I'm in a bit of a pinch. I just built a new sffpc around the aforementioned board. For the CPU, I went with an i5 11500, the GPU is a 3080, connected to three 2k displays.

While I occasionally game or do 3d-work, I'd love to be able to run Mac OS as my primary OS again. I know I could just swap the 3080 for an amd card but frankly the 3080 runs circles around anything from amd, especially when it comes to creative work.

So swapping is out of the question and the UHD 750 of the i5 is also not supported.

I was wondering if I could go back to my old i7 8700k, it's iGPU being an UHD 630. That's supported, as far as I know. Sucks to lose PCIe 4.0, but oh well.

Let's assume I did just that ...

The z590i features two thunderbolt ports, both of which can (as far as I understand from the boards manual) be used to connect to a display. You can either use the iGPU, if present, or you can connect your discrete gpu to the DP-IN port of the motherboard (which, according to the manual, then limits the output to 4k, 60hz. Huh.).

My questions are:

• Given a Tb3 or Tb4 dock, would I be able to connect two displays via dp-to-usbc adapter, as well as one directly to the motherboard , to get all three screens working on just the iGPU? Should work, shouldn't it?
• If the aforementioned works, would I then also be able to just connect the discrete GPU to the DP-IN port of the motherboard and use my 3080 in windows? Probably would work with one display, but with three? Especially if two are connected to a dock and the other to another port on the motherboard.
• I was also wondering whether switching to two displays, one being a 5k2k ultrawide and the other one remaining at 2k, would make things slightly easier. Then again, the user-manual of the motherboard lists a maximum resulution of 4k, 60hz - meaning I'd probably run into issues with the 5k display.
• Some guy named Schmocklord did a very similar build (same board, 3090), although he's using an additional Radeon Pro eGPU, as well as just one ultrawide Display. That seems to work. In his videos, he mentions a dock, but there's no mention of having to reconnect anything when switching between OS'.

All in all, sure, I'd much rather buy an M1 Max, but I don't want to spend three grand on a portable device when I really don't need said portability. I kow, there should be new Mac Minis coming early next year but that's.. early next year. :P