This seems to be a good choice of motherboard for me if I’m going for an 8th or 9th gen i5. Just a small question however: it’s got onboard thunderbolt 3 connection, but you need Thunderbolt 2 connectivity. I’m assuming you have a Thunderbolt 2 card installed as an extra. Does this card choice make any difference?
I read a post on Sound to Sound from Pete Cain saying that the Z390 is not good for connectivity with thunderbolt 2, made me wonder how come your set up works so well.
Thunderbolt 2 was dead and buried before the Clarrett even came out, it’s a design choice that honestly has always puzzled me.
To further confuse things TB 2 wasn’t ever supported by Microsoft, so at an OS level, TB3 is the only standard that has ever been supported on the PC side.
Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 were/are as equally stable once you take the converter out of the mix the beta tag doesn’t really mean a great deal here except that end user should be aware of support limitations.
Stability issues come from the implementation of the core TB chipset and how it’s routed around the board. The core chipset (current generation is Alpine Ridge) is sold to the mainboard manufacturers who then have to implement support in the BIOS and route the signal through the onboard USB-C implementation that they’ve chosen.
This is pretty much where it’s going to go tits up if it’s going to do so, and something I don’t really expect to be rectified until it finally goes native to the chipset and everything is handled by the Intel controller and routed via an Intel-native USB-C port. Icelake is promising this later this year, but then admittedly so was Coffeelake last year, Kabylake the year before, Skylake the year before that… well, you get the idea. Don’t hold your breath.
What you need to know is that the Focusrite stuff works best over the Apple converter and doesn’t like the Startech version (almost a reversal of the rest of the market!) which pretty much refuses to let it work at all.
Other than that it’ll probably work. If it doesn’t work over that adaptor then chances are none of the other Thunderbolt interfaces are going to behave much better. It’s very often not an interface issue so much as an implementation issue, which is why I tend to say check out what the support forums are saying for the kit in question and see what other users have managed to get up and running.
Asus and Gigabyte implementation largely work via their own add cards, but the cards in question can be an arse to set up initially, though tend to remain working fine once you have done. The onboard editions are very hit and miss (example: Gigabyte z170 designaire worked with everything, Z370 designaire works with very little) and comes back down to the whole “routing via a third party controller” business I mentioned before. Supermicro add-in implementation when I checked it was great, but 3 times the cost of everyone else and you probably don’t want to be paying the premium for one of those boards. MSI and ASROCK onboard implementations I’ve yet to get around to testing, but they have a few interesting boards now that have peaked my interest.
