. Inside, you find both internal cables that are used to connect it to the motherboard. Simply plugging it into a PCIe slot isn’t enough. You have a USB 2.0 header cable and MSI’s own 16-pin Thunderbolt header cable. The latter of which means it will not work with motherboards of other manufacturers–just like their TB cards won’t work with the MSI boards (Thanks MSI…)
You have to make sure the card is inserted into a PCIe 3.0 (or higher) slot that is x4 or larger. Then run the two internal cables between the card and the motherboard (make sure your motherboard has the 16-pin TBT header before you buy into one of these.
There are four ports on the back of the card. Of those, you get two TB4 ports that are used to break out to all of your Thunderbolt devices (TB3 or TB4). You can daisy up to three TB4 devices to a single port, or up to five TB3 devices.
The other two ports are DisplayPorts, but these are inputs. Basically, this allows you to adapt any DisplayPorts from your graphics card to USB-C/TB monitors, passing the DP signal through the TB4 ports. So DP 1 port is for passing DP signal/connectivity to the 1st TB port, and DP 2 port is for the second TB port. If you do this, you can include a TB or USB-C supported monitor within your daisy chain.
If you do make use of such monitors, TB models should be able to exist anywhere in the chain (assuming they themselves have an throughput to daisy to the next device). If the monitor is USB-C, then make sure it is at the end of the daisy chain as the USB-C device (in this case, a monitor) can’t pass TB connectivity to the next device.
Performance
Test system: MSI MPG Z690 Edge WIFI DDR4 Motherboard running Windows 10
We have connected a number of Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 accessories to this card. Including hubs with plenty of ports. We attached OWC’s 4-port TB4 Hub (which extends a port to multiple ports) to one of the outputs and then ran a multi-port TB4 dock from that. We then loaded the other ports of the hub and dock with multiple USB devices, and other accessories (ie, SD card, headphones, etc). All of which worked exactly as they should.
Other docks we tested included Hyper’s HyperDrive USB4 Mobile Dock, a Kensington Thunderbolt 3 4K Dock, OWC’s Thunderbolt 3 14-Port Dock, and more.
We tested it against various external TB4 SSD models, and Samsung’s C34J791 TB3 34-inch ultra-wide QHD monitor (which can also daisy chain and looks to be on sale right now!).
Everything we threw at it, simply worked. We also noticed that we didn’t have a single TB4 monitor on-site, which was surprising. We turned the place upside down looking for one, but that test will have to happen at another time. For now though, the fact that nothing gave us problems showed that we had a formidable expansion card (which is probably why MSI refers to this card as being part of its “Pro Series” of devices.
Our Conclusion
It works! It works great with everything we threw at it and should make a lot of MSI built owners happy (at least, those who have gone without TB4 access all this time and have the 16-pin header on their board). This is an incredibly powerful TB4 card and should serve the needs of most users looking for TB4 support in their (MSI) system.
It is also only $69.99 (MSRP), which makes this quite reasonable for an upgrade. Sadly, many of the Z690 DDR4 boards were already incredibly expensive for not having native support. So it is still a bit of a blow below the belt to have to spend an additional $69.99 to get TB back into your system (since TB support has been around for quite some time now). So a mix between that how long it took MSI to get into the game with this card and that it can “only” be purchased directly from MSI, did bring the score down a little. If it wasn’t for this, it would have actually walked away with a perfect 10 out of 10 (which is quite rare coming from us). Now, hopefully, the company extends inventory to retailers so that we can trust that it will stick around longer than the TB3 card did.
| Our Rating
/ stars |
Average Price* $69.99 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
Additional Images:
Specifications:
- Part #: MS-4463v3.0
- Model: THUNDERBOLTM4 8K
- Interface Type: PCIe 3.0 x4
- Dimensions: 6.1″ x 5.8″ x 7.2″
- Weight: 0.29 lbs
- Connectivity:
- 2 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports (output)
- 2 x DisplayPort input ports
- Internal Connectivity (PC must support this)
- 1 x 16-pin TBT header (MSI exclusive)
- 1 x USB 2.0 header
- Compatibility
- Support up to 40Gbps transfer rate with Thunderbolt devices
- Support up to 20Gbps transfer rate with USB4 devices
- Support up to 10Gbps transfer rate with USB 3.2 devices
- Support up to 5V/3A , 15W power charging
- Each port can daisy-chain up to three Thunderbolt 4 devices or five Thunderbolt 3 devices
- Support for up to 8K display (need to connect the DisplayPort of the motherboard or discrete graphics card to the DisplayPort Input port on the ThunderboltM4 8K card)
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
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