Any ETA on a thunderbolt equipped chassis?

M

mercutiouk

Member
Hi, been around a few laptop forums looking for answers on this, as you're a forum and seller in one I can see me spending a reasonable amount of time here ;)

I'm looking to build a "modular" desktop setup with a thunderbolt equipped laptop at it's core. I get to pull the plug and take it on the road with most of my data and settings etc rather than having a desktop with a gaming laptop that's normally gathering dust (saves on keeping them both patched up and syncing settings etc too). When docked it'll have a decent desktop GPU on a thunderbolt to PCIe bridge board and probably my raid array via a similar route.

When do you expect to see chassis through your door with thunderbolt? There's a couple of laptops announced that will have it soon but I've not heard much from Clevo who seem to be your main supplier. I have sent a sales mail with the rest of my requirements but I figured a general "heads up" reply here would give me enough to plan around :)
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Welcome to our forums :)

At present we do not have any ETAs on Thunderbolt enabled chassis. As soon as we hear anything we'll post back here.
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
Thunderbolt is only just coming through on desktop motherboards - you are looking at 3 months+ for our laptops.
 
dangro474

dangro474

Bright Spark
I take it this is a completely different type of "thunderbolt" port to those available on macbooks, which as far as I know only serves as a rediculously costly solution to the size of the chassis. £40 adapters for HDMI, oh dear.
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
UPDATE

Thunderbolt enabled laptops will not be with us until around October 2013, so they're 14 months away yet!
 
M

mercutiouk

Member
dangro474 said:
I take it this is a completely different type of "thunderbolt" port to those available on macbooks, which as far as I know only serves as a rediculously costly solution to the size of the chassis. £40 adapters for HDMI, oh dear.
Click to expand...

Well, that's the use on macs, sure. Thunderbolt IS used for other things but they mostly just plug screens into it. You can put a screen at the end of a thunderbolt chain of devices, so long as it's last in chain it works (something like that anyway).

With PC's (and macs will maybe catch up too) there's a nice feature with it: External PCIe bridge card. You get a box you can put a proper desktop GPU in so when at home you get a much beefier machine. I'm taking the idea further and having a decent raid setup attached in a similar way. The 10GB link IS a little slow for very high end cards but you still get 80-90% of the performace from eg a GTX680 as you would plugged into a motherboard, if PCIe 3.0 gets here by the time thunderbolts working properly on laptops it'll be able to go full whack.

I'm planning my next full rig purchase (currently SB i7 and getting married next year so I should really wait) to be a laptop with a thunderbolt to PCIe bridge box. I'm home quite a lot but spend maybe 2 months a year in Greece so being able to take the important bits of my main rig with me rather than keeping a seperate laptop "in sync" with a desktop PC or just being able to unplug and go sit in the garden while it still being a slightly cut down version of my main rig is (in my opinion) a fairly good idea. I'll still be having a very basic box under the desk (probably take a smallish rack case and build something into it and fit a cheap set of rails into my desk) so when not sat infront I can plug the raid array into the desktop (which will also have thunderbolt) for access to the raid over wireless if i'm wanting to use the laptop elsewhere in the house and I get to have 1 set of expensive parts that get plugged into whatever i'm using at the moment. Lastly if I have a buddy over and we fancy a little multiplayer I can unplug and use the laptop, plug the GPU on thunderbolt into my desktop and I have 2 full gaming PC's again. It makes a lot of sense imo :)

Without thunderbolt it's VERY hobbled on the GPU front, doable with expresscard to PCIe adapters but they are only 1x PCIe (single lane) so VERY slow.
 
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M

mercutiouk

Member
I don't want to start a new thread so sorry for the uber necro-ing of this but... anything?

I'm hunting around and there's definitely a few laptops sporting thunderbolt ports now Haswell is here but I don't think I've seen anything with a decent GPU AND thunderbolt yet (although - early days). Anything in your pipeline?
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
What device do you own or plan to own in the next 12 months that supports thuderbolt?
 
M

mercutiouk

Member
PCS said:
What device do you own or plan to own in the next 12 months that supports thuderbolt?
Click to expand...

It's still possible to get hold of the TH05 (thunderbolt to PCIe bridge interface) reference samples if you talk to the right people. Into that I'd be plugging an ATI7950 and achieving something like 80-90% desktop performance (far in excess of what any laptop GPU can produce currently). That obviously does rather cause some issue with gamer grade laptop manufacturers as people would then not need a new shiney laptop every 18months to keep up with graphics card tech :p

While in my case it's rather niche etc it's an angle I think will eventually take off and... well I have plans :whistling:

If I need to I'll wait for a Haswell refresh on the Asus laptops (G750JW) and jump on one of those (as they have thunderbolt) but I was hoping for something a little cheaper/more custom built as I'd probably want to throw the biggest processor and the best onboard GPU I could into it. Which is either going to be impossible or leave me with the hassle of selling parts.

There's a couple of boxes (silverstone are doing one) coming out of Computex with PCIe to thunderbolt bridge tech. I'm quite happy to be an early adopter and deal with ironing out issues. The silverstone box talks about the having "frame buffer" problems but that's with doing something like virtu's tech and sending the image out the laptop to the eGPU, having it rendered there and brought back to the laptop screen to be displayed. I don't need anything so complicated (plan to have a screen plugged into external GPU) so the tech (basically) exists already in that TH05 reference board. They're having problems getting it certified or it would be in full production.

Assuming thunderbolt doesn't die on it's ass (may yet) my idea/ideal doesn't seem sooo far away.
 
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keynes

keynes

Multiverse Poster
I'd be plugging an ATI7950 and achieving something like 80-90% desktop performance
Click to expand...
If that is possible I assume you need another source of power for the gpu.
 
PCS

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
There is talk about putting a Thunderbolt port on the Vortex series. However, this increases the price by around £30 and given that there isn't much demand for Thunderbolt at present we feel that at present it's not in the best interests of the majority. Agree/disagree?
 
M

mercutiouk

Member
Hmmm for the sake of a £30 option...

I'm obviously biased in the extreme on this so maybe my vote doesn't count for much but considering that's a "ok, I'll go a bit smaller with the hard drive" type trade-off in terms of price it doesn't seem so excessive.

I'd (almost certainly) be making my wallet scream if something like this showed up.
The upgraded TB port next year is something I'd likely upgrade for :D
 
L

Looner

Bronze Level Poster
I'd rather have the latest tech now (as I want to buy NOW), rather than wait until next year. I am not going to buy a laptop every year, especially one for gaming for over £1000. PCS should stick to its policy of always offering the latest tech because that is what makes the company unique.

That's just my 2p, of course.
 
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