Akitio Released Thunder3 PCIe Box Expansion Chassis

Akitio announced the availability of the Thunder3 PCIe Box.

The Thunder3 PCIe Box is an Thunderbolt 3 external PCIe expansion chassis device and was designed to provide an additional PCIe slot for Thunderbolt 3 computers where there is either not enough space to install another PCIe card or on systems such as laptops where there previously was no option to add a PCIe card.

Thunder3 PCIe Box rear
click to enlarge

This PCIe Box features a 1×16 slot that supports half-length, full-height, double width cards, which can easily be swapped out due to the screw-less design of the box.

The 1×16 PCIe slot also supplies up to 25 watts of power to the card, providing an all-in-one expansion chassis solution. The box has two Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chaining up to six devices as well as a DisplayPort to add an additional monitor to the system. The downstream Thunderbolt 3 port supports Thunderbolt 3 devices as well as USB 3.1 and DisplayPort devices.

The four PCIe Gen3 lanes and the Thunderbolt 3 interface are capable of transfer rates up to 40Gb/s, providing enough bandwidth to support whichever card is installed into the device as well as any additional devices connected in the daisy chain. The rugged aluminum device makes it portable so that it can  be taken on location and moved from one system to another.

“Modern computers and especially laptops are often designed to be as lightweight, thin and as portable as possible,” said Richard Wright, VP, sales and marketing, Akitio. “This often results in the need to add additional devices to either upgrade the specs or add additional functionality and this where the Akitio Thunder3 PCIe box comes in. The incredible 40Gb/s bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 provides our customers with the flexibility to install a plethora of PCIe cards into the Akitio PCIe Box to meet their demanding workflow requirements.“

The Thunder3 PCIe Box gives Sony Vegas and Adobe Premier users the ability to edit and playback multiple streams of HD and/or 4K content with enough headroom to connect up to two 4K displays simultaneously. It can be daisy chained to other Thunderbolt 3 devices, such as company’s Thunder3 Duo Pro dual-bay storage, Thunder3 Quad 4-bay storage or Thunder3 PCIe SSD storage with a data transfer rate of up to 2,500MB/s.

“There has been tremendous industry momentum behind Thunderbolt 3 since we launched the technology a year ago, with all the major OEMs shipping Windows PCs with Thunderbolt 3 ports, unleashing new capabilities that were previously not possible,” said Jason Ziller, director, Thunderbolt marketing, Intel Corp. “Akitio’s Thunder3 PCIe Box represents new and creative ways for users to take full advantage of 40Gbps performance and flexible connectivity only available with Thunderbolt.“

The Thunder3 PCIe Box is not designed to support GPU graphics cards and not all PCIe cards support Thunderbolt unexpected cable removal and hot-plug. In some cases, unsupported cards could lead to unpredictable system behavior. Visit company’s website for a list of compatible cards.

The empty Thunder3 PCIe Box will be available in August 2016 with an MSRP of $299.99 and includes a 40Gb/s 0.5m Thunderbolt 3 cable.