Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master and Thunderbolt add in-card

Hardware
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Hello there,

I am using a Gigabyte Titan Ridge 2.0 Thunderbolt add in-card with my Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master motherboard and it doesn’t seem to work. I have the 1.0 revision of the board, so I had to use the pin-bridging trick. I have enabled all Thunderbolt options in my BIOS (version F34) I could find and it “seems” to get recognized in linux.

lsmod 
me@me-X570:~$ lsmod | grep thunder            
thunderbolt           274432  0
tree /sys/bus/thunderbolt/ 
me@me-X570:~$ tree /sys/bus/thunderbolt/      
/sys/bus/thunderbolt/
|-- devices
|   |-- 0-0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.2/0000:0d:00.0/0000:0e:00.0/0000:0f:00.0/domain0/0-0
|   `-- domain0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.2/0000:0d:00.0/0000:0e:00.0/0000:0f:00.0/domain0
|-- drivers
|-- drivers_autoprobe
|-- drivers_probe
`-- uevent
sudo lspci -tv 
me@me-X570:~$ sudo lspci -tv
[...]
           +-03.2-[0d-54]----00.0-[0e-54]--+-00.0-[0f]----00.0  Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 NHI [Titan Ridge 4C 2018]
           |                               +-01.0-[10-31]--
           |                               +-02.0-[32]----00.0  Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 USB Controller [Titan Ridge 4C 2018]
           |                               \-04.0-[33-54]--
[...]

So why do I think it is not working?
I want to use a Dock I have, but sadly that is a USB3 dock. I thought it would still work, because I tested this dock with two other devices that have thunderbolt 3 (my Lenovo Laptop and a Intel Nuc) and it worked with both of them. When I plug it into the add in-card however, it only works as a USB hub without any video signal. I also have a USB-C video adapter (no idea if it is actually a thunderbolt adapter) and I DO get a video signal out of that when I plug it into the add in-card. So there IS Displayport pass-through or DP-Alt-Mode going on there…

I do not know where the fault lies exactly. I would love to use the Dock with my PC and get the video and USB connection working on it.
Is there any hope for me? How can I further test if things actually work?

I am thankful for ANY help or pointers on what to do next…

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Just to be sure what ports are you plugged into I thought my card wasn’t working either until I looked at the manual and realized that looking at it from the back of the PC going from left to right it goes “DP in 1, DP in 2, Thunderbolt 3 Port 2, Thunderbolt 3 Port 1”
Screenshot_20211027_200152

Kept thinking the display connection wasn’t working properly because I thought since I connected to the left most Thunderbolt port that the display connection should go to left most mini DP port… woops.

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Hi Velgen,

thank you for your input. I tried switching around which DisplayPort port or Thunderbolt port I used, but sadly that made no change. I tried rebooting every now and then, because when reading other reports, there might be a problem with cold-booting Thunderbolt. But still no luck.

I’ll keep trying :slight_smile:

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That’s unfortunate I wanted to start with that simple thing since I found the port layout to not be particularly intuitive so it would of been an easy mistake. Sadly I don’t have a Gigabyte board and have an ASRock X570 board which worked out of the box with the Gigabyte card so I am not sure if I can give much helpful advice unfortunately.

It could be that the USB-C/Thunderbolt cable is marginal and the extra hop from the GPU to the thunderbolt card is causing issues. Doesn’t seem super likely though with it working when you use it with your laptops, and the hop using the supplied DP to Mini DP cables being so short.

Really seems like it’s probably a setting/configuration issue hopefully some of the people here who have had more experience with these cards can give some helpful advice. A thought on the settings side what did you set the security option for Thunderbolt in the BIOS?

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@Velgen don’t worry. This issue will get solved eventually. :+1:
I also thought that it might be the cable, so I tested another shorter cable I had, but that didn’t help. The shorter cable also worked with the laptop.
Today I bought a new Thunderbolt 3 certified cable and that didn’t change anything either :confused:
In the BIOS the security is set to “none”, to make sure that that is not interfering.

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What dock do you have btw? May help narrow things down some.

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That’s true. It is a Renkforce RF-4724373 and it is advertised as a universal USB-C Dock.

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I found the problem and I feel stupid.
The problem wasn’t the add in-card at all. I was merely missing the driver for the USB-C dock. Under Windows it would install them automatically, but under Linux you have to install them manually.
The dock is using the DisplayLink technology and I had to download the driver from the Synaptic website (owner of DisplayLink). After that I had to reboot and now it seems to work.
I will report back after some more testing…

[Edit]
It seems like the USB-C dock won’t be a viable solution. As far as I can tell, the attached displays are only working once the kernel and its modules are loaded. So getting into the bios won’t be possible. I also noticed that the driver automatically disables the directly attached screens. Makes sense in a Laptop, but not really on a Desktop computer. Still…more testing is needed

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Makes sense since it doesn’t work without the driver from what you’ve said. So I think you should be fine using some other USB-C dock as long as the dock doesn’t require drivers. Most likely any dock that has multiple display outputs on it will probably require a driver is my guess.

Personally I use my Thunderbolt card with the L1Ts USB-C KVM which I got since I am transitioning to using mostly mini PCs, and want to be able to easily switch between my PCs. Works out well for me, but it is more expensive than a simple dock.

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