Hi.
I'm not sure if this is the right place to post ... I own Prime DELUXE x299 board. And with it ThunderboltEX 3 card.
Years in the past, i did setup this rig, and everything worked. BIOS was v2002, and TBEX3 card was in PCIE_4 slot. No issues. Well, maybe there was some since post qcode was not expected "AA" but instead "81". Regardless, i did not notice any issues, even using XMP 2.0 profile (memory).
GPU is 1080TI. Installed in PCIE_1 slot. Other slots are empty, and there is M2 disk. CPU is i9 7980XE.
Since i plan to go to Win11, i decided to upgrade bios ... ant then problems began. With latest bios 3801, system works, but post qcode shows "bc" and TBEX3 does not work. And in device manager there is error displayed in thunderbolt driver - something POWER error. And no, nothing is plugged in in this card. And yes, this is OLD TBEX3, with firmware "18.5".
Drivers version was 17.2.x.x ... i did try to go to 17.4.x.x - no change. Newer version causes BSOD (blue screen), and error is something DMA VIOLATION something (yea, no screen captures, sorry).
Long story short, last version of bios where this setup works is v3301. Starting from v3403, TBEX3 does not work.
Digging through internet i found that similar problems can be fixed with mowing cards around. To my surprise, moving TBEX3 card from PCIE_4 to PCIE_3 solves it. No more errors in device manager, and TBEX3 card actually works!
So, current setup where this card works is:
- TBEX3 in PCIE_3
- BIOS 3801
- Enabled "Force GPIO power" and "USB support" in BIOS (other values are at default)
- thunderbolt driver v17.4.x.x
So it would seem that newer bioses are sensitive about which slots are populated and in which order?
The post Qcode is again "81". Does anyone know is this ok or not?
Resuming PC from sleep, bios shows qcode "bc" again. But TBEX3 cards works as expected. What this qcode means?
Regards,
H.
