GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Designare

[Geesejuggler]

After some hours of frustratingly switching settings on and off in Clover Configurator and the BIOS, I finally gave up and put back an old copy of the config file, some mindless BIOS tinkering and suddenly it all worked! Both nVidia graphics and audio worked like they should!

The annoying thing is that I do not know what I messed up, but I wrote down all BIOS settings and made extra backup copies of the EFI partition... Just in case...

Some minor points remain:
- when I shutdown the machine, it powers up again after a few seconds.
- sleep does not seem to work (yet).
- Clover graphics is missing some icons [?].

USB 3 seemed to work fine, I do not have 3.1 type-C devices, so could not test that.

I tested the Thunderbolt3 interface with a Promise RAID setup and Apple's Thunderbolt3 to TB1/2 adapter. It did not work out of the box, but thanks to information on this forum (thanks!) I figured I needed to update the Thunderbolt firmware to revision 18. To do this I installed Windows on a spare drive and performed the update. After this, the Promise drive mounted in macOS Sierra without a glitch. It is not hot swappable, but for now I can totally live with that.

Thanks again guys!

I have now a water-cooled Core i5 6600K running on 4.4 Ghz, 3000 Mhz RAM, an EVGA water-cooled GTX970 and some regular SATA SSDs (Geekbench single core score: 5641, multi-core: 16242). System stays cool (CPU max 47°C, GPU < 50°C under full load).
Everything feels quite snappy.

 

[dmijic]

Has anyone tried updating to F21 BIOS on this board?

 

[iWanderer]

Has anyone tried updating to F21 BIOS on this board?

Yup, didn't notice any different. Sleep is still not working.

 

[henrychic]

Has anyone tried updating to F21 BIOS on this board?

Yes. Everything works as expected. Had to recreate DSDT to get thunderbolt working. And strangely Maciasl 1.4 could not read the DSDT file. Had to use Rehab Man's Maciasl which uses iasl 6.1. Hope it helps.

 

[mustang.dvs]

Under F20, the Multibeast HD530 fix causes kernel panics on boot (3/8ths through the Apple screen progress bar).

Audio and Ethernet (both ports show as en0, so only one works) work, though.

EDIT: FakeID graphics entries were causing the panic. Removing those restored booting.

 

[SMW]

Remember that the Thunderbolt chipsets won't be enabled or firmware installed, unless you do it through a windows boot install first, then add a Mac OS boot drive.

 

[Manceor]

SMW can you expand on this? If I have two hard drives present. One with Windows where I have installed and updated the TB firmware and drivers and a second ssd with my sierra install should the thunderbolt work? I am still having issues getting it to see my UAD apollo. It's frustrating because windows does and it definitely knows it is there, but doesn't read it.

 

[mivanitsky]

Has anyone mapped their USB ports and made a custom USB-SSDT for this board yet? I hate to reinvent the wheel if someone has already done it. If no one has, then I will do it at some point.

My system is working basically perfectly, but custom USB configuration will be preferred to the port limit patch alone.

My single complaint about the machine is that I can not get the machine to reboot with Last OS Booted, despite my settings in Clover. This would not bother me too much, except I had it working before.

 

[Geesejuggler]

My Thunderbolt experiences:

After booting into Windows, apply the Intel Thunderbolt Firmware patch.
From the firmware update instructions:
Please follow the steps instructed after executing Thunderbolt FW Update Tool, remove the system power cord for at least 30 seconds after FW update. Thunderbolt function will be available after system powers on.

After this, to test, I plugged in Apple's TB3 to TB2/1 adapter attached to a Promise RAID and booted into macOS. Drives were mounted correctly.

Other observations:

• Storage does not seem to be hot-pluggable.
• BIOS setting "Boot from Thunderbolt" makes Clover hang with my current BIOS settings (still on F20 firmware).
• I turned TB security off, but have not checked if it would work with some of the settings.

To try:

• I want to try Thunderbolt networking in the BIOS and attach a TB1/2 equipped MacBookPro.
• See if Apple Thunderbolt(1) to Ethernet adapter works.

 

[creepyTowel]

Same motherboard, same BIOS, same problem.

What fixed it for me was to change "ErP" to "enabled" in the BIOS. It's in the Power section.

It's probably more a workaround than a fix, though. It forces the board to draw less than one Watt when powered down, so whatever is causing the restart can't draw enough power to make it happen. You can tell it's worked because even the onboard red LED goes out.

Peter.