Thanks to the discussion on Titan Ridge and valuable input by @karatekid430 and @joevt3, I decided to try a Gigabyte GC-Titan-Ridge add-in card with my Threadripper desktop. Level1Techs recently showcased a similar setup in Linux. I'm beyond excited to share we can get them working in Windows too. The L1T video indicated there's reverse-engineering involved. Well, all I did was plug-and-pray. With some experience playing around eGPU and Thunderbolt 3 in the past few years, I went for it and hoped for the best.

System specs:

OMEN X399 Threadripper 1950x/Radeon Vega FE dGPU/32GB RAM/1TB SSD/GC-Titan-Ridge AIC

eGPU hardware:

Razer Core X + Nvidia RTX 2080 FE + 2m Thunderbolt 3 cable

Hardware pictures:

I believe the crucial component to make this work is the new GC-Titan-Ridge. My ASRock X399M Taichi board does not have a Thunderbolt header.

Installation steps:

There's no hacking or modding BIOS settings at all. I simply connected 2x 6-pin PCIe power cables and the USB 2.0 header cable to the GC-Titan-Ridge AIC. I proceeded to attach the Thunderbolt 3 device then booted my system up. The only software I installed was Intel Thunderbolt Software version [17.4.77.400] from Gigabyte support website. I tested several TB3 devices and hot-plug seemed to work.

Thunderbolt Software even showed this Threadripper system has support for External GPUs :D.

Benchmarks:

I built this system with no intention of adding Thunderbolt 3. I guess this is now my test bench because the X399 platform is amazing. 66 PCI lanes afford me the ability to connect Thunderbolt 3 devices directly to the Threadripper CPU. Windows 10 currently boots off a RAID0 of 4x NVMe drives. Memory modules are overclocked to 3600 MHz in quad-channel arrangement. I have not found a good CPU cooling solution so I'm leaving the 1950x alone while running the stock OMEN X AIO cooler.

Here are synthetic benchmark results in AIDA GPGPU and Unigine (ran through USB-C port from RTX 2080 to AOC portable monitor.

Comments:

Titan Ridge is a pivotal controller that has provided features and functionalities not seen in older Thunderbolt controllers. I hope more devices and computers will use this new controller to bring cost down.