ASRock Z87 Extreme9/ac

[inaki.mat]

I have now successfully connected an external drive via a firewire to thunderbolt adapter. So far it seems to work only if I boot into windows first, then reboot into OSX 10.9. I have not tried a thunderbolt monitor yet but the pass-through does work connected via displayport to an iMac target display. I plan on getting a thunderbolt display when/if Apple releases a new one. The only question is whether or not Apple puts some little extra something in there to prevent anything other than a Mac working with the thunderbolt display. Apple appears to have done this with the thunderbolt iMacs.

The Extreme9/ac was relatively simple to setup to run OSX. You will have to patch the bios using pmpatch.

Which version of Windows are you using? Could you give us the exact model of Thunderbolt adapter you are using? Maybe beyond the fact that making Thunderbolt work for most of us is an issue we could start isolating the different factors that influence on the compatibility/funcion of the final experience getting that to work.

I have bought a Z87X-UD5 TH which I believe uses the same Thunderbolt controller as the Asrock Z87 Extreme9/ac.

 

[shakmc]

Thunderbolt Hardrives will it work? I own a MBP 15 with Buffalo Ministation SSD wich I use all the time, since thunderbolt is on pc mobo I wanted to buiild a hackintosh but never decide wich mobo to buy, when I see asrock z87 E9 I thought it would be great to make my own thunderbolt mac pro

 

[cdrhoek]

I spent some time his afternoon trying to isolate what it took to get thunderbolt to work on the Extreme9/AC.

I booted into OSX Mavericks with the following thunderbolt bios settings:

Thunderbolt support: Enabled
Security Level: Unique ID
Wake from thunderbolt devices: Disabled
Thunderbolt resource allocation: Standard
TBT device IO resource support: Disabled
Thunderbolt PCIe cache line size: 32

The computer was booted with an external firewire drive connected via an Apple firewire to thunderbolt adapter. The external drive was turned on and running before boot.
After booting, the computer seemed to recognize that something was plugged in (see first attachment). But the external firewire drive was not recognized.

I then rebooted and changed the Security level in the bios to Legacy mode. After reboot, the external firewire drive was recognized and mounted on the desktop. The attachments show the system report for the firewire drive.

I rebooted and changed the security level in the bios back to Unique ID. The external drive was recognized and mounted on the desktop. Multiple reboots after complete shutdowns (including unplugging the power cord) resulted in a reliable connection with the external drive via thunderbolt.

I did not need to boot into windows at all to get this to work properly. Booting with the drive attached via the firewire to thunderbolt adapter did take significantly longer than booting with the drive unplugged. Once booted, computer speed was unaffected.




View attachment 76655View attachment 76656View attachment 76657View attachment 76658View attachment 76659

 

[shakmc]

I spent some time his afternoon trying to isolate what it took to get thunderbolt to work on the Extreme9/AC.

I booted into OSX Mavericks with the following thunderbolt bios settings:

Thunderbolt support: Enabled
Security Level: Unique ID
Wake from thunderbolt devices: Disabled
Thunderbolt resource allocation: Standard
TBT device IO resource support: Disabled
Thunderbolt PCIe cache line size: 32

The computer was booted with an external firewire drive connected via an Apple firewire to thunderbolt adapter. The external drive was turned on and running before boot.
After booting, the computer seemed to recognize that something was plugged in (see first attachment). But the external firewire drive was not recognized.

I then rebooted and changed the Security level in the bios to Legacy mode. After reboot, the external firewire drive was recognized and mounted on the desktop. The attachments show the system report for the firewire drive.

I rebooted and changed the security level in the bios back to Unique ID. The external drive was recognized and mounted on the desktop. Multiple reboots after complete shutdowns (including unplugging the power cord) resulted in a reliable connection with the external drive via thunderbolt.

I did not need to boot into windows at all to get this to work properly. Booting with the drive attached via the firewire to thunderbolt adapter did take significantly longer than booting with the drive unplugged. Once booted, computer speed was unaffected.




View attachment 76655View attachment 76656View attachment 76657View attachment 76658View attachment 76659

Thats great, sounds like your are advancing!!! Maybe more tries changing bios settings.

What you think about DP-in feature on the asrock z87 e9 did it works on hackintosh?

http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...y-motherboards-pcie-cards-available-soon.html
On this post talk about the thundebolt pci card(asus_z87_mb_thunderboltexii) it can be conected to a dp port on a graphic card for a thunderbolt port output, somebody talks about that is the way you can conect a TB Display and using your Graphic card I think is the same as the asrock z87 e9 does with the difference on adding an other TB port

http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/8o-TB-Z87 Extreme9ac.jpg

 

[PJALM]

very nice choice unlike the asus mobos the dvi doesnt block the usb 3.0 ports and has the same asmedia host controler aka 1061/1040a the wireless is unsupported at this point so have a backup plan also the locked msr is easier to unlock than the asus mobos its also better than the gigabyte choices as they have the crapy marvell controller for sata and usb 3.0 also if using clover boot loader the locked msr wont be an issue as it will binary patch the appleintelcpumanagement kext a great build overall

pay no attention to the asus fanboys

What are you talking about. ASUS Haswell mobos do _NOT_ have a locked MSR. The included Wireless/BT module on the ASUS _is_ supported.

This ASRock mobo however may be a bad choice as it uses PCIe multiplexing to achieve the 4way SLI/Crossover which OSX has no support for.

 

[cdrhoek]

I currently have two Sapphire 7970 cards in a crossfire setup. I have the displayport output of the primary card connected to the displayport input on the motherboard. My 27" iMac is connected to the thunderbolt 1 output on the motherboard via a displayport cable. The passthrough works as advertised in the target display mode. I plan on buying a thunderbolt display when/if the new version comes out, and trying it. If it works, this will be one of the only motherboards that will allow you to use discrete graphics and a thunderbolt display. I believe Asus has a similar solution that uses an add-in card.

This ASRock mobo however may be a bad choice as it uses PCIe multiplexing to achieve the 4way SLI/Crossover which OSX has no support for.

I'm not quite sure what this means as OSX has no support for crossfire or SLI on any motherboard. I only have a dual crossfire setup, but both cards are recognized and connected via 16 lanes. Only one of the cards can be used to drive graphics output. I have tried a couple of openCL aware programs, the Luxmark benchmark and a bitcoin mining app. In both cases, both card were recognized (as FirePro D700s) and utilized.

The Asrock Extreme9/AC does not have an unlocked bios and it must be patched. This was relatively simple. There is no support for the built in WiFi or bluetooth. I have no real need for either, so I have not pursued alternatives.

 

[synchromesh]

Hi cdrhoek,

Do you have the BIOS patch for the ASRock Z87 extreme9/ac? I've tried using the latest 2.30 BIOS and UEFIPatch 0.2.1 (and its included patches.txt file), but I get the message "reconstruct: Aptio capsule checksum and signature can now become invalid/No patches can be applied to input file".

Any help or advice would be appreciated...

Also, have you had any luck with the WiFi and/or Bluetooth?