Gigabyte GC Alpine Ridge rev 1.0 thunderbolt card - anyone got this to work????

[yoshisakan]

I had rev1 working, but it was tempermental. I don't use it anymore because I got tired of the inconsistency. I was just using it for an audio interface, and I ended up going usb instead.

 

[Mariovn]

Hey Jiffyslot,

First of all, thanks for your comments and suggestions!
Last night I got “lucky”... I now have a dual boot system fully working in Win10 and Mac OS X (High-Sierra 10.13).
It turns out that I bought the Alpine Ridge card in a rush (bad thing if you’re to build an Hackintosh...) not realizing that there were two revisions of the same. I had to do it on eBay as the Gigabyte distributor in Portugal was not delivering it. At that time I’ve chosen a link supposedly to a rev1.0 board. The site was in German and I got the ideia that it might be a 2nd hand board, so I did not trust the box markings and presumed it was rev1.0. Yesterday I took it out of the PC case in a trial to really identify which revision the board was.. the markings on the board were not clarifying at all and I had to unscrew the metal sheet casing to finally see it is.... (drum rolls...).... revision 2.0!
I tweaked my BIOS settings once more and got it working on Win10 - tested with UAD Octa- core TB Stellite + a Seagate TB hard disc. I had to have them connected and powered before powering the PC. SUCCESS!

Then I shut down (keeping the TB UAD and Seagate Disk powered) and rebooted on OS X High-Sierra. I had already installed UAD drivers (ver. 9.6). Checked system report - still no drivers for TB but when I opened the UAD control panel there is was the Satellite! Looked on the desktop and the Seagate disc was there as well. SUCCESS!

I shut down and rebooted a couple of times and the system kept working as expected.

I tested the Satellite thru Logic Pro X and it worked perfectly and the same with the hard disk.

So, it turns out that now I have my hackintosh working successfully with this configuration:

MB - Gigabyte Z370 Aorus gaming 5
i7 8700K
32 GB Crucial Balistics RAM
2x M.2 NVMe Samsung V-NAND SSDs - one for Win10, the other for OS X High-Sierra
(The OS X is formated according the lates5 file system!)
NVGA GTX 1070 SC Gaming vídeo card
A Sonet FW 800 PCIe card (works in Win10 with my MOTU UltraLite mk3 Hybrid - not tested yet in OS X)
2x Barracuda 2TB HDD in RAID 0 - only OS X support (Intel support from the MB is not available for OSX)
1X FireCuda 1T (formated in exFat so both OSs can see it)

I run a small bench mark on it and it already out performs my Mac Pro (trash can 32GB ram, 1T SSD and 6 cores) by almost the double, both in single core and multi-core tests.

Cheers,
Mario

BTW, I forgot to mention that my MB is running BIOS version F7 - the latest one.

 

[Mariovn]

I had rev1 working, but it was tempermental. I don't use it anymore because I got tired of the inconsistency. I was just using it for an audio interface, and I ended up going usb instead.

Hi Yoshisakan,

I run a small recording studio business and TB was a must in my build as all my audio cards are UAD Apollos (Apollo 8 grey quad + Apollo 16 Black Quad + Apollo 8P Black Quad + Satellite Octo) all TB connected. Also my SSD external disks are TB based.
TB was the only option for me because of very low latency it provides.
Right now the only thing that is not yet solved is WiFi which I count on solving once a Broadcom based card I ordered from China arrives - it is supposed to work right out of the box.
I used other connections for audio cards in the past (USB 2.0 was one of them) but I only was satisfied when I installed a MOTU system based on a PCI card (2x2408 + 1x24i/o + 1x 8Pre). When I moved into MacPro (mid 2013) this was no longer an option due to the absence of PCI bus. Also the AD/DA was already not in pair with current technology.
If you can get it to work properly, TB is a tremendous interface, with extreme performance and flexibility.
I cannot live without it any longer.
I’m feeling lucky because I finally got it working properly in my hackintosh.

Cheers,
Mario

 

[jiffyslot]

I'm not going to bother with Bluetooth or WiFi. Any difference in the "bootability" of 10.13.6 with BIOS F7 vs F5? Did you ever get an F5 working with that config?

On the interface topic, Yoshisakan and Mario, I hear ya' both. If I could build a studio from the ground up, –as much as I love the sound of my Apollo 8 Quad, I'd probably go with a PCIe based Dante-based system. IDK, maybe look at the Lynx or Hilo stuff. I'd build a lunch-box-type i/o and skip most plugins. I have a ton, but I keep going back to about five plugins. All the dough I've spent over the years could have gone towards a rebuilt Steinway or Mason & Hamlin.

I'd probably be happier with Logic had I not trained myself on Opcode Studio Vision Pro 3.5.6 (the best DAW ever made, then destroyed by Gibson), Sound Designer II 2.8.3, then my first Pro Tools 4.3 system back in the mid-1990's. I'm a die-hard Pro Tools guy for fast cutting. -I dislike using anything but a transport-type keyboard for recording and editing.

I think I ruined my workflow when I moved away from SVP. Music became more about updates and computer troubleshooting moving toward virtual instruments. SVP was a great middle ground and I could still run timecode to another deck if I needed more audio tracks. -

 

[jleahy2]

I keep hearing about the success stories people have had getting their TB to work, but I finally gave up, which is a shame because I too use my machine specifically for audio work and have loved using my UA Apollo audio interface. I struggled with this when moving over from my MacPro to the Hackintosh and finally gave in and got a Focusrite Clarette 8Pre USB to replace my Apollo.

Definitely not the same as far as latency goes, and I lost access to the few plugins it provided, but in a lot of ways, it's a more seamless experience for me. After reading about all the weird issues and troubles with Thunderbolt and then experiencing a lot of them first hand, it was enough. Perhaps some day TB will become easier and more seamless to use without experiencing caveats and issues. I know a lot of improvement has been made over the last few months in regard to this, but it's still not quite there. I had everything working flawlessly under Windows.... I just could never get anything to work in the slightest under Mac for some reason.

I was actually looking at going back to FireWire with the UA interface due to this, when I read that even on real Macs, UA states that their FireWire hardware has problems with sleep, etc. No easy answer I'm afraid.

 

[Mariovn]

I'm not going to bother with Bluetooth or WiFi. Any difference in the "bootability" of 10.13.6 with BIOS F7 vs F5? Did you ever get an F5 working with that config?

On the interface topic, Yoshisakan and Mario, I hear ya' both. If I could build a studio from the ground up, –as much as I love the sound of my Apollo 8 Quad, I'd probably go with a PCIe based Dante-based system. IDK, maybe look at the Lynx or Hilo stuff. I'd build a lunch-box-type i/o and skip most plugins. I have a ton, but I keep going back to about five plugins. All the dough I've spent over the years could have gone towards a rebuilt Steinway or Mason & Hamlin.

I'd probably be happier with Logic had I not trained myself on Opcode Studio Vision Pro 3.5.6 (the best DAW ever made, then destroyed by Gibson), Sound Designer II 2.8.3, then my first Pro Tools 4.3 system back in the mid-1990's. I'm a die-hard Pro Tools guy for fast cutting. -I dislike using anything but a transport-type keyboard for recording and editing.

I think I ruined my workflow when I moved away from SVP. Music became more about updates and computer troubleshooting moving toward virtual instruments. SVP was a great middle ground and I could still run timecode to another deck if I needed more audio tracks. -

Hi Jiffyslot,

I went straight to upgrade BIOS on the MB to F7 so didn't even try F5 (I started with a full Win10 install which allowed me to run the Gigabyte tools directly from windows). I can tell you that booting times in OS X are reasonably good and comparable to my MacPro.
Performance wise it runs really fast - 2x faster than my Xenyx based 6 core MacPro.
I really love UAD Plugins (started with them back in 2006, long before they had any audio interfaces) and that's basically what I use (I use iZotope and Waves too, but when using waves I'm generally not going for emulations but for specific functionalities).
The reason I went with TB Apollos was that at the time I made the move into MacPro (trash can) PCIe was still not an option with an external PCIe chassis and there was no implementation that could bridge TB to Dante... Nowadays, thats covered ground... Also I had to sell my PCIe UAD DSP cards...
In my studio I'm running Cubase Pro 9.5, Logic X and ProTools 18 - but my standard DAW is Cubase, which I've been using since the early days of ATARI 520ST and know quite well.

Rgds

 

[Mariovn]

I keep hearing about the success stories people have had getting their TB to work, but I finally gave up, which is a shame because I too use my machine specifically for audio work and have loved using my UA Apollo audio interface. I struggled with this when moving over from my MacPro to the Hackintosh and finally gave in and got a Focusrite Clarette 8Pre USB to replace my Apollo.

Definitely not the same as far as latency goes, and I lost access to the few plugins it provided, but in a lot of ways, it's a more seamless experience for me. After reading about all the weird issues and troubles with Thunderbolt and then experiencing a lot of them first hand, it was enough. Perhaps some day TB will become easier and more seamless to use without experiencing caveats and issues. I know a lot of improvement has been made over the last few months in regard to this, but it's still not quite there. I had everything working flawlessly under Windows.... I just could never get anything to work in the slightest under Mac for some reason.

I was actually looking at going back to FireWire with the UA interface due to this, when I read that even on real Macs, UA states that their FireWire hardware has problems with sleep, etc. No easy answer I'm afraid.

Hi jleahy2,

One of my Apollos was a grey face Quad with both FW and TB. These interfaces were running FW800. On my PC (Windows 7 64bit), before I jumped into MacPro, I installed a PCIe card from Sontec that was providing 3 ports of FW800 - never had any problems with this setup. When I bought the MacPro, I still used this grey Apollo with a TB to FW converter (Apple) for some months before updating the Apollo firmware and jump into TB only. Never had problems as well. It was very stable.
It is true the Energy saving options were set not to allow for sleep mode in the MP but that was the only thing.

 

[jleahy2]

Hi jleahy2,

One of my Apollos was a grey face Quad with both FW and TB. These interfaces were running FW800. On my PC (Windows 7 64bit), before I jumped into MacPro, I installed a PCIe card from Sontec that was providing 3 ports of FW800 - never had any problems with this setup. When I bought the MacPro, I still used this grey Apollo with a TB to FW converter (Apple) for some months before updating the Apollo firmware and jump into TB only. Never had problems as well. It was very stable.
It is true the Energy saving options were set not to allow for sleep mode in the MP but that was the only thing.

Yeah, that's exactly why I passed on it and went with the Focusrite USB instead - I want sleep to work. It's a shame it interferes with it, or I would have sprung for the UA Firewire and popped in a card without a moment's hesitation if it didn't cause issues with sleep.

 

[jiffyslot]

Hi Jiffyslot,

I went straight to upgrade BIOS on the MB to F7 so didn't even try F5 (I started with a full Win10 install which allowed me to run the Gigabyte tools directly from windows). I can tell you that booting times in OS X are reasonably good and comparable to my MacPro.
Performance wise it runs really fast - 2x faster than my Xenyx based 6 core MacPro.
I really love UAD Plugins (started with them back in 2006, long before they had any audio interfaces) and that's basically what I use (I use iZotope and Waves too, but when using waves I'm generally not going for emulations but for specific functionalities).
The reason I went with TB Apollos was that at the time I made the move into MacPro (trash can) PCIe was still not an option with an external PCIe chassis and there was no implementation that could bridge TB to Dante... Nowadays, thats covered ground... Also I had to sell my PCIe UAD DSP cards...
In my studio I'm running Cubase Pro 9.5, Logic X and ProTools 18 - but my standard DAW is Cubase, which I've been using since the early days of ATARI 520ST and know quite well.

Rgds

Okay, I'm convinced. I'll use the @BIOS tool from GB in Windows. I'll let you know what happens.

A couple questions beforehand: NVRAM or Emulated NVRAM on your installer? When you built your setup from the 10.3.6 installer, did you do anything (check any boxes) on that initial Clover-boot to the OS Installer USB stick? Any boxes ticked on your first run of MultiBeast? Did you skip Clover Configurator altogether?

Update: F7 has turned my PC into a 48-pound boot-looping device. Thunderbolt card no longer appears for setup in BIOS. Clearing CMOS did nothing. Can't boot with the original Aorus GB DVD(to roll back to F5) nor the Windows Pro 10 DVD. If someone wants this for parts or whatever, PM me. I'm done.

 

[AaronDarklightAudio]

Holy sheep! Well it actually turns out that I have a rev2.0. I just didn't spot it until I looked at .. er.. the label on the box!

So I guess getting Thunderbolt up and running would be a viable thing... just don't quite know how yet.

Thank you for the post. I actually had a hard time researching how to identify the rev. # for the GC Alpine Ridge. It was in fact a white label on the outside side of my box. Says "PCI-Ex4/Rev.2.0" Thanks!