Apple Cinema Display 27" Thunderbolt - help please :)

[BigJ]

Hi Guys'n Gals

I'm clearly a n00b specking up my hackintosh to take advantage of black friday/ciber monday, and would really love 1 piece of advice please. I am currently running a 2012 17inch mac book pro on a 27 inch thunderbolt display. This is the system I am trying to "upgrade" to hackintosh.

The motherboard will be a GA-Z97X-UD7-TH which has a built in HD4600 video card with a thunderbolt port...

The video card providing acceleration will be either a GTX760/780...

My problem is I want to continue using my apple cinema display which is thunderbolt based, and I will need to plug it into the motherboard thunderbolt slot which runs off the HD4600 built in card...(non accelerated)

Does that mean that my cinema display will effectively not be using the GTX760/80 and will not be receiving acceleration from them, e.g. for gaming? (I know this might sound like a really retarded question, but I need to know )

Is there any solution to use my apple cinema display and to gain the acceleration as if it was plugged into a mac?

Thanks in advance...

 

[cdrhoek]

The Gigabyte motherboard will only support the built in intel graphics via thunderbolt. If you want to use another graphics card, You will need a motherboard that supports a pass through of a displayport signal to a thunderbolt output. You will also need a graphics card that has a displayport output.

Asrock makes a Z87 board that will do what you want (I use one with dual HD7970 and a thunderbolt display). Another option is a motherboard that will support a thunderbolt add in card with a displayport passthrough. The only company that currently makes both a motherboard and an add in card is Asus. If you need a Z97 board, Asus may be your only option.

 

[BigJ]

Thank you so much for the help....

Would you be able to help me identify the graphics card and motherboard/thunderbolt board combo? Are they in the Buyer's guide by chance? I just don't want to make a mistake and the whole build relies on this. If I can't get the 27 inch display to work properly then I would be forced to buy a new iMac, because there would be no reason to keep the current screen and save...

Cheers

 

[BigJ]

Bump ... could really use a system spec that we know will work with the Apple Thunderbolt display (eg. motherboard, video card, Thunderbolt card if needed) Has anyone got any ideas please?

 

[cdrhoek]

I can only verify what I am using.

I have an Asrock Z87 Extreme9/ac. I have dual Sapphire hd7970 cards installed with crossfire.

I use Clover and Yosemite on the Hackintosh side. I can boot into OSX using either the thunderbolt port connected to the onboard graphics, or the second thunderbolt port which passes the signal from the primary hd7970 (crossfire does not work under OSX). OSX will use the second 7970 to process OpenCL, but will not use the second 7970 to drive the display. Using Windows 7, I have full crossfire capability.

If I boot with the 7970 connected, i don't get any picture until the driver loads. This is in both Windows and OSX. I can boot with the onboard graphics and get the full bios display if I need it.

The Asus Z97 board with the thunderbolt add in card should work also. Maybe someone else has tried it and can verify that it works.

The Thunderbolt Display works fine, but an older Cinema Display with a display port input would certainly make things easier.