[SOLVED] ASRock X570 Taichi/Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge AIC: Thunderbolt 3 devices OK - But USB 3/DisplayPort device Hotplug causes BSoD :(

I think that exists already, but I have not tested it.

See this product: https://www.akitio.com/expansion/node-duo

Or you could also use a PCIe -> 2 m.2 adapter with PLX. It should work.

Opened up my own Titan Ridge and there are indeed JTAG solder points. See if you can use that interface to reset to factory defaults.

I am deciding between AsRock or Gigabyte for thunderbolt support. But the Gigabyte boards seem to be missing the headers completely and a risk not knowing which board has it. I cannot budget for a Taichi but may have to if it comes to it. Will any of the other Asrock boards support the Titan Ridge card. The Steel Legend or Phantom Gaming 4 perhaps ?

All ASRock X570 boards that have the little “Thunderbolt ready” button on their product website should have that 5-pin TB Header, so just check by that.

Personally I can only vouch for the X570 Taichi and Phantom Gaming X but cannot see a reason why these other models would behave differently.

Yes. I am narrowing my efforts to Taichi now for AsRock or Aorus Pro-Master if Gigabyte tell me where to find rev 1.1 stock locally.

Is the Taichi chipset fan noisy at all ? Some said it is, the Gigabyte one isn’t.

The VRM on Phantom Gaming 4 wont be suitable for 3950X, this is what people keep saying anyway. Gigabyte have a much better board cooling setup there. I am open to come back to Taichi and spend the extra $240 or there abouts though. Knowing there is immediate support for the Titan Ridge card and a header for it.

AsRock BIOS has been hit and miss. And Gigabyte BIOS reserves high end features for boards above a particular price bracket. The B550 Aorus Master should have the most recent support of Titan Ridge.

You should research the board’s BIOS before purchasing because critical missing features could mean buyer’s remorse afterwards.

Edit: Correction, only the B550 Vision D with it integrated has the highest likelihood of configuring the controller. You are at Gigabyte’s whim if you go with the B550 Aorus Master. They could decide to add the UEFI option for Thunderbolt config… they could not. They for certain do on boards with an integrated Thunderbolt controller though.

Yes, when using default BIOS settings the chipset fan is annoyingly loud (the loudest component in my system), even when using the fan profile “Silent”.

BUT it is very easy to just manually change this profile, I set it so the fan only starts running at 65 °C.

My X570 Taichi is fully-loaded, all PCIe slots and with M.2-to-U.2 PCIe adapters so I had to permanently remove the largest part of the motherboard’s heatsink.

I just placed a Noctua fan on an PCIe AIC PCB that’s near the remaining small heatsink directly over the chipset and with this it never hits that 65 °C threshold and it’s silent.

I don’t have any other issues with the BIOS (currently P3.40).

@wendell

Any plans on reviewing the Gigabyte B550 VISION D (rev. 1.0), seems to be the ultimate Thunderbolt 3-AM4 motherboard on the market right now.

Am a little worried if it has the most recent silicon revision of the Titan Ridge controller though, that is the major thing preventing me from just checking it out myself.

Edit:

Meeeh, just realized that the board only has a DP-IN for its onboard TB controller, was hoping to plug a Renoir APU in there to use its DP interface for the TB controller resulting in not having to install a dedicated GPU :frowning:

Most likely the difference is the 2.0 version has a different firmware. It may be the same chip, but different firmware on whitelisted boards for where UEFI settings will appear for the controller.

Okay, finally have proper context for how this works. So, the official way requires both the blessing of the Windows driver and chipset UEFI features which makes OSX Thunderbolt “interesting” if you did no DSDT or SSDT modifications (constant port power cycling, causing OSX to freeze, or 10.12.6 does not support Titan Ridge.)

Using the jumper method activates the controller so that it appears as a PCI-E device. If you plug into an officially supported board with no intervention from the motherboard, the controller is literally powered off. If you jumper the pins, this allows you to use ANY lanes on a motherboard, rather than being restricted to chipset lanes. This is how you solve the issue where only official support is through a single chipset slot. By using the jumper method, you can put it in any slot, including direct CPU lanes.

Anyone needing a quick reference, with the top clip facing up, short the middle and rightmost pin. This will activate the controller so it shows up as a PCI-E device. If you simply plug in the THB_C connector, your Windows Thunderbolt drivers and UEFI need to send commands over the pins to activate the controller.

I’ve also heard the 2.0 version may affect cheese grater older Mac Pro users in making it easier to use the controller on a genuine Mac. The 1.0 version had a NDA restricted firmware update for cheese grater Macs, so people like Wendell may be interested what that changed.

Some boards also don’t include Thunderbolt configuration changes in the UEFI, so you’ll still have to use the Windows tools. (The majority actually on Gigabyte, because they skipped out on a lot of features for anything the Gaming 7 and below on X299)

Unfortunately, with this new knowledge, I have way more in terms of DSDT and SSDT modification to get my X299 “iMac Pro” working. Titan Ridge might not even be worth it for Hackintosh and only worth it for Linux and Blackmagic devices.

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Thank you for sharing the results of your research!

So, if I understand it correctly, you can add Thunderbolt 3.0 to any system with a “jumpered” GC-Titan Ridge 2.0?

I’m getting an ASUS ThunderboltEX 3-TR (90MC08R0-M0EAY0) for an ROG Strix B550-E system soon, can I help you out with details regarding this AIC (prior to proper initialization through the motherboard UEFI, for example)?

Do you have any idea why ASUS uses a 14-pin Thunderbolt header on their newer motherboards instead of the “old” 5-pin one?

Likely it exposes more GPIO pins. Somewhere in there is the same standard 5 pins, but for newer chipsets like Z490 and higher into the future like Z590 there may need to be more GPIO communication between the Thunderbolt chip and the chipset, since Thunderbolt 4 may be the same speed, but there may be not so obvious changes to the specs.

Yes, you can add it to any system as long as you configured your Titan Ridge before going to an unsupported system. (Just change the security setting on a supported system)

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Meaning to “No security” or is the “User authentication” option good enough so the driver on an unsupported system handles everything via a GUI?

I’m happy and angry to hear that: If Intel didn’t have their head up in their own behind so much and just offered official TB AICs for any systems with free PCIe lanes (similar to USB controller AICs) I am pretty certain that TB would have experienced a much, much wider adoption rate with lower cost for everyone and less bugs since much more system configurations would have reported back with potential issues.

By any chance: Have you tried to install multiple TB AICs in a single system?

Am a bit curious if you could splitt a x16 slot into x4/x4/x4/x4 and pop 4 TB AICs in there resulting in 8 ports :stuck_out_tongue:

Another thing came to mind: Does USB-C/TB power delivery also work properly?

One feature why I personally am so fixated on the GC-Titan Ridge (2.0) is that you can charge 2 laptops via USB-C at 100 W each.

Yeah, that’s something I unfortunately can’t test. I now need to know the procedure to change the security setting in the least painful way possible when there’s no UEFI menu option for it, like if it’s possible to modify the BIOS on supporting boards lacking the UEFI option to add the option.

New info: So in a default configuration, if a Thunderbolt 3 device is connected on boot, it will properly power on the controller using the header, even if the UEFI lacks the configuration options. (My X299 Aorus Gaming 7 Pro is Thunderbolt ready with support in UEFI, but no way to configure it.)

It may come to the point where I need a ASUS Prime Intel board with a cheap CPU like the G5500 to configure the actual controller, because Gigabyte dropped the ball on UEFI features.

I seriously need a better BIOS for my board. One that has OCP and OVP and PWM switching frequency changing, and Thunderbolt configuration. Leaving it out means I have to buy another motherboard, with ASUS Prime Intel boards being the best documented.

So configuring with an ASRock Z390 board managed to change my SL level from the stock SL1 User Authorization to SL0 No Security, and it managed to stick across multiple motherboards.

Those buying a Titan Ridge, you will still need an ASUS Prime Z370 or Z390 Mobo (NOT Z490 because of it’s weird new pinout) to configure the controller, then you can jumper the pins with the controller configured. By default it will be SL1, which might not work with Hackintosh.

Gigabyte Thunderbolt configuration options on "supported/ready’ boards might not even be in the UEFI. ASUS Prime is the only guaranteed board with this feature in the UEFI.

We will need a database of Gigabyte boards with functioning Thunderbolt UEFI if people are gonna start using X570 in conjunction with Titan Ridge.

I have determined that ASUS is going with a I2C interface rather than a GPIO interface to configure their cards. Probably wanted to change more settings on the controller and it needed a better interface. You can’t get better than I2C.

This means the Gigabyte Titan Ridge will NOT be compatible with ASUS boards moving forward. You’ll have to do some PCB probing to get an I2C interface out of the controller and to the special snowflake 14 pin I2C based Thunderbolt header.

Are you sure the Gigabyte Titan-ridge 2.0 has dual 100W ports? The 1.0 version has one 100W and one 27 W port and the tech specs on the Gigabyte website are identical. Look at the supported power modes on the ports: the first port supports maximum of 20V @ 5A (100W), but second port only supports max 3A @ 9V (27W).
Why do you think the 2.0 is different?

I could have sworn I saw that on marketing materials - that was the reason it got two PCIE 6-pin power connectors, the new ASUS dual TB3 AIC also features 100 W + 27 W but with a single PCIE 6-pin power connector.