Gigabyte GC Titan Ridge detection issue fix

Buying Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Card Component

I bought Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge 2.0 (Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Card Component) in 2020 through Amazon India online. I had to convince the seller that I had the right motherboard. I guess there was lot of returns. I assured the Amazon seller that I was using X570 AORUS PRO WIFI (Link) mentioned on the manufactures website.

Installation and initial issue

As soon as I started installing the PCIe card I was faced with my Gigabyte RTX 3080 10 GB OC taking up the slot space in the mid tower. Any way I was able to connect the wires. The most crucial THB_C connector.

 

This was the beginning of my nightmares as I decided to use thunderbolt on windows with Mac Drive pro app which I later on moved to Paragon Mac Tool Box which seamlessly made life easy. My windows formatted drive worked on macOS and macOS HFS+ and APFS worked on windows. (Note: You can not read mac password protected (Mac Journaled encrypted) hard drives on windows)

 

 

At first, I had the connections installed and the firmware (mb_driver_626_thunderboltdch) was installed in windows 10 then but the device did not show up. I checked online and found out that I had to to install Thunderbolt™ Control Center [Link] exclusively available in Microsoft store to work with DCH. Some how after installing and tweaking with motherboard bios it worked.

 Reference Image

If I remember correctly I may have taken e support from Gigabyte website who told me to change some memory and enable 4G decoding settings in the bios.

 

The thunderbolt device used to not get detected so it was always a stress to check device manger (windows key + x > Device Manger ) with multiple restarts to get it detected. 

 

Later on I figured out it was a old bios issue for which I updated my bios from Gigabyte (Aorus) website. (Link) It seem to solve the issue until windows 10 got updated at times but it was stable.

 

For reference

(Download bios > Unzip and copy it on USB disk > Restart PC > Press 'End' and go to File and select Run at your own risk)

I was using Thunderbolt™ Control Center to approve thunderbolt based hard drives. 

When I shifted to Windows 11 [2022 - 2023]

The setup was same but the thunderbolt device would not show up after windows update. I installed the drivers from available from the manufacture and e support suggested to use Thunderbolt FW Update Tool from the this URL: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GC-TITAN-RIDGE-rev-20/support#support-dl-utility

It only starts working suddenly like magic. I tried installing the driver and firmware and new bios still you never know when it will show up in the device manger to read thunderbolt 3 devices. It can not see Controller driver version even though the PCI device is connected.

I was relying on Thunderbolt™ Control Center which I would later learn that it's not required.

 

If you disable security level to "No security" settings in the bios. The drive would directly show up when connected in Windows 11.

FYI - You need Titan Ridge to be detected by the motherboard in bios.

 

 

Update - 29th December 2023

This seems to be the solution from Gigabyte esupport by clearing CMOS:

 

Clear CMOS:
(1) Turn off the power.
(2) Remove the power cords from the motherboard.
(3) Take out the battery gently and put it aside for about 5 minutes
or longer.
(Or you can use a conductive metal to connect the two pins in the
battery holder to make them short-circuited.)
(4) Re-insert the battery to the battery holder.
(5) Short-circuit the CLR_CMOS header.
(6) Connect the power cords to motherboard again and turn on the
power.

Source - Gigabyte eSupport