Gc-titan ridge thunderbolt 3 problem

Hi all,

I’ve been testing a GC-Titan-Ridge AIC card with several motherboards (msi X399 gaming pro carbon, msi Z390(with TB header), Supermicro X10DRI) with windows 10 1903 (& 1909). I had to short pins 3 & 5 on the TB header and then everything works fine. I’m using a TB3 dock (2 displayport monitors, usb mouse & usb keyboard). Hotplugging seems to work fine as long as the peripherals are connected on boot.

All the computers have 1 problem though: the thunderbolt connection does not activate on a cold boot. I have to unplug & replug the thunderbolt cable for it to become “active”. Restarting works fine.

I’ve tested the setups with several docks (caldigit ts3 plus, elgata TB3 dock)

I have also tested 3 different TB cables so I dont think its the cable.

I have also tested all the firmwares for the titan ridge (V50,v43,v23) and this makes no difference.

Anyone knows why the thunderbolt connection only “becomes active” after a unplug/replug ?

Thanks !

Jo

Thunderbolt is NOTORIOUS for bad initialization at boot. Restarting is pretty much the only solution coming from a cold boot.

If you initialize your device at the wrong time or in the wrong order, it simply won’t be detected. This is an incredibly common issue with Thunderbolt.

I’m curious how you flashed between firmware versions since downgrading firmware is not officially supported. If you upgraded, it’s a one way journey. And NVM43 and up only work with the Windows DCH drivers which are broken. Ideally you want the NVM23 firmware with the Legacy non-DCH driver.

I managed to downgrade to FW23 (43->50->23). I found the file here (all credits to the user that posted it there !)

The problem is that even restarting after a cold boot does not activate the thunderbolt connection… I always need to manually unplug & replug the cable. (am I the only one with this issue ?)

If you’re wondering why this is so annoying: I’m using a 25m optical TB cable so pc’s are in the basement. Going to the basement everyday to unplug a cable is kind of pointless of course :slight_smile:
I also have this problem with a passive (short) TB cable and an active TB cable.
To make things even worse: the optical TB cable only contains data so I have to unplug it on the pc side . Unplugging at the dock side does nothing. (with a normal TB cable it works to just unplug it at the dock side to reset the connection)

Help is greatly appreciated !

Jo

You say this, but it depends on implementation, so I wouldn’t spread that as if it is gospel. Most issues stem from Thunderbolt AICs because they are stupidly hard to get working right.

This is only speculation, but for the BIOSes that do support it, you’ve made sure to have whatever you need enabled in BIOS/UEFI for TB Support right? I can’t really speak about the X399, but the Z390 should of at least have a BIOS option to turn thunderbolt on during boot.

On the X399 i dont have any BIOS options for Thunderbolt. On the Z390 I do (turned on/off most of them to test all options) and still the problem remains. The titan ridge is now on SL0 in every pc so at least I know that the thunderbolt header on the Z390 did something…

Ah, so you’re sorta doing a Linus when it comes to optical fiber KVMing.

The Linus video where he did his “dock extension” used standard fiber and a special extender. That might be better than a Thunderbolt dock for this case.

BTW, that flashing utility work with a non DCH driver to flash? Does it require a really specific driver? Don’t want to brick my Titan Ridge.

(Also, remove the *://cdn.* from the URL you got the file from as it breaks the eGPU site.)

Only have experience with the Titan Ridge, but I’m getting overall negative impressions about Thunderbolt overall from the reactions of people here.

Some of that could be NVM43 though, and maybe downgrading to NVM23 works. Need more verification of the safety of the flashing utility though. Need screenshots and full details on what it does.

@jdj1982 did you ever find a way to fix this? I’m having the exact same issue as you with a very similar setup - I’ve also got a fiber optic tb3 cable and have to unplug and replug it on every boot with my gc titan ridge, but it otherwise work flawlessly so far for my 2 x 4k monitor setup which is really awesome. But the unplug replug issue is almost a deal breaker (though its a bit less of an issue for me right now since I’ve got my rig and the dock in the same room, just far apart). Have you contacted Gigabyte support about this issue?

My titan ridge card is the rev 2 version and came with firmware version 50.

I had previously been using the asrock thunderbolt 3 aic r2, which I didn’t have this not connected at boot issue with, but when I finally got my second monitor in, discovered it didn’t actually support 2 x 4k60 over a single thunderbolt connection, despite explicitly advertising support for it (it has 2 displayport ins, but they each go to a specific one of the thubderbolt 3 connections).

Huh, managed to get it working by swapping out my motherboard - from an ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 to a Asus TUF Gaming B550-Plus. What I find more amusing is that I got the board because I wanted to try the Asus ThunderboltEX 3-TR card (which has a different thunderbolt header than the ASRock and Gigabyte cards), but with the Asus motherboard that card didn’t work with hotplugging my dock, but when I tried the GC-Titan Ridge again with pins 3 and 5 bridged, it just worked. I still have to unplug and replug on a reboot (otherwise I just get display and the USB devices don’t work), but can do it from the dock end now, and it comes up completely fine on a cold boot. Not sure why the Asus board worked better than the ASRock one. But it’s good enough for me now.

Hey man I saw that firmware as well! How did you use it? I’m getting a cannot be null error when I try to run it. Also do you know if it can be used on 2.0 as well? Which did u use it on

I have the same issue. I plugged an avid hdx thunderbolt 3 sonnet chassis and an avermedia pw513 4k usb (type c) webcam into a Titan Ridge 2.0 pci card. I have to unplug and replug them both on every cold boot. firmware and drivers are updated to the latest ones. My motherboard is a z490m with intel 10900kf chipset.
did anyone solve it?
thank you, byE!

I don’t have experience with an Intel platform + TB3 but various X570 motherboards with the GC-Titan Ridge.

Check out the checklist in this other thread and the few postings below it, you don’t have to study 200+ postings (currently the last 5 postings).

The only difference should be that on Intel motherboards IOMMU is named VT-d, everything else should be the same.

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