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Best ASUS EX 3 Thunderbolt card & UAD Sound card Configurations for 2018

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So, I discovered the issue with Windows 10 not recognizing the ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 card.

With the ASUS motherboard came a Windows CD ROM, with all sorts of drivers. I booted into Windows, loaded up the ASUS drivers, and rebooted. THEN I tried to install the ASUS firmware updater, and it worked perfectly. Windows detected the TB card in the system tray.

NEXT step was booting into High Sierra, and with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi loaded into my EFI folder, MacOS booted fine. However, in the System Report, Thunderbolt still shows "No hardware was found" - however, based upon other comments in this forum, a TB device has to be PLUGGED IN for it to come to life.

I'll be running off to Best Buy soon to "borrow" a TB3 disk drive, and see what happens. Stay tuned.

Okay, thanks. Earlier this morning, Clover was updated (see Home page) so I wonder if that will improve things for fresh builds. On my Windows 10 build, both the BMD MultiDock 2 and the UAD Apollo showed up as distinct items on the two TB3 ports; 2x 1 meter Apple TB Cables and Apple TB2 to TB3 dongles. On my real 6,2 Mini these cables show as: Thunderbolt 2 cable firmware version 1.0.16, Link Controller Firmware Version: 0.14.0.
 
Yeah I'm actually still experiencing troubles with my 2nd EX3 card (I replaced the 1st after it stopped working miraculously one day). After using the card fine for three days in a row, the 2nd card then just didn't load up in OS sierra one day no matter how many times I tried turning off the comuter and restarting. After the firmware update I was finding I only had to reboot once if it didn't show up in OS Sierra. I haven't yet been able to check in windows to see if it still shows up. Im currently overseas away from my computer for a month so will have to wait a bit to see if I can salvage it. Im thinking to try a Gigabyte alpine ridge card as others have had success with less heart aches on a hackintosh. The EX3 card seems just so flawed. Anyone else found the spontaneous loading issue that doesn't get resolved with a few reboot attempts?
 
So, I discovered the issue with Windows 10 not recognizing the ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 card.

With the ASUS motherboard came a Windows CD ROM, with all sorts of drivers. I booted into Windows, loaded up the ASUS drivers, and rebooted. THEN I tried to install the ASUS firmware updater, and it worked perfectly. Windows detected the TB card in the system tray.

NEXT step was booting into High Sierra, and with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi loaded into my EFI folder, MacOS booted fine. However, in the System Report, Thunderbolt still shows "No hardware was found" - however, based upon other comments in this forum, a TB device has to be PLUGGED IN for it to come to life.

I'll be running off to Best Buy soon to "borrow" a TB3 disk drive, and see what happens. Stay tuned.

My experience is that my UAD apollo doesn't ever show up in System report under OS Sierra but it does show up in preferences / audio so as long as yr thunderbolt device loads then its working. That might be different though tweaking High Sierra's config file.
 
So, I discovered the issue with Windows 10 not recognizing the ASUS ThunderboltEX 3 card.

With the ASUS motherboard came a Windows CD ROM, with all sorts of drivers. I booted into Windows, loaded up the ASUS drivers, and rebooted. THEN I tried to install the ASUS firmware updater, and it worked perfectly. Windows detected the TB card in the system tray.

NEXT step was booting into High Sierra, and with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi loaded into my EFI folder, MacOS booted fine. However, in the System Report, Thunderbolt still shows "No hardware was found" - however, based upon other comments in this forum, a TB device has to be PLUGGED IN for it to come to life.

I'll be running off to Best Buy soon to "borrow" a TB3 disk drive, and see what happens. Stay tuned.

FOLLOW UP:

Well, I received and tested a LaCie 1TB USB-C disk drive, and it worked fine under macOS, however, sleeping posed a problem. Simply putting the system to sleep resulted in the typical "eject warning" upon system wake, but worse, after another restart, the system started to encounter "allocation" errors while booting (which is purportedly fixed by the OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi). A reboot, fixed it, but this kind of instability was the deal-breaker. I would have had to abandon the idea of "sleep" and/or manually & physically eject any TB device before sleeping.

Ultimately, I decided to totally abandon Thunderbolt on my Hackintosh, and instead opt for a nice USB 2.0 audio interface (like an Apogee Quartet or Audient iD44, for example), and leave well enough alone. My original idea was to use the UAD Apollo Twin MKII, but I've already got a UAD Quad and UAD Solo PCIe card installed, and I have plenty of DSP horsepower with that. Ultimately, an article from the Apogee website discussing "why not Thunderbolt" sealed the deal for me.
 
Hey everyone,

I'm building a RACKinstosh with an ASRock TB 3 AIC and I'm getting the Aptio memory issue,
Has anyone figured out a stable way of solving the problem through BIOS settings or some version of the drivers?

Here's my post with some of the different attempts I made at fixing the issue:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...-after-restart-from-bios.256046/#post-1776885

Maybe it can help someone figure out a solution to this issue.
 
hey!

but how you configure this aptio memory issues? i started 3 days ago this hackintosch thing(noob), because i bought new apollo 8 and didn't manage to make it work properly under windows.
in windows apollo 8 started to crackle with large projects like when buffer gets full. which was weird, because old apollo FW went through it with 64 and even 32 buffer size with no problem.

asus prime z370 a + thudnerbolt ex 3 card with 16gb and i8700k.

in hackintosh my boot is like every 4th attemp succeeds. otherwise getting the same '0/' margin after boot. but what seems to be most often working is going to high sierra apollo off, then turn it on, then restarting and then it's coming through - hopefully this doesn't fry anything.
 
hey!

but how you configure this aptio memory issues? i started 3 days ago this hackintosch thing(noob), because i bought new apollo 8 and didn't manage to make it work properly under windows.
in windows apollo 8 started to crackle with large projects like when buffer gets full. which was weird, because old apollo FW went through it with 64 and even 32 buffer size with no problem.

asus prime z370 a + thudnerbolt ex 3 card with 16gb and i8700k.

in hackintosh my boot is like every 4th attemp succeeds. otherwise getting the same '0/' margin after boot. but what seems to be most often working is going to high sierra apollo off, then turn it on, then restarting and then it's coming through - hopefully this doesn't fry anything.


I've spent a few days in a row trying to fix the Aptio memory issue and the only thing that fixed it once and for all was the AptioMemoryFix-64.efi file you can install through Clover configurator.

Remove all other Aptio fixes and leave that one only.
 
Current ex3 struggler here. I had it working well and then it just stopped with my Apollo Twin. It initially gave me a weird "usb pane" icon in top toolbar by the clock. If I booted with the Apollo off then I could click it and turn off my ex3. With the Apollo powered on I couldn't click it as it would sort of crash the toolbar. I changed my bios settings to a working set from ****** and the pane went away and function was normal. Now it just won't show up! Im going to try the Aptio memory 64 driver alone. Other than that sheesh what do I do?
 
Update: I did a Windows reinstall of the ex3 drivers and firmware to no avail in OS but it cleared the air that the card and Apollo were safe. I randomly changed the boot menu custom logo to "apple" and all of my boots failed. I managed to open OS recovery and then shut down and it self corrected but still didn't load the custom logo so I disabled it. Anyways! This fixed the Apollo issue somehow so Im wondering was the custom logo what crashed or was there something going on along?
 
Update: I did a Windows reinstall of the ex3 drivers and firmware to no avail in OS but it cleared the air that the card and Apollo were safe. I randomly changed the boot menu custom logo to "apple" and all of my boots failed. I managed to open OS recovery and then shut down and it self corrected but still didn't load the custom logo so I disabled it. Anyways! This fixed the Apollo issue somehow so Im wondering was the custom logo what crashed or was there something going on along?

Your problem could be any number of variables but mostly I think its about the EX3 card, it simply sucks. Ive been fiddling with my 2nd card now as the first card stopped working one day and no matter what i tried I could not get it back to normal. Ive just regained connection to my 2nd card after it also miraculously also stopped working.

My suggestion is that in trying to diagnose the problem with osx cutouts is that you always start in windows and confirm your card works there first. Yr thunderbolt software must see the ports and then yr UAD Meter and control Panel must find the sound card. Theres a specific order you need to follow to regain connectivity to the card in windows which you should find online. If all good there then you know yr problem is possibly with your chosen OsxAptioFix.efi file in clover bootloader.

Currently im trialling Nick woodham's suggested combo of the OsxAptioFixDrv-64.efi and the Test2-2016.efi which seems to allow osx to boot easier than it was with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi which seems to accept the Th Ex3 card loading with osx only after a few bootups.
 
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