Part Thunderbolt 3 expansion cards

[The-Alchemist-404]

So after Asrock showed their x570 line up and timmy joe tried to review a thunderbolt ssd enclosure i was wondering if there was a pcie expansion card for thunderbolt but little did i knew, the cards needed a thunderbolt header, looking around on what this header does i've found that it most likely sends metadata to push a display signal down to the usb type c port, but i havent been able to found concrete information on why it needs the header to work. For starters it cant be data tied to the chipset because thunderbolt also works on AMD, then if it is meta data for encoding the signal then why it needs a dedicated header when it is plausible to use aditional pcie lanes to send the video signal.

so, my question is this, What does the thunderbolt header really does? And is there a workaround to it?

 

[The-Alchemist-404]

I been doing some research on the subject and it looks the THB-C header for AICs is just suplying idle power for validation on boot according to this forum thread and they suggest to use a pull up resistor to supply power from another plug with idle power

it migth be an intresting idea to run a m.2 to pcie x4 adaptor running a thunderbolt AIC, but i dont know if it would work, any suggestions?