Thunderbolt 5 not working: Proart Z890 board

[tugela]

Hello, I have a Asus ProArt Z890 motherboard that has one thunderbolt 4 port and two thunderbolt 5 ports on the rear panel.

I am having issues getting the T5 ports to work. The thunderbolt 4 port works with no issues.

I have used three different T5 cables, they all work fine on the T4 port, and have varying success on the two T5 ports.

The devices I have used to test is a 10 gbps SSD enclosure and a T5 SSD enclosure (rated at 80 gbps). Both work fine and saturate the line on the T4 port (10 and 20 gbps respectively).

On the two T5 ports however it is a different story. Initially the drives lit up indicating they were recieving power. The 10 gbps enclosure would initially connect, but would transfer data at ~30 MB/s, which is really slow, similar to USB 1.0. The T5 enclosure has never connected at all, even though it recieves power.

I have tried updating BIOS to the most recent version, updating all the drivers I could find on the website, and nothing works at all. There does not seems to be any specific drivers for the T5 ports anyway, so maybe it is called something else. No power is being delivered to either enclosure through the T5 ports, and of course neither connects or are seen by the computer. The T4 port still works flawlessly however, so whatever the problem is appears to be specific to T5.

The thunderbolt 5 options in BIOS are ticked as enabled. I have tried enabling and disabling these options but it does not appear to do anything. The ports just dont see anything plugged into them.

I can't find any T5 drivers on the website at all. There is something called "PD Firmware Update Tool" which does who knows what, but seems to be related to Thunderbolt 5. After doing that is when the ports stopped doing anything.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to get these ports to work or where to find drivers for them?

I have seen posts here were someone says that there are no drivers and that Windows 11 does it. No, it does not, there are in Win11 drivers for Thunderbolt, so, premptively, please don't suggest doing a windows update.

[ROGn7cpzbiqejm0]

Hi - After months of successfully using both Thunderbolt 5 ports on my ProArt Z890 WiFi Creator board, I began having issues this week as well which I suspect are due to a recent Windows Update as the timing seemed to coincide.

Similar to you, all of my Thunderbolt hardware functions properly on the single TB4 port, however nothing is recognized once it is plugged into either of the TB5 ports.

Did you have any luck resolving? I tried everything from updating BiOS/all available drivers and have not had any success either.

[tugela]

No, so far no luck, the ports are just unresponsive.

[tugela]

It would appear that either the BIOS is broken or a driver is missing. But since there is no discrete thinderbolt driver apparently, there is no way to figure out what the problem  might be

[ROGn7cpzbiqejm0]

Thanks for the quick response. Totally agree. I poked around the system BIOS a bit and all of the configurations looked fine/unchanged with the exception of the controller firmware which is now listed as TBTNVM: N/A.

Hopefully a new update is released soon. I am going to submit a ticket to Asus this morning to hopefully get the issue on their radar as the TB functionality was the main selling point of this board for me.

[ROGn7cpzbiqejm0]

I believe I fixed the issue. If you go to the Asus Driver page and navigate to the PD Firmware Tool, you will see two separate options posted on July 21st, 2025: Version 1.29 & Version 0.16.

Be sure to download the second option as well (Version 0.16) as this will update the ProArt's Thunderbolt 5 firmware. Once I did this, the Thunderbolt 5 firmware once again appeared in my BIOS and I am now able to connect all of my peripherals to both ports, as expected.

While there is no documentation, it is my understanding that you need will need to download both versions of the PD Firmware Update Tool moving forward as the Thunderbolt 4 and 5 controllers are managed separately.

Hope this helps!

[tugela]

It does not fis the issue for me. 1.29 appears to be the TB4 driver, and 0.16 appears to be the TB5 driver.

TB4 works fine, but TB5 has reverted to the original behaviour, in other words power is delivered but actual connectvity is not there or greately deminished.

The devices I am using are a UGreen 10 gbps SSD enclosure, and a Acasis 80 gbps SSD enclosure. Both enclosures have a WD Black 850X $T SSD inside them. Both work fine with the TB4 port, with transferr rates of ~660 MB/s and ~1150 MB/s respectively. On the TB5 port the UGreen enclosure is connected and transferrs data at ~36 MB/s, while the ACAsis enclosure does not connect at all. I tested a Samsung T7 SSD on both ports as well, and that transferred data at about 600MB/s on the TB4 port, and around 30 MB/s on the TB5 port (although both showed big fluctuations in transferr rates over the course of the transfer).

That tells me that something is very wrong with the TB5 ports, presumably at a driver level since they do partially work at basic USB levels.

What version of BIOS are you using? I am currently on 2201

What peripherals are you attaching to the TB5 ports?

TBTNVM version is listed as N/A on my system as well. Does that mean the BIOS is somehow not seeing the TB5 driver, and consequenly is deliver a minimum or no service as a result?

[ROGn7cpzbiqejm0]

That's strange, I'm sorry to hear that you are still having issues. In my experience, once I downloaded the PD Firmware 0.16, the Thunderbolt 5 firmware updated in the BIOS and no longer appeared as "N/A". Once this happened, all of my devices began functioning properly again.

I am running the same BIOS (2201) with Windows 25H2 installed. In terms of peripherals, I have 3 Areca Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosures daisy chain connected to TB5 Port 1 and a Dual CFExpress Card Reader connected to TB5 Port 2.

[ROGn7cpzbiqejm0]

Just a thought, when updating the TB5 firmware, have you tried disconnecting your peripherals? I know that in the past, I ran into issues with the firmware not flashing if there was a device connected.

[tugela]

There is nothing attached to the ports during the flash. The TB5 ports are just not working at anything other than a very basic USB level.

Question: how did you contact Asus to open a support ticket? Their customer service options appear very opaque.