- Joined
- Jan 13, 2010
- Messages
- 2,832
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
- CPU
- i7-3770K @4.2-4.4GHz
- Graphics
- GTX 660 Ti
- Mobile Phone
We know a lot of you have already bought Gigabyte’s new Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard, but some of you are hesitant due to the lack of confirmed Thunderbolt support. On the eve of Mountain Lion, we thought we’d be the bringers of good news, the Gigabyte Thunderbolt equipped motherboards work with Thunderbolt devices in OS X 10.7.4 and we should see the same kind of support in Mountain Lion.There is a but though, although it’s not a major issue and it’s something that should be possible to solve in the future, given some time and the ingenuity of the community. The screenshot above shows a Western Digital My Book Thunder Duo connected to the Z77X-UP5 TH and although it didn’t show up under Thunderbolt devices, it does show up under SATA devices.
As you can see, Western Digital fitted an ASMedia ASM1061 controller inside the My Book Thunderbolt Duo and as we know, this SATA 6Gbps controller already works quite happily in OS X. We’ve also tested Apple’s Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter and we can confirm this works as well, but again, it only shows up under Network devices.
The one but, is that you can’t hot-swap Thunderbolt devices using the Gigabyte boards and this simply because they’re not detected as being a Thunderbolt device, but are instead seen by the OS as an internal PCI Express device. Since Thunderbolt is pretty much an external PCI Express interface, this makes sense. What this means is that you have to plug in your Thunderbolt devices at boot, which might not be ideal for everyone, but it’s something that we’re hoping to be able to solve given enough time. Note that things like hard drive docking solutions where you have a removable drive are still hot swappable on the drive end, as long as the dock itself supports hot swappable drives.
We would like to hear from forum members using Asus, MSI or Intel motherboards with the single port DSL3310 Thunderbolt controller that have tried to attach a Thunderbolt device, as currently we don’t know if the DSL3310 Thunderbolt controller is compatible with OS X or not and it would be good to have some confirmations as to whether or not it works. So far we’ve only had a single report about the Apple Thunderbolt display in the forums, but it’s not conclusive, although a user going by the name of Einsteiniac claims to have gotten his display working, albeit not entirely flawlessly, as the display turns off before you reach the OS and as such he had to unplug the display and plug it back in to make it work.
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