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[SUCCESS] Gigabyte Designare Z390 (Thunderbolt 3) + i7-9700K + AMD RX 580

thanks if want to use a pci/thunderbolt card is there one that works ?

Your inquiries suggest you want to add additional Thunderbolt ports, not simply daisy chain.

First, understand that a Thunderbolt dock will NOT create additional Thunderbolt ports.
It will add other ports (USB3, DisplayPort, ethernet etc.), but at best, will only allow additional daisy chaining from the original port onto more devices.

Adding a PCI Thunderbolt card to provide additional Thunderbolt ports would require a TB header on the motherboard.
The Gigabyte Z390 Designare does not have an TB header available.

I don't believe there is any way to add additional TB ports to this motherboard
 
Hi everyone. I’m back with what I think is good news for me and possibly other 5700 XT users who have issues. I had a lot of trouble with my 5700 XT, which is a Gigabyte branded model. My system was freezing randomly and regularly, no matter what I did. Screen freezes, mouse moves, audio continues, etc. - need to hard reboot.

Last week I decided to try out tweaking my graphics card with power play table device property injections in clover thanks to this thread and tool:


I undervolted my card to 1000mv from 1200mv, set the maximum GPU clock speeds to what my card is advertised as (1905mhz), and also set the minimum clock speeds to 1000mhz, as some people say that they have HDMI issues when the clock speed goes too low (PC/MAC users) Who knows though? I guess I’d just be wasting power even if it has no effect.

I’m told that the undervolt value is the only setting really having any influence here, and that limiting the clock speed maximum or tweaking the minimums has no effect, as it’s not possible to do so with power play tables.

I can’t say I understand the technical back end intricacies of what’s going on, but I understand what’s going on conceptually. As a side note, however, Luxmark reports the card as having a 2100mhz clock speed when no tweaks are set, but any speed I limit to with the tweaks in Clover show up in Luxmark as the same, meaning that Luxmark now shows 1905mhz as my card‘s clock speed. I’m told that this is just cosmetic, and that Luxmark doesn’t report things correctly anyway. Since I know little about graphics card tweaks and overclocking, I can only offer up my observations here.

Undervolting these cards seems to be a thing for PC users as well in order to boost performance and lower thermals. I’m wondering if some brands of 5700 xt cards running on hacks are just too close to their max performance or thermal edges and crashing? My card would randomly spin up its fans to full blast even when not doing anything graphics intensive - I’m not sure what that really meant, but in retrospect I assume it was the card heating up quickly for no reason, but it may have just been poorly managed fan speeds under OSX. Like I said, I’m not an expert here. My fan freak outs did not seem to happen when my system would freeze. Either way, the fans were erratic.

Anyway, since my undervolt, my fans never freak out anymore, my graphics benchmark the same in some synthetic tests, and in other benchmark tests, a teeny bit higher or lower, while video rendering is consistently 8-10% faster across the board in multiple apps.

Undervolting lowers the thermals and stabilizes the cards as a result, to the point where you actually gain performance as you’re avoiding some nasty throttling due to bad thermals. My fans are also more consistent and quieter when under load.

All that aside though, I HAVE NOT HAD A FREEZE OR CRASH since I undervolted my card, which is really all I care about. It’s been about a week now. I don’t want to cry wolf again, but it looks very promising for my situation.

This leads me to speculate that some brands of 5700 xt cards are not properly managed under OSX as well as others are, and perhaps they are being pushed to operate too close to their performance and thermal edges inducing the freezing or crashes. Perhaps newer Apple AMD drivers will address this, but who knows?
 
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Now I have a Thunderbolt issue with my build.

I have a OWCMETB7DH4.0T hard drive enclosure that's TB1 and that works just fine with a TB3 to TB adapter. (I'm using a Startech TBT3TBTADAP REV 2 adapter). This also works in Windows. It's worth mentioning that the way OSX sees this HDD is as an internal drive.

On the other hand, I have a Pegasus R4 RAID enclosure that is also TB1 and that doesn't work at all. It doesn't even work in Windows either.

I wish there was a way to make this work.
 
Your inquiries suggest you want to add additional Thunderbolt ports, not simply daisy chain.

First, understand that a Thunderbolt dock will NOT create additional Thunderbolt ports.
It will add other ports (USB3, DisplayPort, ethernet etc.), but at best, will only allow additional daisy chaining from the original port onto more devices.

Adding a PCI Thunderbolt card to provide additional Thunderbolt ports would require a TB header on the motherboard.
The Gigabyte Z390 Designare does not have an TB header available.

I don't believe there is any way to add additional TB ports to this motherboard
Technically, we might not need a Thunderbolt header. Instead, we could bridge two wires on the THB_C port of the add-in-card itself to force it to power on the Thunderbolt controller. However, I'm not sure if it's possible to add a second Titan Ridge controller. I plan to test this soon.
 
Now I have a Thunderbolt issue with my build.

I have a OWCMETB7DH4.0T hard drive enclosure that's TB1 and that works just fine with a TB3 to TB adapter. (I'm using a Startech TBT3TBTADAP REV 2 adapter). This also works in Windows. It's worth mentioning that the way OSX sees this HDD is as an internal drive.

On the other hand, I have a Pegasus R4 RAID enclosure that is also TB1 and that doesn't work at all. It doesn't even work in Windows either.

I wish there was a way to make this work.
Have you seen NOTE 2 from Post #1?
Screen Shot 2020-03-04 at 10.09.56 AM.png

Some TB1 devices will not work at all. The Apple Thunderbolt Display is one example.
 
Have you seen NOTE 2 from Post #1?
View attachment 452987
Some TB1 devices will not work at all. The Apple Thunderbolt Display is one example.
Thanks, Casey!

I have seen this post, I thought this is a different case though.

I will try a Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 dock that I can get from a friend, coupled with using this Startech adapter. Will be back with results!
 
It feels pretty random honestly. In this case it happened right when I finished watching a youtube video but trying to reproduce it didn't work. Other freezes didn't seem to happen during any particular action.
Just had another freeze while trying to write an email in Safari.

This time it froze completely. No cursor, no nothing.

Edit: Right after that freeze, restarted, connected a USB3 SSD, froze completely. Restarted again, connected this USB3 SSD again, no freeze. This is pretty weird and happens often now.
 
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Just had another freeze while trying to write an email in Safari.

This time it froze completely. No cursor, no nothing.
There's another Process of Elimination suggestion for that:
  • We perform a fresh installation of Mojave or Catalina on a spare SSD.
  • We do not install any of our third-party apps (simple utilities are okay).
  • We then disconnect the internal SSD/NVMe.
  • We boot from the fresh installation and check whether the system is stable during YouTube, browsing, etc. If the system is rock solid, then we install one "heavy" third-party app at a time (on the fresh install disk) and check again for reliability. Then we repeat with other apps.
 
There's another Process of Elimination suggestion for that:
  • We perform a fresh installation of Mojave or Catalina on a spare SSD.
  • We do not install any of our third-party apps (simple utilities are okay).
  • We then disconnect the internal SSD/NVMe.
  • We boot from the fresh installation and check whether the system is stable during YouTube, browsing, etc. If the system is rock solid, then we install one "heavy" third-party app at a time (on the fresh install disk) and check again for reliability. Then we repeat with other apps.
Thanks for the suggestion, Casey!

Seems like a pretty laborious process which I'll probably end up doing soon if the system keeps crashing like this.
I'm just curious what you mean by the "heavy" third-party apps.
 
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