ASUS ThunderboltEX II PCIe Expansion Card - Testing Thread

[itsmikerofl]

As for the setup with the discrete graphics: I connected the display port from Thunderbolt Card -> GTX 970 and Thunderbolt Card -> Thunderbolt Display, no adjustment needed. Sound's working, but so far I did not manage to achieve any of the other Thunderbolt Displays functionality. If anyone is aware of a workaround for this, it'd be much appreciated.

EDIT: Oddly, the Thunderbolt Display seems to -fully- work sometimes. I'd tried to figure out how and when and to see if it's reproducible - it is. If I first start into Windows 10 if an additional display (in my case attached via HDMI) and then proceed to reboot into OS X, every ATD functionality is working as intended and I don't need to keep the additional display on or plugged in. Of course, rebooting or shutting down the system creates to need to redo this procedure, so it is somewhat annoying if regular switching is in use. I'll add any further observation and/or solution as soon as they occur.

Not to bump an old thread, but thank you so much for specifying this simple procedure. I've searched everywhere on how to use discrete graphics with the Thunderboltex II in general, and you're the first to have detailed it.

Thanks!

 

[ctek]

Just reporting that I have the dual card working on a Z97-WS.

It only works in the PCIEX4 slot and I was told by asus support to force the slot into X4 mode in BIOS.

I used the default settings but changed:
Security Mode: No Security
Cache-line size: 128

 

[kobe1980]

I have:

Asus X99-A
5960X

Yosemite
Clover

ThunderboltEX II

can somebody help a brother out getting this thing to work? i installed it in windows & it sort of recognizes the card. if i hit 'settings' it shows information on the card, but it's not connecting to the TB drive i have connected (though the drive is formatted for mac - but i also use Paragon so it should see mac drives). It also shows up in Device Manager so i think i did the windows thing right.

i have thunderbolt kexts from 10.9.5 installed, and think i have the correct BIOS settings.

 

[kobe1980]

the Kexts... do they all need to be removed? or replaced by the ones from 10.9.5?

 

[thenightflyer]

I have:

Asus X99-A
5960X

Yosemite
Clover

ThunderboltEX II

can somebody help a brother out getting this thing to work? i installed it in windows & it sort of recognizes the card. if i hit 'settings' it shows information on the card, but it's not connecting to the TB drive i have connected (though the drive is formatted for mac - but i also use Paragon so it should see mac drives). It also shows up in Device Manager so i think i did the windows thing right.

i have thunderbolt kexts from 10.9.5 installed, and think i have the correct BIOS settings.

If your TB drive is formatted for Mac and it's a Raid you will never see and use it in Windows even if you have Paragon HFS software...
What HD model do you have?

 

[kobe1980]

If your TB drive is formatted for Mac and it's a Raid you will never see and use it in Windows even if you have Paragon HFS software...
What HD model do you have?

Yeah, i think you're right. I am not sure, bc i borrowed the drive & it's at home. it was one of the earlier lacie drives.

but what about this...... i tried putting my macbook pro in Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode.. shouldn't it at least have seen that?

 

[BoomR]

I know this is from a while ago, but to the extent you are still interested in "forcing" the slot the board uses for the Thunderboltex, I may have figured out how. Check out this thread for what I did http://www.tomshardware.com/answers...sus-x99-deluxe-apple-thunderbolt-display.html.

Hope it helps.

Hey friend... apologies for the delay in replying with my results. Somehow I just missed this post! At any rate, I've been reading over what you have shared. So I set out this afternoon to see if I could make it work for me.

For the most part, I **was** able to have success with my TB card no longer having to reside in the PCIEX4_1 slot. Before, my GPU was in one of the bottom slots (I think #4) and the TB card was in the little X4 slot. Since following what you discovered, I now have my GPU card where it really should be (in the #1 slot closes to CPU, and the TB card is now in the #5 slot (the slot furthest away from the CPU).

BUT... I still have to use "Legacy" mode for security. The "Unique ID" option is not working for me. I don't know if this makes any difference, but I noticed that I was on one gen older BIOS (I was on 2001 dated Sept 2015), and upgraded to 2101 (dated I think Nov 2015).

I'm **HOPING** now that I've got my cards in a bit different order, this will help me with some of the problems I'm having installing El Capitan on my build. I'll be curious to know if you have had any luck getting your X99 build on 10.11...

 

[thenightflyer]

Hey friend... apologies for the delay in replying with my results. Somehow I just missed this post! At any rate, I've been reading over what you have shared. So I set out this afternoon to see if I could make it work for me.

For the most part, I **was** able to have success with my TB card no longer having to reside in the PCIEX4_1 slot. Before, my GPU was in one of the bottom slots (I think #4) and the TB card was in the little X4 slot. Since following what you discovered, I now have my GPU card where it really should be (in the #1 slot closes to CPU, and the TB card is now in the #5 slot (the slot furthest away from the CPU).

BUT... I still have to use "Legacy" mode for security. The "Unique ID" option is not working for me. I don't know if this makes any difference, but I noticed that I was on one gen older BIOS (I was on 2001 dated Sept 2015), and upgraded to 2101 (dated I think Nov 2015).

I'm **HOPING** now that I've got my cards in a bit different order, this will help me with some of the problems I'm having installing El Capitan on my build. I'll be curious to know if you have had any luck getting your X99 build on 10.11...

Hi Boomer...i own an Asus X99-E-WS with a 5960X processor...if i remember well you have an X99 Deluxe but not a 5960X right?
With my conf it's at the moment impossible to have a stable EC installation...and it seems that a few users with this configuration tried to install EC but with no success!
At the moment i prefer to stay with Yosemite even if i've in another SSD a Mavericks conf.
About the TB card, for my mainboard i put it in the 2nd PCI-E slot, following Asus guide for that motherboard. My settings are the same as shown in attached pictures. I use TB with a Lacie 2big raid HD. I've no particular problems except some checksum error unpacking big files (for ex. a rar set made by 30 or more files of 800MB each one). I tried to change Cache line size and Reserved Mem per phy slot values but i didn't notice any differences...

 

[jimfoon]

If your TB drive is formatted for Mac and it's a Raid you will never see and use it in Windows even if you have Paragon HFS software...
What HD model do you have?

Actually you can just maybe not with Paragon. I use Macdrive and our supports RAID no problem. It want sideways supported but since version 8 it had been avail. I use it with my RAID5 every day between Windows and Mac and it's formatted HFS+

 

[acemanx19]

a bit osx offtopic, I've got this expansion card yesterday and hooked it up to a Apple thunderbolt display (windows 8.1) and sound everything is working ok, I haven't installed yosemite yet because I have a haswell petium in the z97 A mobo. I've another build with a gtx 750 ti evga (light ivy bridge gaming machine)with display port, when I get a compatible haswell cpu(although I'm waiting for broadwell's igpu performance increase) I will try to do some tests igpu/750 ti with osx/yosemite .

View attachment 118344

Hi, how did you get the sound to work from the Apple Thunderbolt Display? I've tried every method out there.. running this on El Capitan currently.

Thank you so much for the help!