Gigabyte Z490 Vision D (Thunderbolt 3) + i5-10400 + AMD RX 580

[Higgie]

@Higgie did you hide the slot #1 via the relevant SSDT when booting macos? and where you able to boot mcos with the slot hidden from macOS?
I had my 5600 Xt in slot 1, then install my 6800 XT in slot 2, added the SSDT to hide slot 2 but I could not boot macOS. 50% in the boot sequence it crashed and the system reset. If I remove the 6800 XT but keep the SSDT to hide slot 2, I can boot macOS. And if I install only the 6800 XT in the system and do not hide slot 2, I can boot macOS but of course I have no acceleration.
I have not tried yet booting windows with 2 cards and slot 2 hidden. I wanted to make sure that I could boot macOS first.
I remember reading something on this forum about someone having 2 cards and the system crashing if the non supported video card in macos was in slot 2. did I read it correctly or am I dreaming ?

No SSDT is used in my case. I had the same experience as you, in that macOS would crash during the boot sequence. If I remove the SSDT, it boots fine again. I would love to get the SSDT working but I couldn’t figure it out, so I’ve just left it as is.

 

[mickelsn]

This is admittedly a low-priority problem and purely cosmetic, but it bugs me and we're all Mac folks who care about attention to detail in GUIs, so here goes:

I have a rock-solid Vision D Z490 build thanks to @CaseySJ since this summer. This thread has been awesome. But I've not been able to fix a graphics problem in OpenCanopy on my setup through multiple iterations of OpenCore including the upgrade OC0.6.6 per the latest EFI package @CaseySJ has been kind enough to provide. I'm running Z490 Vision D | i7 10700K | RX 580 Pulse 8GB as shown in my profile with two LG HDR 4K monitors (27UK850-W) attached via HDMI 1 inputs with good quality cables. Picture on both monitors is normally fantastic. EXCEPT for the OpenCore OpenCanopy GUI. Then, it's pixelated garbage and hard to read as shown below/attached in example pictures taken with my iPhone.

Text rendering is horrible in the picker and icons are somewhat pixelated as you can see, even after the picker when boot moves to the Apple logo with progress bar. Once the system swaps into the login screen with user pictures, everything is gorgeous. But this is annoying. I tried changing some OpenCanopy resolution configuration edits in OpenCore config.txt, but nothing has worked well. I want to keep 4K resolution and the icons small to avoid left-to-right scrolling in 4K, but with high resolution and crisp readable text. Any ideas?

 

[CaseySJ]

Hi everyone!

I'm trying to enable TB Bus on GC-TITAN RIDGE 2.0. I used a modified (5v to 3.3v) CH341a programmer to flash and used GC-Titan-Ridge-V2.0-Mod-NVM50-CaseySJ.bin as a custom firmware. Before flashing compared the original NVM50 firmware with a modified one and have found only few differences, so the choice was right I think.

But with a modified firmware GC-TITAN RIDGE doesn't work at all. No output to LG UltraFine display at all (during boot either), macOS does not detect it: no PCI devices (including Hackintool and IORegistryExplorer), no hardware found in Thunderbolt section instead of 'No drivers were loaded', it just disappears completely. Have the same situation in Windows.

My MB is ASUS Z490-E Strix, so the TB_HEADER is not compatible with TITAN RIDGE. I tried to connect pins in THB_C together, but it did not help.

If I flash an original firmware back it starts working as before, without TB Bus.

I also have ThunderboltEX 3-TR AIC, which is compatible with ASUS MB and works much better. But there's no modified FW for it. Maybe someone could help with it?

Original firmwares I've read from GC-TITAN RIDGE 2.0 and ThunderboltEX 3-TR attached.

Hello @etc,

Attached zip contains two modified versions of firmware for the two cards:

• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin

Please try each one to see if Thunderbolt Bus activates (System Information --> Thunderbolt). Once we get to a working state, we can create an appropriate Thunderbolt DROM and then test actual Thunderbolt devices and monitors. Right now it's sufficient to just flash each one to the appropriate card and see whether Thunderbolt Bus activates.

 

[etc]

Hello @etc,

Attached zip contains two modified versions of firmware for the two cards:

• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin

Please try each one to see if Thunderbolt Bus activates (System Information --> Thunderbolt). Once we get to a working state, we can create an appropriate Thunderbolt DROM and then test actual Thunderbolt devices and monitors. Right now it's sufficient to just flash each one to the appropriate card and see whether Thunderbolt Bus activates.

Omg, thank you so much!
I'll post the results asap

 

[Ploddles]

Any ideas?

Have you tried setting UEFI | Output | ConsoleMode = Max in your config.plist file.

 

[emistral]

No SSDT is used in my case. I had the same experience as you, in that macOS would crash during the boot sequence. If I remove the SSDT, it boots fine again. I would love to get the SSDT working but I couldn’t figure it out, so I’ve just left it as is.

@Higgie So to summarise, you have no SSDT to disable slot 1 or 2, you have your 6800 in slot 1 and your RX580 in slot 2. You boot macos and I am guessing you are using one output of the RX 580 connected to your monitor. then if you boot from windows, you use one output from your 6800 and I am also guessing that you have disabled your RX 580 in windows device manager or at least made the 6800 the default card in windows?
If it is the case, when in macos, you don't have any issue having 2 active video card? I don't think there is a way in macos like there is in windows to easily disable a video card. But if the above works, that's ok.
My only concern is that if I put the 6800 XT in slot 1, the card is so big that there is only a couple of mm between the 6800 xt and the backplane of the 5600 XT hence the airflow is heavily compromised. That is why I initially put it in slot 2.

 

[centraljava]

Hello @favoriti,

Despite making a serious attempt, I was unable to install Mojave on my Z490 Vision D. I'm not sure if anyone has installed Mojave on a Z490 system with Comet Lake CPU.

For Mojave, it is better to use a Z390 board with Coffee Lake such as Gigabyte Z390 Designare.

I came across a posting on another board about someone running Mojave on this Z490 Vision motherboard; it's a few months old article complete w/ screenshot.
I'm curious. I cross-checked with a youtube clip showing another Z490 with 10.14.
No details on how it's done, though.

 

[Higgie]

@Higgie So to summarise, you have no SSDT to disable slot 1 or 2, you have your 6800 in slot 1 and your RX580 in slot 2. You boot macos and I am guessing you are using one output of the RX 580 connected to your monitor. then if you boot from windows, you use one output from your 6800 and I am also guessing that you have disabled your RX 580 in windows device manager or at least made the 6800 the default card in windows?
If it is the case, when in macos, you don't have any issue having 2 active video card? I don't think there is a way in macos like there is in windows to easily disable a video card. But if the above works, that's ok.
My only concern is that if I put the 6800 XT in slot 1, the card is so big that there is only a couple of mm between the 6800 xt and the backplane of the 5600 XT hence the airflow is heavily compromised. That is why I initially put it in slot 2.

• No SSDT to disable either slot
• RX6800 in slot 1, RX580 in slot 2
• HDMI out of 580 to my monitor, I swap this cable to the 6800 when I want to boot Windows (until i get a switcher)
• RX580 disabled via Device Manager in Windows
• No issue in macOS so far, I haven’t tried putting it to sleep since having both cards powered (although sleep was broken with my previous 6800 - reference model with the USB-C port. My new Sapphire Nitro doesn’t have the USB-C output)
• In retrospect I would have put my 6800 in slot 2, I just figured I wouldn’t have the 580 in there for long. Due to the size of the card I really wish I put it in slot 2, as I am now unable to remove it without taking my NH-D15S cooler off - reaching the PCIE slot latch is impossible!

 

[etc]

Hello @etc,

Attached zip contains two modified versions of firmware for the two cards:

• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• thunderboltex-3-tr-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD1-CaseySJ.bin
• gc-titan-ridge-v2-MOD2-CaseySJ.bin

Please try each one to see if Thunderbolt Bus activates (System Information --> Thunderbolt). Once we get to a working state, we can create an appropriate Thunderbolt DROM and then test actual Thunderbolt devices and monitors. Right now it's sufficient to just flash each one to the appropriate card and see whether Thunderbolt Bus activates.

So, the results. Good news: all these firmwares enabled TB Bus on 3-TR and GC-TR.

Speed is shown as "Up to 20Gb/s x2" instead of expected "Up to 40Gb/s x1"

In depth

- If nothing is connected to AIC, the TB Bus won't be enabled, i. e. "No hardware was found" in the TB section. Valid for both cards.

- If UltraFine is connected on cold boot, TB Bus will be enabled on 3-TR. GC-TR won't enable it until you re-plug UltraFine after the boot.

- No UltraFine's internal devices are recognized on cold boot even if TB Bus is enabled. You won't see them in Camera and USB sections until you reboot the machine.

- To get TB working in Windows you need to boot macOS first. The TB controller will report errors, but all devices should work.

- No bootscreen on cold boot with UltraFine at all. You may get it after booting to macOS, i. e. on warm boot.

I even got an old Apple Thunderbolt Display working with that mod!

3-TR looks more stable with all that stuff, maybe because it's compatible with my motherboard. Flashing card also means that you lose boot screen on UltraFine, unfortunately.

@CaseySJ I'm bit concerned about TB speed, why it shows 2x 20 Gb/s links instead of single 40 Gb/s? Could it be fixed anyhow with another fw modification?

I have more Sys Report, Hackintool, etc. screenshots. If you need them, just ask.

----

The main reason of flashing AIC cards is getting full 5K resolution on UltraFine. But currently I don't have macOS compatible graphics card with two DP outs I'll try to get it asap.

 

[starchyfind]

Over the past couple of days, I've been working on a networking issue regarding the 2.5GbE port. Long story short: I've been upgrading my switch and a few devices to greater than 1GbE speeds. Synology DS1618+ and QNAP switch are 10GbE, and my hack is currently 2.5GbE. I've narrowed the issue down to read speeds only on the 2.5GbE port (1GbE port works at max bandwidth on both read/write). For some reason the read speeds top out at around 80MB/s on the 2.5GbE port. Read/write speeds are max throughput from Windows; no issue. I've already exhausted most of the common troubleshooting options (SMB settings, signing, encryption, MTU, etc.) so I'm 99% sure it's something (driver?) related to just the 2.5GbE port under macOS (Catalina and Big Sur).

Is there anything I can do in the OC config to troubleshoot the issue?

I'll eventually upgrade to this Syba 10GbE card, but I thought it's worth finding a solution in case anyone else has a similar issue.

Side note: in Big Sur, System Prefs>Network>Advanced>Hardware>Duplex is set to full-duplex, flow-control by default (when switching from Configure: Automatic to Manually), whereas in Catalina it's just set to full-duplex. I've read somewhere that ethernet flow-control is not preferred, but I'm no IT guy. I haven't noticed a difference either way in any of my troubleshooting.

@CaseySJ Have you ever used the IntelMausi driver instead of FakePCIID_Intel_I225-V for the 2.5GbE port? I found it via the Dortania site under Hardware Limitations. I'm curious if that's a viable troubleshooting strategy.