Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD7-TH - Thunderbolt 2.0 Testing

[genzai]

Thanks. Not hotswapping; using lacie TB drive and cable that work in my macbook pro. Are there any settings on the board itself that I might have set wrong - dip switches, turbo-buttons?

no, the only thing i can suggest is trying another device in case that lacie is for some reason not compatible.
If you have thunderbolt on in the bios and have installed the windows drivers (or better yet do testing in windows) there should not be any other settings needed.

g\

 

[thomasjudge]

Hi,

I've been following this and other Thunderbolt related discussions as I'm
considering doing a build, I currently have a Thunderbolt Apple Cinema Display
and would like to continue to use that if possible, at least for the
display capabilities, the camera, sound & other ports are less important.
So, just to confirm/deny, have other people had success getting
the Thunderbolt ACD to work with this or other motherboards?

Thanks
Thomas

 

[Maflagulator]

Hi,

I've been following this and other Thunderbolt related discussions as I'm
considering doing a build, I currently have a Thunderbolt Apple Cinema Display
and would like to continue to use that if possible, at least for the
display capabilities, the camera, sound & other ports are less important.
So, just to confirm/deny, have other people had success getting
the Thunderbolt ACD to work with this or other motherboards?

Thanks
Thomas

I specifically avoided the Thunderbolt Display (TBD) and use a pair of Apple Cinema Display (ACD) which use the same display panel, in order to avoid issues. From what recall, I think that someone has a TBD working on the Thunderbolt ports of the motherboard, but the display is handled by the onboard graphics only. Graphics from a "discrete" video card will not pipe through to the Thunderbolt ports. Look through the first few pages of replies in this thread, which is where I recall seeing someone mention doing this.

I'm using the pair of Thunderbolt ports simply as Mini-DisplayPort outputs to drive my pair of ACD monitors. Since this rig was built for FCPX video editing, I have a pair of 280x cards to handle OpenCL work.

~Scott

 

[cscturulo]

I'm using the pair of Thunderbolt ports simply as Mini-DisplayPort outputs to drive my pair of ACD monitors. Since this rig was built for FCPX video editing, I have a pair of 280x cards to handle OpenCL work.

~Scott

What 280x Cards did you buy, and did they work OOB? Did you have to do any tweaks?

 

[fragment7]

so my pc just died on me just now. and im considering this board for awhile now. is this worth it at all in terms of stability, i dont mind patching lots of stuffs. does speedstep work?

 

[mendozal]

so my pc just died on me just now. and im considering this board for awhile now. is this worth it at all in terms of stability, i dont mind patching lots of stuffs. does speedstep work?

I have this board and everything is working fine. Power Management and HDMI audio too.

 

[Maflagulator]

What 280x Cards did you buy, and did they work OOB? Did you have to do any tweaks?

They were XFX R9 280X "Black OC Edition" Double Dissipation model. And yes, lots and lots of fighting to get them to work. I ended up finding someone who was well versed in flashing the BIOS on these cards, and even he had to get assistance from someone to make them work. FCPX is finally working well, and they score 4771 in LuxMark 'Sala' benchmark.


~Scott

 

[Palagius]

Interesting... How do you configure your system so that the "Base System Peripheral" menu bar icon is not needed or displayed?

I know this thread is old, but I decided to answer this since I was able to fix the disappearing icons on my Thunderbolt build. I'm slightly off-topic here, as I am using a GA-Z87X-UD5 TH board which is Thunderbolt 1 rather than Thunderbolt 2.

My config:
Z87X-UD5 TH
Just Integrated 4600 graphics
Apple Thunderbolt Display 27"

I had to do the annoying Windows install first to have the link negotiation on the Thunderbolt side behave correctly, after which the Apple Thunderbolt Display would work correctly even during system POST. I did set the link negotiation to Legacy in the BIOS.

All the ports and whatnot on the ATD work correctly. The FaceTime camera, the USB and Firewire ports, and audio are all working fine.

I removed the kext for NHI, and like for everyone that fixed the slow boots. I did still have the disappearing / reappearing icons and clock on the menubar, which was maddening. I Googled a good bit and found many threads reporting the problem and none fixing it. It's worth noting that the icons disappearing isn't the whole problem--it's just a symptom. Those helper apps are actually not running, so for example when the Spotlight icon is missing you cannot use command-space to search for something--the applet that provides that shortcut is not running.

Checking the system log showed that com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent was segfaulting every time it started. Further was the data point cited by others that there is no dynamic TB device enumeration or access going on... OSX just sees the downstream devices as PCI devices connected via a bridge that it evidently decides is ExpressCard. Based on those nuggets, I decided to delete the ExpressCard (and actually two others I didn't care about) menu helper apps.

I did the following:

sudo su -
mkdir /tmp/moved_helpers/
cd "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/"
cp -R ExpressCard.menu Ink.menu IrDA.menu /tmp/moved_helpers/
rm -Rf ExpressCard.menu Ink.menu IrDA.menu

What this did was delete those helpers from being loaded. Within ten seconds of doing the removal all the icons showed up and I have had correct behavior from everything on the menubar. I see the AirPlay icon and it shows a local AppleTV, etc. etc.

I suspect a lot of people are having this pain point if they are using a Thunderbolt Display because they are building a Hackintosh to replace a Mac Mini that Apple is evidently not ever going to update. I may cross-post this somewhere else in Post Installation in the hopes it'll be useful to others.

Cheers.

 

[Palagius]

Hi,

I've been following this and other Thunderbolt related discussions as I'm
considering doing a build, I currently have a Thunderbolt Apple Cinema Display
and would like to continue to use that if possible, at least for the
display capabilities, the camera, sound & other ports are less important.
So, just to confirm/deny, have other people had success getting
the Thunderbolt ACD to work with this or other motherboards?

Hi Thomas. See my immediately prior post in this thread. I have a Thunderbolt Display and all the built-ins on the display (camera, USB, Ethernet, etc.) working in OSX on my GA-Z87X-HD5 TH now. I am using the Intel graphics. As others have cited, the ASRock and Asus boards theoretically let you tunnel an external GPU to the display but I didn't see anyone successful doing that in OSX. I was replacing a Mid-2011 Mac Mini, and did not care about graphics performance. I did not want to discard an expensive display though.

I will attempt to assemble a full build reference and post it as a success story in the User Builds forum, but it probably won't be for a few days.

 

[B-San]

I know this thread is old, but I decided to answer this since I was able to fix the disappearing icons on my Thunderbolt build. I'm slightly off-topic here, as I am using a GA-Z87X-UD5 TH board which is Thunderbolt 1 rather than Thunderbolt 2.

My config:
Z87X-UD5 TH
Just Integrated 4600 graphics
Apple Thunderbolt Display 27"

I had to do the annoying Windows install first to have the link negotiation on the Thunderbolt side behave correctly, after which the Apple Thunderbolt Display would work correctly even during system POST. I did set the link negotiation to Legacy in the BIOS.

All the ports and whatnot on the ATD work correctly. The FaceTime camera, the USB and Firewire ports, and audio are all working fine.

I removed the kext for NHI, and like for everyone that fixed the slow boots. I did still have the disappearing / reappearing icons and clock on the menubar, which was maddening. I Googled a good bit and found many threads reporting the problem and none fixing it. It's worth noting that the icons disappearing isn't the whole problem--it's just a symptom. Those helper apps are actually not running, so for example when the Spotlight icon is missing you cannot use command-space to search for something--the applet that provides that shortcut is not running.

Checking the system log showed that com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent was segfaulting every time it started. Further was the data point cited by others that there is no dynamic TB device enumeration or access going on... OSX just sees the downstream devices as PCI devices connected via a bridge that it evidently decides is ExpressCard. Based on those nuggets, I decided to delete the ExpressCard (and actually two others I didn't care about) menu helper apps.

I did the following:

sudo su -
mkdir /tmp/moved_helpers/
cd "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/"
cp -R ExpressCard.menu Ink.menu IrDA.menu /tmp/moved_helpers/
rm -Rf ExpressCard.menu Ink.menu IrDA.menu

What this did was delete those helpers from being loaded. Within ten seconds of doing the removal all the icons showed up and I have had correct behavior from everything on the menubar. I see the AirPlay icon and it shows a local AppleTV, etc. etc.

I suspect a lot of people are having this pain point if they are using a Thunderbolt Display because they are building a Hackintosh to replace a Mac Mini that Apple is evidently not ever going to update. I may cross-post this somewhere else in Post Installation in the hopes it'll be useful to others.

Cheers.

Oh wow!!

I'm about to try this fix out and will report my findings..

Thanks!!!!

EDIT: I LOVE YOU It WORKED!! THANKS x10000000000!!!