Resolve and P8Z77-V PRO Thunderbolt ???

I've tried to dig in the forum for this topic but couldn't find a straight answer.

I plan to rebuild my windows system with an Asus P8Z77-V PRO (not certified by Blackmagic) once it has two pci x16. I need Thunderbolt to make it fully compatible with my macbook retina. Would it be the best choice?

I'm using Resolve Lite in mac but I need the power of a workstation for heavy work with Resolve 10 (license). I hope to get it soon with my Blackmagic Camera.

I'll use a GTX 650 TI 448 Core nvidia for GPU and for now I'll try an HD 6570 for GUI (knowing the minimum requirement is Quadro 600). They will be upgrade for power-full cards in the near future.

The big question is choose the right motherboard once the one I have now "Z68X-UD3H-B3" suffers some boot looping problems and needs to be replaced.

Thx

I'm running the Premium version of that motherboard. Tho configured as a Hackintosh while we all wait for the fabled Mac Pro update.

I'm running 2 GTX670 FTW cards. No issues. Resolve is responsive and renders fast.

For a more power you would be better off with a X79 motherboard as you have more PCIe busses but you then have no Thunderbolt. Which, like you, is the reason I opted for a Z77 board.

[CaptainHook]

I'm running the Premium version of that motherboard. Tho configured as a Hackintosh

Is that DSDT-free? Did you have to do bios patching or is it all natively supported? Anything not working or any issues? I have a gigabyte Z77-UD5H running OSX with everything running fine for me but wouldn't mind a board with 2 pci 16x lanes for another GFX card. Cheers.

DSDT Free. Flashed with a patched BIOS. Unibeast & Multibeast install running 10.8.3.

Pretty much everything is working. Wifi can be a bit flaky.

[CaptainHook]

Cool, cheers. USB3/esata/thunderbolt okay?

Well I sold my Mac Pro, bought a retina and completely gave up serious work on macos environment.
It's great to know you're running successfully the P8Z77-V Premium in a Hackintosh Adam but I also would like to know from someone at Blackmagic or any user, which motherboard with thunderbolt technology could pull the maximum performance from Resolve at windows environment.

Cool, cheers. USB3/esata/thunderbolt okay?

USB3 and Thunderbolt work fine. Not tried the eSATA as I did not have a drive to test with. Will test later this week.

It's great to know you're running successfully the P8Z77-V Premium in a Hackintosh Adam but I also would like to know from someone at Blackmagic or any user, which motherboard with thunderbolt technology could pull the maximum performance from Resolve at windows environment.

The Z77 motherboards are the only ones currently shipping with Thunderbolt. Unfortunately they only have 16 PCIe lanes. Some boards like the P8Z77-Premium have additional chips on the board the to "switching" of some sort to get better speed from the PCIe slots. This impacts GPUs.

If you want Thunderbolt you have to deal with that compromise.

I am using a P8Z77 V Pro Thunderbolt ASUS motherboard. It seems to be pretty much the pick of the litter right now for Thunderbolt on a PC. I also tried the best Gigabyte board, and had MUCH worse results, partly because Gigabyte is trying to go down the road of dual Thunderbolt to run a 4K display over them, and that just steals bandwidth from other things that I want to do.

Resolve runs OK on my ASUS board. I give it a pretty hefty nVidia card for its processing, which it recognizes and uses, and a lesser card for the GUI, as BMD says to do. I also run a 4-disk array off the motherboard, which is a cheap array, although not secure, as it is RAID 0, so I use it only as a work drive. I also have an SSD as a work drive for editing / grading, which is helpful. Running Win 7.

Video editing and grading and compositing are basically dataflow intensive, and there are multiple areas of the motherboard that need very serious bandwidth. Resolve wants serious bandwidth in and out of a second video card, besides the serious bandwidth you need to your main GUI card for dual display. Ram needs serious bandwidth. Thunderbolt needs serious bandwidth. I have an internal array, and an SSD system drive and an SSD data drive for video, all of which like bandwidth. I should be able to use my BMD Decklink card in my video workstation, but there is not enough bandwidth for it.

I can run UltraScope over Thunderbolt on my PC, but I don't have much use for it. USB 3 works OK, but not great. Thunderbolt works OK on my GoFlex (newer model has a different name), but I cannot get it to work on a Pegasus R6. Promise claims to release the PC version of drivers, software, etc. before long, but right now, I cannot even get it to work as beta. I typically take my SanDisk SSD out of my BMCC and stuff it into the GoFlex to unload it. It is pretty fast, as you would hope. eSata works, but it does not have much bandwidth. It is OK for laying off data to a drive, but I would tend to use a USB 3 dock for that. There are various issues with different USB 3 docks. The way I see it, you are going to need a couple of arrays to do much work, one over TB, and one not. Three arrays would be good, too.

So the bottom line is, Thunderbolt right now on a PC is nascent, and not well supported. For example, even though the ASUS boards are 'Intel certified', Thunderbolt does not even show up in the Device list. The tech support guys at ASUS, Gigabyte, and Promise do not have much of a handle on Thunderbolt, that is for sure. Microsoft has no driver for it. The guys at Drobo don't indicate that they will ever support it on a PC, citing lack of Microsoft support as an issue. So even though Thunderbolt is a nice idea for the BMCC, and Intel has some chip sets working, some people need to get their hands dirty and write drivers and firmware to play ball with it before we can get much out of it. Gamers are the primary market for high performance on a PC, and they are not particularly enthused with Thunderbolt. So it has been a slow development, compared to Apple. Apple was an early adopter of Thunderbolt, because they like the idea of one small connector on their small devices supporting lots of stuff. That is not down our alley, either.

Why would Thunderbolt need to show up in the device list? You don't expect PCI-e sockets to show up in their own section so why Thunderbolt (as essentially it's just an external connector for a PCI-e 4x socket). Any device you plug in to the socket should show up which is all you really need.
I think the main reason PC motherboard manufacturers aren't that hot on adding it in is because the chips are expensive, the cables to use it are expensive and you get no real benefit from it on a PC as you can just plug in most things internally or into one of the many other sockets on a PC, whereas on a MAC they've locked a lot of it down so you have no choice but to put most things through the thunderbolt which means you have a lot more devices all going through 1 4xPCI-e socket. All the motherboard manufacturers have to 'steal' the 4xPCI-e bandwidth from somewhere whether it's an Asus or Gigabyte board (personally I've had better results with Gigabyte than Asus as it's more configurable and the fact it has 2 sockets allows me to use 2 BM devices at the same time as most BM devices have to be 'end of chain' and have no pass through) Even on a MAC they have the same bandwidth issues as they are essentially the same hardware inside, they get round this by not supplying them with as many options as you get on a PC and therefore not having to worry about other things hitting in to the 4xPCI-e that the Thunderbolt uses.
Personally I'm hoping they'll bring out a new range of 2011 pin boards with Thunderbolt as that would make much more sense as it has 40 lanes on the CPU instead of 16

Yeah, Thunderbolt doesn't show up under device manager on my Asus G55, until I plug something in, then it shows up.

I believe that's normal.

If I have Thunderbolt capability on a motherboard, and it has an actual driver, then I expect it to actually show up in the Device list, simple as that. It is a device. The Promise tech wanted to see it. I think it is helpful to show your actual devices and drivers in there, and you can check to see if they are working or not, etc. This is not currently working on a PC. It is true, I can see something plugged into my GoFlex, but that is not Thunderbolt. Just like USB, Thunderbolt should show up. The fact that it uses PCI-E lanes and extends them out while adding certain capabilities does not change the fact that devices need to be registered with their drivers, etc.

I plan to put an array and the GoFlex on the same Thunderbolt daisy chain. That should work fine. GoFlex will have to be at the end, but that is OK.

The devices do get registered with their drivers when you plug them in and then usually get assigned to their respective sections, so drives go in to drives, media devices in to Sound, Video.... When I plug things in to USB 3 they don't show up under USB 3 they show up in their respective sections, so the BM shuttle goes in to sound, hard drives go in to drives. I see no real use to having a single line in device manager that says 'Thunderbolt'.
It's also possible that the Thunderbolt doesn't activate until you have something plugged in, therefore preserving the PCIe bandwidth for other device on your system until you plug in a device, and at that stage it then turns on Thunderbolt and allocates the bandwidth

One of the main purposes for the Device List is for troubleshooting. When you see a yellow button device, you know there is a problem. You can go in and look at parameters and see what version and driver it has, etc. You can update the driver there. When something does not work, it is common to go into that area and look it over. There are driver issues with Thunderbolt on a PC. The fact that it does not register there is just one manifestation of that. If you talk to the hardware guys who develop a driver for a device that has to talk over Thunderbolt, and have to interface with it, they are interested in such things.

If you plug a device in via thunderbolt the device still show up even if it's faulty, there's no need for a section called 'thunderbolt' as it just installs a driver for a 'PCIe to PCIe bridge' which is all Thunderbolt is. When my USB 3 devices are faulty they don't show up under USB 3, they show up under 'unknown device' or whatever device type they are, so a faulty USB 3 Shuttle shows up under 'Sound Video & Audio Devices', faulty drives show up under drives. Anyone who actually develops thunderbolt devices shouldn't need to have a section in device manager called 'Thunderbolt' as it's irrelevant. As to MS not having a driver, well if they didn't then you wouldn't see anything at all as the controller just wouldn't work. Windows has a standard driver which manufacturers then have to make their hardware work with, seems that some have done that and others don't want to which is not surprising really as it's a niche market on the PC side of things

There is now an Intel installer for thunderbolt which makes a 'Thunderbolt' controller show up under System devices when you have something connected. I've only tried it on Z87 chipsets, but I assume it would work the same on Z77 as well