[SUCCESS] Gigabyte Designare Z390 (Thunderbolt 3) + i7-9700K + AMD RX 580

[CaseySJ]

Hello CaseySJ,

Yes it does work on the Z390 Aorus Xtreme, (have now just tested 1.4.1) as did the previous version (1.4.0) however, on the Aorus Xtreme, there is RGB Led Lighting that runs down one entire side of the motherboard. Using Liquidctl with the RGB_Fusion2 drivers it appears that it only illuminates one or two of the RGB LEDs on the side of the MB. (I have attached a photo showing in the red circled area the LED's that are working and in the Blue circle the LED's that do not illuminate) The RGB LED edge lighting runs right from the Top to the Bottom of the MB as seen within the Red and Blue circles.

This edge lighting is controlled via the (led2: one of the two 12V RGB headers) in Liquidctl. As I supplied previously with the older version of Liquidctl, please see below for the list of corresponding LED's for my MB.
...
My System
RGB_Fusion2 (Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Xtreme) As tested and running v1.4.1

• led1: the LED Lighting around the IO Panel
• led2: Aorus Xtreme Motherboard RGB Edge Lighting
• led3: Aorus Logo (Top Left) Covering the PCH Chip
• led4: ESS Sabre HIFI Logo LEDs beside the PCI Slots
• led5: LED_C1 Onbaord RGB Header (I have my Power Supply RGB Sync plugged into this)
• led6: Unknown (Does not appear to be associated with anything on this MB)
• led7: NVME SSD Covers / Shields
• led8: not in use.

Hope this helps others that have the Aorus Xtreme MB and the developers of Liquidctl

Hello @Lukey1979,

Thanks for producing the channel map for AORUS Xtreme. Regarding the edge lighting:

• Do you have Windows installed on the machine?
• If not, do you have VMWare Fusion or Parallels with a Windows VM?
• If so, Gigabyte's RGB Fusion app for Windows can be used to determine whether or not the upper and lower LEDs along the edge belong to two separate lighting channels. If that is the case, then we may need to install and run Wireshark for Windows to capture the USB traffic going to/from this additional channel. This is easy to do -- I can provide a visual screenshot guide.
  • But first let's just determine whether the edge LEDs do in fact belong to two separate lighting channels.

 

[brousseau6933]

Hi All,
I was looking for a mini-guide to installing Windows 10 onto the second NVME on my Z390 Clover Catalina 10.15.6 Hackintosh.
Any pointers?

I would disconnect the MacOS drive and simply install Windows. After this, your MacOS SSD with Clover will detect Windows EFI BOOT.

 

[Inqnuam]

I would disconnect the MacOS drive and simply install Windows. After this, your MacOS SSD with Clover will detect Windows EFI BOOT.

Also Windows NVMe on M2M, macOS on M2P

 

[macs4me]

Sure thing. For some odd reason, I have full "Thunderswap" for my Apollo 8 without the onboard TB chip flash. I can't recall if I added the Apollo's UUID, but I finally got it to work back in the early days of the 'rona. It works with Clover and with OC. Weird but wonderful.


FWIW, they just released a new box.

Using the mini-guide, I successfully flashed the onboard Titan Ridge chip on my Designare Z390. After getting a proper UUID onto the new bus, I have seemingly native TB3 showing in the system report. I plugged in my Apollo x6 and it works flawlessly. Thank you @CaseySJ for all of your hard work!! All I have left is to fix the Bluetooth lag I am getting with my OSXWifi card.

 

[CaseySJ]

Hello again.
I installed a second 250gb SSD as back up of the system. Before changing anything to EFI at the main SSD, I updated the info, so in case of a disaster, I simply copy the backed up EFI.

But my mail SSD is growing s lot (it's 1Tb) , so I decided to buy a NVME 1Tb drive to place it as main SSD.

I heard that Samsung ones are tricky, so I saw your equipment and a brand I never heard:

https://www.amazon.es/dp/B07K1J3C23/?tag=tonymacx86c03-21

Do you think it's a good choice?
Or if you were building now the equipment, what should be your chioce?

What about TRIM? I'm not sure what that means.

Thank you

I have used all of the following NVMe SSDs without any problem of any kind (no boot delays, no sleep/wake problems, no overheating, etc.):

• ADATA SX8200
• ADATA SX8200 Pro
• Sabrent Rocket
• Silicon Power (both the blue sticker and red sticker versions; red sticker is faster)

These are all good brands that represent (in my view) an excellent price-to-performance ratio.

If I were building a new system, I would just pick one of the above drives at random!

TRIM is supported on just about all NVMe SSDs by macOS. Please see:

Trim (computing) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[mathgeek]

@CaseySJ, I followed your advice and was surprised with what I found. I am running into the display problems (display connected via TB blanking out every minute or so while using Zoom) with both Clover 5120 and OC 0.6.0 using Lilu 1.4.6 and WEG 1.4.1. However, the problem does not happen using Clover 5119 and Lilu 1.4.5 and WEG 1.4.0. The details and boot arguments are below. Would be curious if you had any thoughts. I'm going to downgrade the Lilu and WEG kexts on OC and see if that also avoids the problem.

Working properly:
Clover 5119
Lilu v 1.4.5
Whatevergreen v 1.4.0
Boot arguments: keepsyms=1, debug=0x100, dart=0, slide=0, shikigva=80, agdpmod=pikera, igfxfw=2

Creates display problems:
Clover 5120
Lilu v 1.4.6
Whatevergreen v 1.4.1
Boot arguments: keepsyms=1, debug=0x100, dart=0, slide=0, shikigva=80, agdpmod=pikera, igfxfw=2

Creates display problems:
OC 0.6.0
Lilu v 1.4.6
Whatevergreen v 1.4.1
Boot arguments: slide=0 keepsyms=1 dart=0 debug=0x100 agdpmod=pikera alcid=11 shikigva=80 igfxfw=2

Implicit in your description is the assertion that moving to OpenCore created this problem. If you still have the previous CLOVER EFI folder, try booting through CLOVER again to re-validate the assertion. If the problem does in fact occur only through OpenCore, then we can start by looking for differences between the CLOVER and OC EFI folders. For example:

• Which versions of Lilu and WhateverGreen are in CLOVER, and which versions are in OpenCore?
• Are there any pertinent differences in Boot Arguments between the two (particularly agdpmod)?
• Because you have multiple monitors, have you tried various agdpmod arguments (pikera, vit9696, ignore)?
• In System Preferences --> Energy Saver, if the monitor set to sleep after N minutes, have you tried increasing N?

 

[CaseySJ]

@CaseySJ, I followed your advice and was surprised with what I found. I am running into the display problems (display connected via TB blanking out every minute or so while using Zoom) with both Clover 5120 and OC 0.6.0 using Lilu 1.4.6 and WEG 1.4.1. However, the problem does not happen using Clover 5119 and Lilu 1.4.5 and WEG 1.4.0. The details and boot arguments are below. Would be curious if you had any thoughts. I'm going to downgrade the Lilu and WEG kexts on OC and see if that also avoids the problem.

Working properly:
Clover 5119
Lilu v 1.4.5
Whatevergreen v 1.4.0
Boot arguments: keepsyms=1, debug=0x100, dart=0, slide=0, shikigva=80, agdpmod=pikera, igfxfw=2

Creates display problems:
Clover 5120
Lilu v 1.4.6
Whatevergreen v 1.4.1
Boot arguments: keepsyms=1, debug=0x100, dart=0, slide=0, shikigva=80, agdpmod=pikera, igfxfw=2

Creates display problems:
OC 0.6.0
Lilu v 1.4.6
Whatevergreen v 1.4.1
Boot arguments: slide=0 keepsyms=1 dart=0 debug=0x100 agdpmod=pikera alcid=11 shikigva=80 igfxfw=2

Very interesting...

• Does the screen-blanking issue occur only when using Zoom, but other applications are okay?
• WhateverGreen 1.4.1 fixes a problem with on-board HDMI port. Are you using Platform ID 0x3E980003 or 0x3E9B0007?

By the way, slide=0 is not needed with OpenCore. It's also unnecessary with Clover if using "FwRuntimeServices.efi". I will remove that argument in the next OC revision.

 

[mathgeek]

Very interesting...

• Does the screen-blanking issue occur only when using Zoom, but other applications are okay?
• WhateverGreen 1.4.1 fixes a problem with on-board HDMI port. Are you using Platform ID 0x3E980003 or 0x3E9B0007?

By the way, slide=0 is not needed with OpenCore. It's also unnecessary with Clover if using "FwRuntimeServices.efi". I will remove that argument in the next OC revision.

It's only when using Zoom that I've noticed it - other applications seem ok. Just tried OC with downgraded Lilu and WEG and had screen blanking. I am using Platform ID 0x3E980003.

 

[CaseySJ]

It's only when using Zoom that I've noticed it - other applications seem ok. Just tried OC with downgraded Lilu and WEG and had screen blanking. I am using Platform ID 0x3E980003.

So only Clover 5119 with WhateverGreen 1.4.0 produces a stable image on the Thunderbolt monitor when running Zoom?

 

[xtreem.p]

Oh.. now that is really worth checking out, i know a few would love to get more TB3 ports!
Thanks for all your work @CaseySJ, much appreciated!

ok.. after extensive testing... with a z170x ud5 th with 2 built in tb3 ports and adding the gc alpine ridge card to get a total of 4 ports....... no cigar...has anyone managed to get 4 ports with a hackintosh?