X99 WS: Update to move Thunderbolt card + SATA...

Hi,

I know that the X99 WS has been on the market for quite a while and ASRock probably won't have much love left for it but I thought I'll give it try:

1) Thunderbolt add-in card:

Currently (UEFI 3.30) the optionial Thunderbolt add-in card only works in the PCI Express slot supplied by the X99 chipset.

Please add a setting to the UEFI making it possible to manually specifiy the used slot for the add-in card so that the user can place the Thunderbolt add-in card in any PCI Express slot supplied directly by the CPU.

Why is this helpful?

The X99 chipset uses DMI 2.0 between the chipset and the CPU, DMI 2.0 has as much bandwith as PCI Express 2.0 x4.
This means every component that gets its PCI Express lanes by the chipset has to share the bandwith. Thunderbolt 2 by itself is enough to saturate the DMI 2.0 interface and other components like USB 3.0, GbE and SATA are getting significantly slowed down when using Thunderbolt devices that have a high troughput.

This is possible, I know ASUS X99 motherboards that have such an UEFI option (otherwise they could not use a Thunderbolt 3 add-in card with select X99 motherboards since Thunderbolt 3 is like PCI Express 3.0 x4 and the X99 chipset only supplies PCI Express 2.0 lanes) - but I do not like ASUS because of bad personal experiences and wish to stay with ASRock.

With the 40 CPU PCI Express lanes available with the ASRock X99 WS it would be easy to unburden the DMI 2.0 interface without having to purchase additional PCI Express SATA and USB 3.0 controller cards.

2) SATA Hot-Plugging

The 6 SATA ports that can be used for Intel RST RAID volumes do currently not support hot-plugging. Please add this feature so that you don't have to power down the system to add or remove a SATA drive.
(this is also possible with X99 motherboards of other manufacturers)



I hope I was able to desribe my issues comprehensively. These few additions would make it into an almost perfect product.

PS: It would also be nice if the UEFI update was to include the criticial Intel Management Engine security updates.

Thank you very much for your help!


Edited by FLPPasRock - 04 May 2017 at 3:55am