Gigabyte Z490 Vision D (Thunderbolt 3) + i5-10400 + AMD RX 580

[dehjomz]

Gentlemen,

We’ve been hacking away at Thunderbolt 3 PCIe cards, and enjoying the connectivity options that they bring. With the help of Caseysj and others, we flashed controllers to enable additional functionality. It’s been fun.

Now 3rd party Thunderbolt 4 add in cards are coming to market. First up is ASUS with its Thunderbolt 4 Maple Ridge controller.

• I wonder how these new Thunderbolt controllers will behave (e.g., will they be compatible with most if not all Thunderbolt devices as the status quo is hit or miss).
• I also wonder whether Thunderbolt bus in macOS can be enabled without the need to flash the controller.
• I wonder how Thunderbolt 4 controllers interface with the kernel and also other hardware as compared to Titan Ridge and Alpine Ridge.
• I’m wondering if Thunderbolt 4 controllers can even be flashed, especially if intel made enhancements to protect against Thunderbolt vulnerabilities such as Thunderspy.

ThunderboltEX 4｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

ASUS offers different kinds of motherboard accessories including Thunderbolt⢠expansion cards, M.2 add-on cards, and fan extension cards give DIY PC users better choices when it comes to building their perfect workstation or gaming rig.

www.asus.com

​

 

[djlild7hina]

Gentlemen,

We’ve been hacking away at Thunderbolt 3 PCIe cards, and enjoying the connectivity options that they bring. With the help of Caseysj and others, we flashed controllers to enable additional functionality. It’s been fun.

Now 3rd party Thunderbolt 4 add in cards are coming to market. First up is ASUS with its Thunderbolt 4 Maple Ridge controller.

• I wonder how these new Thunderbolt controllers will behave (e.g., will they be compatible with most if not all Thunderbolt devices as the status quo is hit or miss).
• I also wonder whether Thunderbolt bus in macOS can be enabled without the need to flash the controller.
• I wonder how Thunderbolt 4 controllers interface with the kernel and also other hardware as compared to Titan Ridge and Alpine Ridge.
• I’m wondering if Thunderbolt 4 controllers can even be flashed, especially if intel made enhancements to protect against Thunderbolt vulnerabilities such as Thunderspy.

ThunderboltEX 4｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

ASUS offers different kinds of motherboard accessories including Thunderbolt⢠expansion cards, M.2 add-on cards, and fan extension cards give DIY PC users better choices when it comes to building their perfect workstation or gaming rig.

www.asus.com

​

Could the ASUS ThunderboltEX-3 work by jumping pins 3 and 5? I know it has a different header so wasn't sure if it worked the same.

 

[mickelsn]

I'm following up in this thread on my OpenCore graphics resolution problem...

This is admittedly a low-priority problem and purely cosmetic, but it bugs me and we're all Mac folks who care about attention to detail in GUIs, so here goes:

I have a rock-solid Vision D Z490 build thanks to @CaseySJ since this summer. This thread has been awesome. But I've not been able to fix a graphics problem in OpenCanopy on my setup through multiple iterations of OpenCore including the upgrade OC0.6.6 per the latest EFI package @CaseySJ has been kind enough to provide. I'm running Z490 Vision D | i7 10700K | RX 580 Pulse 8GB as shown in my profile with two LG HDR 4K monitors (27UK850-W) attached via HDMI 1 inputs with good quality cables. Picture on both monitors is normally fantastic. EXCEPT for the OpenCore OpenCanopy GUI. Then, it's pixelated garbage and hard to read as shown below/attached in example pictures taken with my iPhone.

Text rendering is horrible in the picker and icons are somewhat pixelated as you can see, even after the picker when boot moves to the Apple logo with progress bar. Once the system swaps into the login screen with user pictures, everything is gorgeous. But this is annoying. I tried changing some OpenCanopy resolution configuration edits in OpenCore config.txt, but nothing has worked well. I want to keep 4K resolution and the icons small to avoid left-to-right scrolling in 4K, but with high resolution and crisp readable text. Any ideas?

I've been doing some experimentation with my OC066 config.plist file to see if I could make things look good. Setting Output > Resolution directly (to 3840x2160) seemed to have no effect. Setting Output > ConsoleMode to Max had no effect (not surprising, OpenCore docs say it is currently ignored). Setting NVRAM > 4D1EDE05-38C7-4A6A-9CC6-4BCCA8B38C14:UIScale to "02" to instruct OpenCore to use the screen like it was HiDPI resulted in everything being double-sized, but resolution was still not great. I've gone back to a "clean" version of the config.plist file (with just my serials) after all my experimentation.

SO -- here's where it got weird. My machine kernel panicked a couple nights ago...screens wouldn't wake up, couldn't log in to it remotely for a shutdown so I rebooted via case reset button. The machine was in the crashed state for likely a couple hours minimum (overnight). When I rebooted, the OpenCore OpenCanopy resolution was PERFECT - crisp icons, smooth font rendering, etc. There were no changes into the config.plist file since my prior reboot. Curious, I rebooted the machine again with no changes made -- and I was right back to jaggy graphics rendering.

Anyone have any ideas why this might be happening? I would suspect hardware somewhere along the way except for the fact that this is a problem only with OpenCore -- once macOS boots up the graphics are beautiful.

 

[PeterAF]

Hi @CaseySJ, and others,

still one more question because the build works so fine that I was wondering,

• if a cpu upgrade from i5-10400 to i9-10900 would be worth the money and effort to make it even faster and better suited for future requirements. My work profile is photo editing (up to 2 Gb Photoshop files, Capture One) and Visual Studio C++ programming (medium to large projects, most of the time in Parallels Windows 10, build time now for example 6-7m).
• If a cpu upgrade makes sense, can I use the same config.plist, platform-id (now iMac 19,1 then iMac 20,2?), serial number?

Thanks

 

[jd6]

To the owners of (vision G), are all three M.2 slots work on the Z490 Vision G? Or only two of them, and the other one closes by CPU reserved for 11gen CPU....?

 

[CaseySJ]

Hi @CaseySJ, and others,

still one more question because the build works so fine that I was wondering,

• if a cpu upgrade from i5-10400 to i9-10900 would be worth the money and effort to make it even faster and better suited for future requirements. My work profile is photo editing (up to 2 Gb Photoshop files, Capture One) and Visual Studio C++ programming (medium to large projects, most of the time in Parallels Windows 10, build time now for example 6-7m).
• If a cpu upgrade makes sense, can I use the same config.plist, platform-id (now iMac 19,1 then iMac 20,2?), serial number?

Thanks

Hello @PeterAF,

If you are within your rights to return/exchange the i5-10400 for an i9-10900 then of course that would give you a significant boost in multi-threaded applications. To determine whether your Photoshop and Visual Studio jobs make use of multiple cores, simply run Activity Monitor and bring up the CPU Usage window from the Windows menu.

If you upgrade to the i9-10900 then no change of any kind is needed. Just plug and play.

Note also that 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs will be on the market later this month, but they top out at 8 cores, 16 threads. If you choose an 11th Gen CPU, we may need to apply a Fake CPU ID to config.plist.

 

[CaseySJ]

to the owners of (vision G) are all three M.2 slots work on the Z490 Vision G or only two of them and the other one closes by cpu reserved for 11gen cpu....?

All three M.2 slots work. The slot closest to CPU is PCIe 4.0 complaint, but also compatible with PCIe 3.0. If you insert a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD in that slot, then:

• You will get PCIe 3.0 speeds with Comet Lake CPUs (10th Gen)
• You will get PCIe 4.0 speeds with Rocket Lake CPUs (11th Gen)

 

[CaseySJ]

Gentlemen,

We’ve been hacking away at Thunderbolt 3 PCIe cards, and enjoying the connectivity options that they bring. With the help of Caseysj and others, we flashed controllers to enable additional functionality. It’s been fun.

Now 3rd party Thunderbolt 4 add in cards are coming to market. First up is ASUS with its Thunderbolt 4 Maple Ridge controller.

• I wonder how these new Thunderbolt controllers will behave (e.g., will they be compatible with most if not all Thunderbolt devices as the status quo is hit or miss).
• I also wonder whether Thunderbolt bus in macOS can be enabled without the need to flash the controller.
• I wonder how Thunderbolt 4 controllers interface with the kernel and also other hardware as compared to Titan Ridge and Alpine Ridge.
• I’m wondering if Thunderbolt 4 controllers can even be flashed, especially if intel made enhancements to protect against Thunderbolt vulnerabilities such as Thunderspy.

ThunderboltEX 4｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

ASUS offers different kinds of motherboard accessories including Thunderbolt⢠expansion cards, M.2 add-on cards, and fan extension cards give DIY PC users better choices when it comes to building their perfect workstation or gaming rig.

www.asus.com

​

So who's volunteering for this duty??

According to TechPowerUp:

"The only catch here is that you'll need an ASUS motherboard with a Thunderbolt readiness header (which provides timing and other low-level system commands to the card)."

 

[dehjomz]

So who's volunteering for this duty??

According to TechPowerUp:

"The only catch here is that you'll need an ASUS motherboard with a Thunderbolt readiness header (which provides timing and other low-level system commands to the card)."

That's a very big catch! Not as open as we'd expect!

Hopefully when other thunderbolt 4 and/or USB4 controllers arrive, they're more open than this ASUS solution, and the USB4 ones provide PCIe tunneling and all the other thunderbolt features we've come to love and expect. Kinda strange that this device received Intel thunderbolt certification but then only works with ASUS motherboards.

 

[Ploddles]

Anyone had a play with the latest Opencore, 0.6.7, and associated kexts - VirtualSMC, Whatevergreen, etc., released today?