Apple Thunderbolt Display and PC?

[nope7308]

I'm planning to build a custom PC, and I'd really like to use the Thunderbolt Display. Would this work with a Thunderbolt enabled motherboard, such as the Asus Z87 Deluxe/Dual? Any potential issues with gaming? Would I be able to use all the features of the display (e.g., camera, ports, speakers)?

The ASRock Z77, for the previous generation CPU, took the DP connection from the dGPU, and routed it through the mobo so that the dGPU could be used to drive the ACD, whereas I believe most other motherboards had to default to the integrated graphics. Does anyone know if there's similar mobos for the Haswell platform?

I'm waiting until after October before I do anything as I'm expecting a refresh/update to accompany the new Mac Pro. Thanks for any advice!

 

[No-Me]

I've had one for gaming (gigabyte thunderbolt motherboard), but it's not ideal, windows does see the monitor out of the box, but gaming is impossible as you can't hook it up to a GPU, it only works with the iGPU, and that sucks for gaming.

I'm using a old aluminium Apple display for gaming right now, but I'm going to switch to a Dell 21:9 (29") as soon as possible!

 

[nope7308]

I've had one for gaming (gigabyte thunderbolt motherboard), but it's not ideal, windows does see the monitor out of the box, but gaming is impossible as you can't hook it up to a GPU, it only works with the iGPU, and that sucks for gaming.

I'm using a old aluminium Apple display for gaming right now, but I'm going to switch to a Dell 21:9 (29") as soon as possible!

It can't make use of the dGPU natively, but you should check out Virtu GPU. It basically shares the load between the iGPU and dGPU. To my knowledge, this is the only viable solution at the moment. You should get decent performance, but it might take some patience to work out all the kinks. I presume the camera and possibly some of the ports wouldn't work, but I haven't tried it personally.

 

[No-Me]

Yeah I checked virtu GPU, but that's unworkable, it's terrible. I hooked a monitor directly up to the dGPU and it's a lot better now. With Virtu GPU I got about 16-18FPS, now I get about 60-70FPS

The only solution would be if there is a motherboard that has a displayport input so you can loop the dGPU signal onto the thunderbolt without going through the iGPU. But as far as I know there is no motherboard that does this yet.