Gigabyte Control Center and Sappire Nitro+ 6950xt (Windows)

Just thought I’d document my experience here. I was having an issue with the Gigabyte Control Center showing up blank in Windows when I chose Windows from the OpenCore boot picker.

Finally after uninstalling/reinstalling several times and even updating BIOS on my Gigabyte Aorus Z790 Elite AX v1.1 to the latest FJa BIOS and bricking it for a while. (Pro tip- the lowercase letter next to to the two uppercase letters indicates a beta BIOS and you should NOT use it if you value stability) I wound up removing all drives except Windows and unplugging all peripherals except keyboard and it finally booted.

Lo and behold GCC also was showing up! So after I plugged everything back in I bounced back and forth from launching windows from the OpenCore boot picker to launching it from the Windows boot manager on the Windows drive and can confirm that going through the OpenCore boot loader was what was stopping GCC from displaying properly.

Also in unplugging all my peripherals I discovered that one of the plastic dividers in my usb 3.2 port broke off and came out with the cable. This was a 6 week old motherboard from Amazon that wasn’t abused, so beware. Especially if you keep getting a “the last usb device you plugged in could not be recognized” in Windows. Two pins in the port were directly shorting together. Had to bust out my magnifying visor and a small pick to separate the pins. Then I put gorilla tape over the port, as Amazon says I’m past the return window.

Also, figured out that to control the RGB on the Radeon Sapphire Nitro+ 6950XT there is a small 3 pin RGB header hiding on top, at the back of the card that needs to be plugged in to a header on the motherboard and you need to install the Sapphire Trixx software in Windows where you can choose lighting effects or set it to “use external source” and control it from GCC.

I didn’t have an available RGB header so I ordered a couple splitters off Amazon that came with male to male jumpers. Wound up using both of them with the jumper to reach the plug on the mobo but now I can set the graphics cards lighting and then boot into MacOS from OpenCore boot picker and the effects will persist.

Hope this helps someone.