MSI’s Thunderbolt 4 PCIe Expansion Card finally exists

Have you recently built an Intel Alder Lake system in the last year using one of MSI’s DDR4 compatible motherboards? If so, you can finally relax and sit back with a nice cup of coffee and some sweet Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

MSI seems to have finally released its Thunderbolt 4 PCIe Expansion Card (Model “THUNDERBOLTM4”) into the world. Something that everyone has patiently been waiting for it to unveil for some time now. The company has been claiming that the card was “coming soon” since its Alder Lake boards were announced or so. Finally, the wait seems to be over.

Although the expansion card hasn’t been officially announced, nor is it available via any retail location or website, it is currently listed as available within MSI’s own online store (here). Its MSRP is $69.99 and features two TB4 (USB-C) and two DisplayPort connections. Internally, it features the company’s proprietary 16-pin connection (which is why no one has been able to use any other brand all this time), as well as a USB 2.0 header connection. Additional specs can be found below.

This has been a long wait, resulting in many claiming (online) that they assume it will never see the light of day. Which would have been bad for all of these boards that feel like they were released incomplete due to how popular Thunderbolt is right now (and growing thanks to USB4).

Since there hasn’t been an official announcement yet, it is unclear when these will be available via other retail locations. Or how soon the product will ship if ordered from MSI directly since they may not be fully ready to ship (else MSI likely would have said something by now).

If we get our hands on one, we’ll make sure to let you know what we think about it. We’ll match it to one of the Alder Lake boards to see how it performs compared to what’s out there already.

Specifications:

• Interface: PCIe 3.0 x4 or better
• Dimensions: 6.1″ x 5.8″ x 7.2″
• Weight: 0.29 lbs
• Connectivity:
  • 2 x Thunderbolt™ 4 (USB-C) ports
    • Supports up to 40Gbps transfer rate with Thunderbolt devices
    • Supports up to 20Gbps transfer rate with USB4 devices
    • Supports up to 10Gbps transfer rate with USB 3.2 devices
    • Supports up to 5V/3A ,15W power charging
    • Each port can daisy-chain up to three Thunderbolt 4 devices or five Thunderbolt 3 devices
  • 2 x DisplayPorts
  • 1 x 16-pin TBT header
  • 1 x USB 2.0 header

Update: Link fixed (MSI seems to be shuffling their pages around)