A question about whether it was possible to connect a gaming PC desktop to Apple’s Studio Display came up in a recent discussion. Using Apple’s premium display with a gaming PC is a weird setup. Not only does the Studio Display lack in ways important to gaming, it also can only be connected via Thunderbolt. This makes sense for Macs, which have included some version of Thunderbolt since 2011, but PC adoption of Thunderbolt has historically been spotty. In that sense, using an Apple Studio Display with a PC is weird largely because Thunderbolt on PCs has been weird. Despite this weirdness and history, I wanted to help. I have both a Studio Display and a gaming PC, and therefore could explore if and how the two might connect. I also already had some encouraging evidence that it was indeed possible.

A few months ago, my wife had to do some work on her colleague’s Dell laptop. She usually works on a MacBook that her employer provided along with an LG UltraFine 5K, a display also designed for Macs and thus also only has Thunderbolt for input. She connected the Dell and, to our surprise, everything just worked. It seems that in more recent years, PC makers have started to include Thunderbolt on their laptops. A quick search reveals a plethora of Thunderbolt 4 equipped PC laptops.

I believe there are two very good reasons for this trend:

1. USB and Thunderbolt have converged to the point where they are largely compatible and even share the same USB-C connector. This compatibility means PC makers don’t have to sacrifice a precious USB port in order to include Thunderbolt.
2. Like Apple’s MacBooks, PC laptops have become increasingly thinner over the past decade. The versatility and reliability¹ of Thunderbolt makes it possible for these ever shrinking laptops to continue to offer many the same capabilities of their larger forebears using a few small USB-C ports.

As surprised as I was that Thunderbolt has seemingly gained traction in PC laptops, it makes sense. Thunderbolt on PC desktops, however, is a completely different story.

Only a few PC motherboards even have Thunderbolt, and those that do can’t use it for display while also leveraging a discrete graphics card. Furthermore, most discrete PC graphics cards don’t even offer Thunderbolt compatible ports, and those that do are either designed for the Mac Pro and/or are absurdly expensive. Instead, almost all of them come with some combination of HDMI and DisplayPort. My guess is that the very modular nature of gaming PCs runs counter to the integrated paradigm found on laptops and that Thunderbolt was likely built for.

That said, it is possible to use a Thunderbolt display on a gaming PC with a discrete graphics card, but not in the way I (or I suspect anyone) would have ever imagined. As far as I can tell, the best way to connect a PC Desktop with a discrete graphics card to an Apple Studio Display using Thunderbolt is as follows:

1. Buy a motherboard with Thunderbolt support and a PCIe card² with Thunderbolt and DisplayPort In ports.
2. Connect the DisplayPort Out from the graphics card directly to the DisplayPort In on the PCIe card.
3. Connect the Apple Studio Display to the associated Thunderbolt port on the PCIe card.

This means there will be a DisplayPort cable coming out of one part of the PC and going right back into another part of that same PC. I don’t know the details, but my assumption is that the PCIe card combines the DisplayPort stuff from the external cable with the USB and Thunderbolt stuff from the motherboard to create a single Thunderbolt transmission.

This gap is not limited to Apple Studio Displays, it’s also true for the variety of displays that support USB-C input. These displays work with gaming PCs because they typically offer HDMI and/or DisplayPort inputs as well, but the effect is that USB-C and Thunderbolt are effectively relegated to being “laptop ports” in the PC world³. Here’s the thing though, laptops make up a vast majority of computers sold. Using an Apple Studio Display with a PC is weird in large part because Apple has been the odd one out with regards to Thunderbolt, but will that still be the case a few years from now if PC laptops continue to adopt Thunderbolt? Thunderbolt could easily become the de facto standard for connectivity and if that happens, it won’t be the Studio Display that’s weird, but the gaming desktop that can’t connect to it⁴.