X299 Designare TB

[Mixerjack]

Hey all, firstly thankyou to everyone on this site. I managed to build my first hack just from reading and searching posts exclusively on here...

I’ve just built an X299 designare hack with an i9 7940x, 64 gig of ram and a gtx 1060 6GB gpu.

Was a bit of a bugger getting going but all appears to be stable right now! It’s going to be a music production machine, already hitting over 44k multi score. I already have a kaby lake hack in my studio so there is no rush on this machine. I’m giving myself the time to make sure it’s rock solid and fully functioning before I make the swap.

So the dreaded thunderbolt question.... I bought this MB partly because it has TB baked in. Currently not working (a TB drive will power up fine but won’t show up). Do I need to install Windows to activate it? I thought the designare didn’t need to do this? I don’t mind doing it, just been avoiding it for now. Be good to hear from anyone else with this board....

Thanks again for such a cool community. I specced up an iMac pro and it was over double the price of this machine. Absolutely insane....

 

[CaptainChunk]

Hmmm...did you double-check to make sure your Thunderbolt controller is enabled in BIOS? Also, I do know that a lot of the older Gigabyte boards with integrated TB require a firmware update to get TB working. I'm not sure if that's the same case with something as new as the Designare X299 but that may be something worth investigating.

Another thing about TB on a Hack: it's finicky. Don't expect hot plugging to work well or even at all. On my GA-Z170X-UD3 Ultra, I have to have to boot with an already powered-on TB device for that device to mount. Swapping out devices always requires a reboot for me. My TB port won't even show up in System Information unless the machine is booted with a powered-on device.

 

[CaptainChunk]

And if you do require a firmware update for Thunderbolt, it is very likely that the update will be Windows-based. At least it was for mine...