Success: GC Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 AIC (rev 2.0), High Sierra

[purpleronnie]

Purplronnie, I'm SO glad I found this thread. I recently built a computer using the X299 Aorus Gaming 3 motherboard and among other things, I intend on using it for music production. The audio interfaces that I was most interested in purchasing use thunderbolt - specifically the Focusrite 2pre which you have.

So I just purchased an Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt expansion card (A little tricky to find these days) And I am currently waiting for it in the mail.

And I’m starting to get a little worried on whether it’s actually going to be able to work on my system. Will the Alpine Ridge work in any of the PCI Lanes on the Gaming 3 motherboard? Or does it only work in one specific PC lane? I had read somewhere that it only works in the PCIEX 4_2 lane which is going to be a problem for me because that’s where my massive GTX 1080 TI sits and I’m currently using the Nautua D5 as my heat sink which is making virtually all the other PCI lanes unusable due to the size.

Bottom Line: Is all of this worth it for Thunderbolt? Focusrite did recently release a Clarett Pre USB version and I was considering that if the Alpine Ridge + 2Pre Thunderbolt was not worth the hassle. I'm only using Windows 10 and have no intentions of doing OSX on my machine. I'm really not sure what do and I've been trying to figure this out for weeks so I would love to hear from you.

Many thanks in advance!

Yes, you must use the PCIEX slot which is specified in the manual. For my board this was the furthest slot from the CPU.

I built my latest Hackintosh purely to achieve the lowest latency possible in Cubase, so TB looked like the best way to go. Even with a 7800K and TB audio I still have to use a 256 buffer, which isn't that much better then my previous Firewire interface. If I was to do this all over again, I'd go with USB as TB presents problems along the way. Other issues have crept in over the past weeks, such as 128k audio streams not playing from Facebook, some YouTube videos have no audio, etc. I'm pretty sure this is down to less than perfect TB implementation on Hackintosh.

 

[mashflutter]

Yes, you must use the PCIEX slot which is specified in the manual. For my board this was the furthest slot from the CPU.

I built my latest Hackintosh purely to achieve the lowest latency possible in Cubase, so TB looked like the best way to go. Even with a 7800K and TB audio I still have to use a 256 buffer, which isn't that much better then my previous Firewire interface. If I was to do this all over again, I'd go with USB as TB presents problems along the way. Other issues have crept in over the past weeks, such as 128k audio streams not playing from Facebook, some YouTube videos have no audio, etc. I'm pretty sure this is down to less than perfect TB implementation on Hackintosh.

Thank you very much for the reply, I sincerely appreciate it. It sounds like we have virtually the same setup as I use Cubase as well. I think you've convinced me to stay with USB as that's what windows works is best with. I definitely don't want to be ripping my hair out trying to make TB work - especially if what you're telling me is that the latency results are negligible.

 

[eddieboy]

After 5 days of tearing my hair out and reading many posts on this topic, I've found a solution that works on my system.

So, as you may probably already know, you must first activate your AIC in Windows. These steps are well documented, so I won't cover that here.

The next crucial step is getting your BIOS configured. Before I found these golden settings, I was able to get TB to work in OSX, but only after booting into Windows first. After powering down, the connection was lost and I would then need to boot into windows, load my audio interface control panel (Focusrite Clarett 4Pre), then reboot into OSX.

I can now forget about Windows, power down, and connect in OSX 100% of the time!

So, here are my BIOS settings, which will hopefully help some of you out:

View attachment 314397 View attachment 314398 View attachment 314399

How is it that you got it to work. I been having problems in mac OS X. I did the windows part and did all the update and it worked in windows fine but as soon as I install mac OS X it wasn't recognized. Can you plz help me out here cause I use my hack for music production.

 

[Consigliere]

If you press F4 at the main Clover bootloader screen, Clover will write your native DSDT and other files to EFI/Clover/ACPI/origin. If you could grab that, and copy your clover folder to your desktop. Then edit your config.plist so it doesn't have the serial and UUID in it, and do a IOJones dump into that folder, and post a zip of it, and I will attempt to make a SSDT.aml file to get your thunderbolt working with Native hot plug.

Sorry. I didn't see this until today! That would be most appreciated if you have the time. I think I managed to follow your instructions. Here it is.

There is an SSDT for TB3 in it at the moment but it doesn't work for me anyway.
I also made an other thread about this that maybe explain the issue a bit better. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/can-anyone-interpret-my-2-boot-logs.252792/#post-1751966

 

[Middleman]

Mashflutter,

It absolutely is worth it, and it really does work. As for the card, I'm not sure about the Gigabyte version but for Asus boards the Alpine Ridge card works on PCIE_EX3. That said I have read it works on PCIE_EX5 on Gigabyte boards.

 

[Middleman]

How is it that you got it to work. I been having problems in mac OS X. I did the windows part and did all the update and it worked in windows fine but as soon as I install mac OS X it wasn't recognized. Can you plz help me out here cause I use my hack for music production.

Eddieboy, you could follow my TB3 install guide here > https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...-samsung-960-evo-nvme-thunderbolt-ex3.240368/

 

[Rhandyx]

After 5 days of tearing my hair out and reading many posts on this topic, I've found a solution that works on my system.

So, as you may probably already know, you must first activate your AIC in Windows. These steps are well documented, so I won't cover that here.

The next crucial step is getting your BIOS configured. Before I found these golden settings, I was able to get TB to work in OSX, but only after booting into Windows first. After powering down, the connection was lost and I would then need to boot into windows, load my audio interface control panel (Focusrite Clarett 4Pre), then reboot into OSX.

I can now forget about Windows, power down, and connect in OSX 100% of the time!

So, here are my BIOS settings, which will hopefully help some of you out:

View attachment 314397 View attachment 314398 View attachment 314399

Thank you!!!
You save my day!!!

 

[eddieboy]

Eddieboy, you could follow my TB3 install guide here > https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...-samsung-960-evo-nvme-thunderbolt-ex3.240368/

Middleman, thanks I'll try that and see if that will work. Thanks in advance

 

[sloppyholes]

Hey guys,

So I now have a Universal Audio Apollo 8, Alpine Ridge rev 2.0. It works perfectly in Windows, and I've gotten it to work by turning on the unit at the same time as when my BIOS screen pops up during boot. I copied purpleronnie's settings in his first post.

How can I prevent it from requiring me to turn the audio interface on at the POST screen?

My setup:
Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI
Intel Core i7 7700K
High Sierra 10.13.6 & Windows 10

 

[d-rasta]

Hello,

For a month I'm looking for a solution to wake up my external TB3 Arrow UAD sound card.
I think we can not have the active TB3 at startup otherwise macOS do not appreciate. In addition, you have to boot on windaube at first for the UAD arrow to work. I could never do without windows for the hack ....

Hoping for a solution when moving to Mojave


Bye