One reason I was asking about this was I bought a Samsung 1TB Nvme SSD and I wanted it to be portable and work over Thunderbolt1/2. I could probably find get the required Header signals on some tracks on the board and design a custom card and software to do it. I have not found any other solution despite looking and asking around from the original posting date. So as far as I know, for my Z87 Deluxe Dual I am completely stuck with the built in Thunderbolt 1 ports. They really should have provided a Thunderbold Header and a way to turn off the built in Thunderbolt and use a PCie based card instead. It would have been good for Asus to have thought of this situation up front w,r,t, the Deluxe Dual. So annoying! I could have spent less and had a more future proof motherboard! I had not done my research well enough / it was not advertised but the Z87 Deluxe Board (without built in Thunderbolt) actually does have a built in header! It was early days back then for Thunderbolt on PC. My fault for being one of the first to go for an Asus Deluxe Dual with Built In Thunderbolt 1 I guess. I can see no other reason for doing it like this. Not what Asus told me, just my impression from the overall discussion. I think the header partly performs a "dongle" function. They did not state this explicitly but i think it might be the case that part of the reason for the header is to ensure that thunderbolt cards can only be used on certain Intel Approved boards. The Answer was I could definitely not use their Thunderbolt 2 (or 3) addon card if I did not have a thunderbolt header available on the board. I only got though to the hotdesk support guys though. Just logged into this forum for first time since Christmas, sorry for the delay in response to you.