Hi all,
Last year I upgraded my workstation to a (glorious) Threadripper 9975WX + ASRock WRX90 WS EVO combo, which has been great! Rock solid stability and performance.
I’m going to be moving house soon and am considering racking my workstation in the garage instead of my office for noise + temperature reasons. For this reason, I’m looking at what options exist (if any) for running an AOC (active optical fibre) thunderbolt cable from the garage to my office (about 15 meters or 50ft). That way, I can hook up my monitors, input devices, peripherals with one (admittedly expensive) cable.
Having a look at the motherboard’s manual + online, I can see that it doesn’t officially support Thunderbolt at all (it’s not certified for it), however, the built-in ASMedia ASM4242 USB4 / TB3 controller does support it, and one of the rear USB-C ports does seem to recognise thunderbolt devices if I hook up to it. However, the board doesn’t a DisplayPort IN port (a given, since it doesn’t claim to support Thunderbolt officially).
Knowing this, I had a look online and saw that many motherboard manufacturers have released their own Thunderbolt PCIe expansion cards, which usually provide one or more DisplayPort IN ports and one or more Thunderbolt OUT ports. The catch, however, is that these add-in cards are expected to be used on certain vendor motherboards and use their own non-standard ThunderBolt board header connections.
Does anyone know of a way I can use my board’s single, non-video Thunderbolt 3 port and ‘mux” an external DisplayPort (DP-ALT) in? That way I can have both going up the AOC cable. 
Cheers! (sorry it was a bit rambly, first post).