Short story: I run the IT department at our construction company. Last year, I built a PC for the Owner (My Father-in-law) with an i9 13900k and Z790 Taichi with 64 GB Ram, top-of-the-line everything. It is a rocket, completing Cinebench R24 consistently in the High 39,000s. As the days passed, he added more and more devices (External USB everything, external HDDs and Enclosures) and drives (4 additional internal SSDs), and slowly but surely, he started having issues. This happened about the same time we made the switch to windows 11 and it was really hard to tell what was causing what. Everythign from SSD Firmware issues, to ram issues, you name it. I have had to listen to him bitching for the last 18 months every time his pc even turns on an extra fan. I have at least 100 Teams messages stating that he has run out of RAM alone, and a running count of every restart (64).
Fastforward a year and I have this great Idea to upgrade his PC to a Threadripper HEDT. More Pcie lanes, GEN 5 bandwith, more cores. Man am I pumped, the best IT guy ever, I am going to go down as the guy that built the 10 year workstation everyone talks about. Finally time for everyone at my office to respect Dees Nuts. I had BIG USB energy untill I realized that there are no USB4 cards, I just have a header, and the TB4-EX card I used on the first rig will not work. For the old rig, I installed a TB4 card and I built him a OMC TB4 16TB external (Nvme) enclosure he can use for our Dropbox directory. Now I have 4k into a (Threadripper) pc that can’t do what the old one does.
My fix to remedy the current situation was to use a Pcie riser cable, stretch it out of the case, and connect it to an Asus Hyper M.2 card that sits on the top of the case. It is janky AF, but It was all I could come up with. It is insane to me that USB4 is still not available.
- Does anyone have any idea when the USB4 cards will be available?
- Is there any way to get any current TB4 card to work?
- Any suguestions will are welcome.