Does the thunderbolt port on my Asus motherboard utilise my graphics cards?

Apologies if this is a stupid question!

I have an integrated Thunderbolt port on my Asus Maximus motherboard:

But I'm confused as to how it works exactly. If I were to plug an Apple LED monitor into the integrated thunderbolt port, would my graphics cards still be utilised by the port? Could I play Crysis 3 on maximum settings and do my 3D animation and all the rest of it?

To me it seems really odd how no monitor would actually be plugged into my cards if I were to use the Thunderbolt!

2 Answers

Your thunderbolt port actually has two parts connected to it on the computer side:

• A PCI express connection.
• A DisplayPort connection.

It is actually slightly more complex because different chips result in the nu,ber of PCIe lanes which are connected, and the PCIe and display signal are multiplexed, but the important part is that the output from your onboard graphics is available on the thunderbolt port.

This means that yes, your graphics card will be used to display the image on the LED monitor.

Note that you can also use thunderbolt on systems with no on-board graphics. And that you can connect external graphics cards to the thunderbolt port (using the PCI-e lane part).

with the maximums v Extreme board you do not need to add a graph card to you sys to have 3 display the thunderbolt port can be use as a display port as if you have two display port and a HMDI