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Gigabyte X299X - Catalina Support

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Hi,
So yes, it is for replacement in my Studio for the next 10 years I hope.
Overclocking I think wouldn't be that extreme or nor needed.
The current system is stock 3.5 Ghz with Turbo to 3.9 Ghz, so this new machine will outperform this.

Only need 1 PCIEx16 slot for the Radeon Pro WX7100 card.
and a normal PCIEx1 slot for my AirPort Card.

What I really need is a working Thunderbolt situation because I'm using an Sonnet Echo III (New version) for my Avid HDX Card.

At this moment I have a Titan Ridge 2.0 addon card in my current system and it's sort of working.
I can't use the HotPlug SSDT in the system because for some weird reason this breaks the Avid Audio Driver to find the HDX Card.
When using no SSDT the Driver find the Card, just need a cold and warm boot the get it running.

Also need to say that running the Titan Ridge 2.0 with stock NVM 50 firmware doesn't work in the current system, but with CaseySJ's modded NVM50 firmware it's working.
 
So yes, it is for replacement in my Studio for the next 10 years I hope.

Probably only 4-5 years for macOS support though :)

Only need 1 PCIEx16 slot for the Radeon Pro WX7100 card.
Sounds good.

and a normal PCIEx1 slot for my AirPort Card.
FYI if you did want to save this PCIe slot you could also buy a mini-PCIe Broadcom AirPort card and install that in place of the current Intel WiFi/Bluetooth - which wouldn't require using one of the four main PCIe slots.

And thanks to AirportItlwm and IntelBluetoothFirmware, the stock Intel WiFi and Bluetooth does work pretty well on the Designare 10G. Bluetooth is basically perfect as far as I can tell. WiFi works fine, but it's slow - max 50Mb/s at the moment. That may well improve in future, but for now it would be very tedious if you wanted to use WiFi as a primary network connection. For me it's no problem as I'm always wired to both 1G and 10G networks, and WiFi is only connected for completeness.

But I guess as you're not worried about PCIe slots you'll just stick with your existing Airport x1 PCIe card.

What I really need is a working Thunderbolt situation because I'm using an Sonnet Echo III (New version) for my Avid HDX Card.

My understanding is that if you patch the firmware ROM, you can get fully working TB3 on this motherboard. Not something I've done yet, but I hope to be trying it very soon. Certainly several other people in this thread have done it successfully.

So yeah, I guess this could be a decent MB for you. The key issue will be the need for a patched OpenCore, but at least for now that's no problem.

Also, I forgot to mention in my previous post that there is one advantage to this MB versus most other X299 boards: it has fully working NVRAM. That's something that can't be said of many other X299 boards where NVRAM is currently non-functional - which can be quite a pain, especially with regards to Big Sur installation and upgrade. So that's one area where the Designare 10G BIOS/firmware is actually ahead of other boards :)

If you want to compare to other X299 motherboards. check out this thread: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/x299-big-sur-support.302143

That's the general X299 Big Sur thread, which is much busier than this one. Lots of users discussing various X299 boards, and I think there's some TB3 discussion in there also.
 
Thanks! I will running Catalina when I buy this board, Pro Tools still doesn't support Big Sur, so like to stay away from Big Sur
 
So yes, it is for replacement in my Studio for the next 10 years I hope.

This would be the main dealbreaker for me if I were in your position, both parts of this.

If you want something that will last you a long time and work reliably as far as humanly possible (since I assume you'd rather not have to debug your hackintosh while in the midst of a studio session or something similar) then this is definitely not the board/system to buy.

I'm using this as a development machine with a lot of grunt, and most of the things I run are resumable, so I don't really lose any progress if things go south (which they have several times due to all the oddities specified above).

Add to that the fact that these processors gobble up power like the government does taxes and considering the cooling required to keep it silent, I wouldn't really describe this system as either "silent", "reliable" or "economic", none of which are ideal for a studio situation.

Also consider that this is effectively a dead board for a dead platform and you get the perfect storm of no support, no new hardware whatsoever, no upgrade path and a problematic board with issues that will never go away and that can't really be fixed by us plebians.

If you're buying this as anything other than a hobby project which you'll be maintaining for its entire lifespan, my advice would be to stay as far away as possible.

I've also been experiencing some audio issues (sudden drop-outs and crackling) and my USB audio interface has suddenly decided to stop working with this machine, which aren't positive signs of things to come.

If you like torturing yourself and spending a lot of money to do so at the same time, go ahead. In all other cases, you'd be much, much better served with a slightly less powerful but much more reliable, cheaper and easier-to-maintain platform like the new Z490's, for example. CaseySJ is also doing a fantastic job on those platforms in keeping up with all things that can/will go wrong, so you're much more likely to find help there instead of in this largely-inactive X299X thread.

Those are my 2 cents, maybe they're helpful.
 
debugging and maintaining is nothing that scares me off.
I know it's a hungry system, but you get 18 cores / 36 threats when you go with i9-10980XE.
The computer will be in an 'Server Room' outside of the studio, so noise and heat I'm not afraid off.

Yes the platform is maybe dead, but Apple is stopping with Intel and as long as their own processors aren't having more cores for native plugin processing I'm staying away from their SOC.

Avid and all other software creators are very very very slow with updating their stuff to work with atleast on Big Sur and even the Apple SOC.

What's holding me from an Normal user platform is when adding NVMe drives you're GPU is falling back to x8 dpeed, I want it at full 16x speed.
 
If you like torturing yourself and spending a lot of money to do so at the same time, go ahead. In all other cases, you'd be much, much better served with a slightly less powerful but much more reliable, cheaper and easier-to-maintain platform like the new Z490's, for example. CaseySJ is also doing a fantastic job on those platforms in keeping up with all things that can/will go wrong, so you're much more likely to find help there instead of in this largely-inactive X299X thread.

Those are my 2 cents, maybe they're helpful.

Sorry to hear you're having such a bad time!

While I too am hesitant to recommend this MB to any new user, I'm definitely not having anything near as bad a time as it sounds like you are. I would say my system is now fully stable, reliable, and highly effective. I have every on-board feature working, am getting great performance, and it feels 100% usable as a day-to-day workhorse. In terms of a complete system all I feel I'm lacking is a decent GPU (my new AMD 6900XT is not yet supported.) But that's unrelated to the MB.

The only practical problem I am affected by right now is the VCCSA bug. That is certainly annoying for an overclocker and has caused me to remove my RAM OC. But it's not a deal-breaker, and wouldn't be a factor at all for anyone not planning a fairly significant overclock; it'd also be a non-issue if the machine was on 24/7, or if the user was willing to re-set VCCSA on every cold boot and never did sleep/wake.

The main worry I have in the longer term is the boot issue. It works right now, and hopefully will for the foreseeable future. But unless/until the patch can be officially incorporated into OpenCore, each new release will bring with it the risk of the patch no longer cleanly applying. At which point we'll need JTR to update it, or try to work out how to do it ourselves. That risk goes away if it becomes an official OpenCore quirk. Hopefully JTR will find the time to submit his patch to Acidanthera sometime soon.

I've not experienced any of the other issues you mention. All my USB audio interfaces work fine, and I've never had any sudden, show-stopping crashes or OS problems. Admittedly I'm still on Catalina at the moment so I can't speak for Big Sur; I have booted it multiple times on this machine and it always seemed OK, but I've not yet spent any real time in it.

I have heard reports of USB audio issues in Big Sur, along the lines of the crackling you mentioned, but I thought that was affecting many Big Sur users, not specific to this MB? I plan to update to Big Sur soon so I'll see how I get on.
 
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I concur with @TheBloke : other than annoying BIOS crash bug (which in my opinion is a non-issue as long as we know when it happens how to get back to normal.), my experiences with this build is fantastic. By no means, it's reliable as Casey's golden Z390/490 builds. But given we can have more than 10 cores, 2 full x16 pcie, 256G RAM, and most importantly 1/3 of price compared to Mac Pro, I have nothing to complain :)

@TheBloke , does the smalltree driver for 10G work in BS? I thought smalltree only release driver for Catalina.
Sorry to hear you're having such a bad time!

While I too am hesitant to recommend this MB to any new user, I'm definitely not having anything near as bad a time as it sounds like you are. I would say my system is now fully stable, reliable, and highly effective. I have every on-board feature working, am getting great performance, and it feels 100% usable as a day-to-day workhorse. In terms of a complete system all I feel I'm lacking is a decent GPU (my new AMD 6900XT is not yet supported.) But that's unrelated to the MB.

The only practical problem I am affected by right now is the VCCSA bug. That is certainly annoying for an overclocker and has caused me to remove my RAM OC. But it's not a deal-breaker, and wouldn't be a factor at all for anyone not planning a fairly significant overclock; it'd also be a non-issue if the machine was on 24/7, or if the user was willing to re-set VCCSA on every cold boot and never did sleep/wake.

The main worry I have in the longer term is the boot issue. It works right now, and hopefully will for the foreseeable future. But unless/until the patch can be officially incorporated into OpenCore, each new release will bring with it the risk of the patch no longer cleanly applying. At which point we'll need JTR to update it, or try to work out how to do it ourselves. That risk goes away if it becomes an official OpenCore quirk. Hopefully JTR will find the time to submit his patch to Acidanthera sometime soon.

I've not experienced any of the other issues you mention. All my USB audio interfaces work fine, and I've never had any sudden, show-stopping crashes or OS problems. Admittedly I'm still on Catalina at the moment so I can't speak for Big Sur; I have booted it multiple times on this machine and it always seemed OK, but I've not yet spent any real time in it.

I have heard reports of USB audio issues in Big Sur, along the lines of the crackling you mentioned, but I thought that was affecting many Big Sur users, not specific to this MB? I plan to update to Big Sur soon so I'll see how I get on.
 
Sorry to be coming a bit late to the party, but I'm getting ready to purchase a Gigabyte AORUS Master X299X board along with a 10980EX 18-core CPU.

I'm reading quite a lot of this thread and another couple of threads, but I was wondering as of today, what is the consensus on this configuration? Good idea? Bad idea?

Also, what is the indicated machine ID for the Skylake CPU? The Dorthania guide seems to indicate that iMac 17,1 is still the preferred one, but wouldn't a Mac Pro or iMac Pro be closer to the real-world counterpart?

P.S.

Also, in a weird coincidence, Apple just discontinued the iMac Pro yesterday....a sign?
 
@TheBloke , does the smalltree driver for 10G work in BS? I thought smalltree only release driver for Catalina.
Yes, works fine. I'm not sure why SmallTree still list Big Sur as not supported, but the latest 3.8.6 driver works on BS just fine.

If SmallTree have stopped updating those drivers then it does raise some concerns for the future, like maybe macOS 12 or whatever. But for now it's all good.
 
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