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ASUS ThunderboltEX II PCIe Expansion Card - Testing Thread

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BoomR said:
What is your audio source? on-board audio? Firewire audio?
Click to expand...

All sources are lost both onboard and firewire. I have no audio when device is active.
 
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 .

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BoomR said:
So thanks to a tip from user samtimbaud whom I met over in the X99 build threads for both 10.9.5 and 10.10.0, I was able to get my ThunderboltEX II-Dual card working this afternoon.

Here is a very detailed description of the installation process that I took, and the "activation" of the card in Windows, including screen shots, and success (or lack thereof).

According to the ASUS Web site, as well as recommendations here, you are supposed to plug the TB card into the PCIe slot furthest away from the CPU (last slot on the board). While this might work on 8-series and Socket 1150 9-series boards, on the X99-Deluxe (socket 2011), this did not work for me. What DID work was plugging the card into the PCIEX4_1 slot (the "little" PCIe slot). BTW, for the initial Windows-based phase of the card activation, I didn't change any of the BIOS settings in the new Advanced > Thunderbolt menu.

...
Click to expand...

Hi BoomR !
My build is similar to yours :
ASUS X99-A
i7 5930k
GTX 780 TI
32GB RAM
THUNDERBOLT IIEX card single
MOTU 8M Audio Interface thunderbolt

After reading your post I was able to make my thunderbolt devices working .
In Asus X99-A the PCI slot which works is not the little one, but the one close to the video card . Other options didn't work for me.
Another difference from you settings is that in BIOS I had to keep security level on UNIQUE ID and
Thunderbolt PCIe Cache-line Size set to 32 .
The only thing I still have to fix is this one: if I boot directly in yosemite the Motu card is recognized as
thunderbolt device but not as audio source so I first have to boot in Windows8 , then restart and Osx again and Motu works perfectly.
Any suggestion ?

Thank you
 
BoomR said:
So thanks to a tip from user samtimbaud whom I met over in the X99 build threads for both 10.9.5 and 10.10.0, I was able to get my ThunderboltEX II-Dual card working this afternoon.

Here is a very detailed description of the installation process that I took, and the "activation" of the card in Windows, including screen shots, and success (or lack thereof).

According to the ASUS Web site, as well as recommendations here, you are supposed to plug the TB card into the PCIe slot furthest away from the CPU (last slot on the board). While this might work on 8-series and Socket 1150 9-series boards, on the X99-Deluxe (socket 2011), this did not work for me. What DID work was plugging the card into the PCIEX4_1 slot (the "little" PCIe slot). BTW, for the initial Windows-based phase of the card activation, I didn't change any of the BIOS settings in the new Advanced > Thunderbolt menu.

The minute I rebooted & connected my first TB device in Windows 8, I heard a little "chime" and an alert message popped up telling me a new device had been connected, giving me the option to "approve" or "reject" the connection of the new device:
View attachment 111594

Once a device is connected, you can now go into the TB software panel's option to view any/all connected devices:
View attachment 111596

Also, now I can get into the software panel's "Settings" option, too:
View attachment 111597

Finally, the Thunderbolt card is also now visible in the Windows Device Manager:
View attachment 111598

BTW, both the ThunderboltEX II and ThunderboltEX II-Dual cards are working by plugging into the PCIEX4_1 slot. Again, note that this might be different on the socket 1150 boards, but for those of you having troubles getting the card to work on one of the new X99 boards, give this method a try.

Having said all that, maybe someone who is more proficient in the inter-workings of the UEFI BIOS could answer this: Is there a way to "force" the recommended slot (in the case of X99 boards - the PCIEX16_5 slot) into whatever mode/bandwidth/PCIe generation, etc. as the PCIEX4_1 slot?

But for now, I'm super-excited that it's working in Windows. Samtimbaud is the one who suggested that I try this PCIe slot, so big kudos to him. And also for tracking down and sharing the BIOS settings that need to be "tweaked" in order for TB to work properly in OSX.

Last step of course, is to now boot into your working OSX. But before you do that, you must go back into the Bios > Advanced > Thunderbolt and change 2 settings:
--Security Level: change to Legacy Only
--Thunderbolt PCIe Cache-line Size: set to 128

Once you have those options, exit & save your changes, then continue booting into OSX. You should now have working Thunderbolt!
View attachment 111602

Depending on the device, you MAY be able to hot-swap disconnect: I just ejected my FW400 hard drive, then disconnected the TB/FW adapter. No lock-up. But hot-swap connecting my Seagate GoFlex TB drive yielded no results (well, at least it didn't lock up...but it also didn't detect & mount the drive). I had to power down, reconnect the drive, then power on. The Seagate TB drive now appears on desktop.

Hope this info helps everyone! Cheers!
--B
Click to expand...
Hi,

I'm trying to make a ThunderboltEx Dual working with 10.9.4 / 10.9.5 with clover on Asus X99E WS.

I got the card get in windows 8.1 but it still won't work in OSX. The card is listed in IO-tree but no drivers gets loaded and i can't figure out why.

I tried to change the BIOS settings so many times i don't remember what were the defaults. Could you post all of your BIOS settings.

Thank's a lot,

PM!

EDIT : I got it recognised twice, but it's not stable yet. The first time it worked I went to the BIOS and put Advanced>Platform Misc Configuration > SA DMI ASPM to Auto and PCH DMI ASPM to Enabeled
And booted without caches. I don't realy know if it's related to my problem or not.

EDIT2 : In fact it's working every time i change something related to PCIe Lane in BIOS. Tb disappears at next boot.
Tb never appears in System Configuration - I read in an other thread that it's Clover related...
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

SOLVED !!! : Asus made recently (22/12/2014) an update to the BIOS witch solved the problem and makes sense to the problem I was having (the card getting recognised every time i switched something related to PCIe in BIOS)
Update BIOS 801 : Revised a string from "SB PCIE X4_2" to "SB PCIE X16_2" in Advanced\Intel(R) Thunderbolt.
 
I got the ASUS ThunderboltEX II (dual) PCIe card yesterday for my 24TB Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt enclosure and I'm so glad I found this thread.

I'm using the following setup:

Asus X99-A
5820k
Asus OC GTX 760
Samsung EVO 500GB
Samsung EVO 1TB

I tried all possible places to put the GTX 760 and the Thunderbolt card until finally it worked. My GTX 760 is in the first PCIe slot and the TB card is in the last but one.

In the BIOS I get the Thunderbolt Options. So I guess the BIOS recognises the card.

I'm trying to get it working but I'm a little bit surprised that a WIN system is needed to get it going?!
Can you tell me why it's important to get it running under Windows before?

And what would you suggest to install Windows on? I'm using two SSD drives in this x99 machine.
On one is Yosemite installed the other is empty, but I'm a little bit worried about the bootloader?!

Thanks for all the help!
 
BoomR said:
Having said all that, maybe someone who is more proficient in the inter-workings of the UEFI BIOS could answer this: Is there a way to "force" the recommended slot (in the case of X99 boards - the PCIEX16_5 slot) into whatever mode/bandwidth/PCIe generation, etc. as the PCIEX4_1 slot?
Click to expand...

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.
 
In Win 8.1 everything including the hardware raid is working :D

Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter works great in Yosemite but my external Hardware Raid (Promise Pegasus R6) is recognized but the disk aren't showing up at all :confused:

Any ideas kindly appreciated :roll2:
 
Just so that it is out there, I got my Thunderbolt card in for my Asus X99 today. Got it installed and I now have a working Apple Thunderbolt Display using video from my GTX 970. I had to use Chimera as my Clover setup just wouldn't boot anymore with the card installed. So I lost iMessage but gained back my display. No huge loss as I wasn't using iMessage on my previous hack.

Oh also my TB worked without first activating it in Windows.
 
Set mine up with a Gryphon Z97 and so far working great with my Universal Audio Apollo Twin.

I had to load Windows and installed the TB driver before testing out in OS X, also had to delete all TB-related kexts prior to the Apollo connecting. However the Apple TB to FW800 adapter was able to connect prior to deleting all TB-related kexts...

So yes, very happy at this point!
 
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