I have a ASRock WRX80 Creator R2.0. The board is great, except I cannot get the 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports (type-c) on the back to activate. Plugging in any regular USB-C devices (such as a flash drive) to these two ports doesn’t work either, they are simply not detected. All the other USB ports are working fine. I’m on Windows Server 2019.
I contact ASRock tech support and they said the TB4 drivers are only for Windows 10/11, and Windows Server OS’s are not supported. When I mentioned that USB-C devices are also not working, they said maybe the ports are defective. The only solution they suggested is an RMA.
Is there anything else I can try before an RMA? I hate to return an otherwise excellent board.
I got the replacement board from ASRock today and swapped it in. It’s working great! Both Thunderbolt and USB-C are working. So my old board must have been defective. I did an advanced RMA (paid ahead) so there is little downtime on my server.
If you have one of these boards, I highly recommend you test the two Thunderbolt ports on it, before the 1-year warranty runs out. I was using my board for a few months already, and didn’t realize the Thunderbolt ports were defective until I needed to use a Thunderbolt device!
Hello. I have the R1.0 version of this motherboard, and have run into issues with the rear TypeC ports as well. In Windows 11, all drivers are installed and Thunderbolt is reported ok like you show. There is no reaction if I plug a known working TypeC flash drive into either of the rear Type C Thunderbolt 4 ports. The same flash drive work fine in the front panel TypeC port (non-Thunderbolt). However, in device manager under the Universal Serial Bus controllers section, there is an error reported: “Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed)”. Nothing is plugged in, so it is either a driver configuration issue, or hardware problem like you had. Was wondering whether you noticed this same error in Device Manager? Just trying to see if it’s related (which is seems highly likely). I even tried a fresh install of Windows, and it has the same behavior.
Wanted to update my own thread, as I found a solution that didn’t require an RMA. I did contact ASRock tech support, and they suggested that I take apart the I/O shield shroud / heatsink assembly, and make sure that the Thunderbolt card was inserted properly. While painful since I had to remove the motherboard from the case, I went ahead and did this. The shroud is also a heatsink for the VRMs, and I noticed that the two screws holding it down were not fully torqued. They were kind of loose. After taking it all apart, I also noticed that the housing for the WiFi/BT card was kind of bent, leading to it not being inserted completely into the mini PCIe slot. The Thunderbolt card actually uses two mini PCIe slots, so I tweaked the mounting clip to insure that it would pull the card down into the PCIe slot once screwed in. I then re-assembled everything, making sure that the I/O shroud was pulling down on the BT card (pushing it down into the PCIe slot). I bench tested, and now the rear TypeC ports work fine! I don’t have TB devices to test, but flash drives are recognized and you can read/write to them. WiFi/BT was also working, which wasn’t before (though I didn’t care, as I wasn’t using them).
So bottom line, it looks like ASRock has some assembly issues at the factory (both for Rev R1.0 and R2.0) w.r.t. the Thunderbolt and WiFi/BT modules. If you run into any issues, perhaps try my “fix”. You might be able to test the theory by pushing down on the top of the I/O shroud, just above the TB module, to see if this improves the connection to the PCIe slot.
