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[Success] MSI G77A-G43 Mountain Lion Build

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Nov 12, 2010
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Motherboard
Asus X299 Prime Deluxe II
CPU
i9-10980XE
Graphics
Radeon VII
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. 128K
  2. 512K
  3. Apple
  4. Classic
  5. iBook
  6. Performa
  7. Power Mac
  8. PowerBook
  9. SE
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I have been a Hackintosh user for about 5 years now and have probably built a dozen or so total for myself and friends, but a few weeks ago, Fry's had a combo deal on a i5 3570k and a MSI Z77A-G43 for $259 so I decided it was time to upgrade from my Lynnfield i5 750 based system. After gathering all the pieces over the past couple weeks I finally got around to building and setting up the new machine this week, which ended up successful, but had a few hiccups along the way.

Initial Build Specs:

Ivy Bridge i5 3570k
MSI Z77A-G43
32GB Corsair Vengeance 1866mhz
PNY GeForce GTX 560 1GB (Originally, more on that later)
240GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD
TP-Link WDN4800 Wireless PCI Card
(2) 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 7200rpm
(2) 750GB Seagate 7200rpm
Corsair AX 750 Power Supply
Corsair H100 CPU Cooler
Corsair 400R Case
(2) 24" LG LCD's

At first I wasn't so sure about the MSI board since all my builds in the past have either been off Intel or Gigabyte boards, but I figured it was worth a shot seeing it used Realtek chipsets for both LAN and Audio. The build was straight forward, I went with the Corsair 400R case just because it was designed for the 240mm radiator on the H100 cooler, making for a cleaner package overall.

Once assembled, I bought Mountain Lion from the App Store and followed the Unibeast instructions for creating a bootable USB thumb drive, which was all very straight forward.

Booted the machine with the thumb drive and was greeted by the Unibeast boot loader without having to change or modify any settings in the Z77A-G43's UEFI bios at all and thought all was going to be gravy. I told it to boot and was onto the grey Apple loading screen at which point the wheel was turning and all looked good, that was until it tried to kick over to the GUI and immediately both screens hooked up to the GTX 560 went black and went into power save mode. Odd.

Rebooted, tried again, same result. Rebooted in verbose, watched everything load, got to the point where the GUI should kick in and again, screens go to sleep. For a while I couldn't tell if the machine was crashing or if it was a graphics card issue. But after a while I pulled the GTX 560, cleared the BIOS, and rebooted with just one monitor attached to the built in Intel HD4000 graphics. Success! Mountain Lion installer fired right up and I was on my way.

Formatted the SSD drive which at this point I had attached to one of the SATA 3GB/s ports rather that the 6GB/s ports just to eliminate and chance of there being a problem there and started the install. Install was very quick, somewhere around 14 minutes and afterwards I rebooted the machine and was up and running. Ran through the Setup Assistant and the TP-Link WDN 4800 was recognized as built in Airport and in no time I was onto the desktop.

Once in the OS I fired up MultiBeast and installed the following options:

Chimera 1.10.0
MacPro 3,1 System Definition
Patched AppleHDA for ALC892
Non-DSDT HDAEnabler for ALC892
FakeSMC
Patched AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement (10.7.4 Ivy Bridge)
Lnx2Mac's Realtek 8xxx Network Driver

After which I pulled the Unibeast USB thumb drive and restarted. System rebooted and I was into the desktop with working Audio and Lan. Pretty much the easiest initial install I have ever had on a Hack.

At this point I shut down and popped the GTX 560 back in thinking that once the OS was installed, that it should be pretty straight forward. Not the case at all.

Immediately the issue of the screens going to sleep at boot was back. I tried endless combinations of GraphicsEnabler=Yes/No, PCIRootUID=1/0 and just about everything else I could think of to try, but in the end, I was only ever able to get the OS to boot with the card attached twice and both times I was only with 1 monitor attached and GraphicsEnabler=0. The odd part is when this did occur, the system properly identified the card as a GTX 560 and it seemed like all was fine, but as soon as I would reboot even without changing any settings, the problems would return. After a day of messing around with it, I decided that it wasn't worth the effort and returned the card.

In it's place I purchased a XFX HD6870 1GB and decided to start fresh, so I reinstalled ML, again from the integrated HD4000 graphics and once done, reinstalled the Multibeast options. After which, I confirmed the system was running on it's own and shut down to installed the HD6870. Popped the card in and right away was greeted by both screens running beautifully. The card shows up as Radeon HD6xxx in the system profiler but OpenGL and OpenCL seems to be running fine with GraphicsEnabler=No. With GraphicsEnabler=Yes, the card will only run one DVI port but the DisplayPorts are active. Booting with a monitor hooked up to a Active DisplayPort to DVI adapter produces a bunch of "rainbow noise" on the connected monitor. Unplugging and plugging the adapter back in resolves the issue, but would need to be done after every restart. I tried adding the ATI FrameBuffer Profiles one by one, but none of them resolved the issue of the noise or the 6xxx showing in the profiler, at which point I said screw it and went back to running both DVI ports and GraphicsEnabler=No. After testing with Cinebench and Galaxies, I can confirm the card is running OpenGL acceleration.

At this point I followed dta's guide to extracting and fixing the DSDT for the Z77a-G43 which can be found here:
http://legacy.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=68835&start=0

Rebooted again and everything seemed very stable so I decided it was time to see what the CPU/Mobo/CPU Cooler was capable of overclock wise.

The Z77A-G43 has a "OC Genie" built into the UEFI Bios, but it is pretty much worthless. I simply went into the Advanced OC settings and changed the multiplier to 40 as a starting point with the voltage set to "auto" and rebooted. Success at 4.0Ghz so I restarted and set the multiplier to 42 which resulted in a no post. Tried again at with the multiplier at 43 which booted with the voltage still set to "auto" so I knew the chip was capable. At a multiplier of 44 it once again was a no post, so I decided manually bumping the voltage was in order and started with a setting of +0.0002v and was successful.

At this point I figured that a full 1Ghz overclock with Intel's Turbo Boost still enabled was satisfactory and booted into Mountain Lion which properly shows the CPU running at 4.4Ghz.

After a little time of messing around in Safari and playing with Cinebench, Galaxies and GeekBench to test stability, I rebooted to check the idle temp of the CPU which with the H100 cooler is sitting at a nice comfortable 28-30c. Under load and using Temperature Monitor (Which isn't completely accurate) I haven't seen the temps get above 76c.

It's been 2 days now and I have CS6 installed and have been doing actual work on the machine and overall it just feels zippy. Not sure what the deal with the Geforce cards and Mountain Lion are, but I am glad the Radeon cards seem to be working without much issue.

Other notes are Wifi shows up as Airport native, iCloud and the App Store work perfectly. Airdrop to other machines works as does Airplay Mirroring to my ATV and overall I am very happy with the build and it feels the most "Mac like" out of all the Hacks I have run in the past.

Thanks for all the knowledge that is shared on these boards, builds like this wouldn't be possible without it:)
 
I did try the modded bios, but during all the issues with the GTX 560 I ended up flashing back to the stock version 2.4 and haven't had any issues with it.

What should the modded bios provide that the stock one doesn't?
 
Also, since I submitted this post 2 days ago, I have since upped the voltage again and now have the machine running stable at 4.6Ghz with the idle temps right around 30c and never getting above 60c while running CPUtest or benchmarks like Cinebench or LuxMark.
 

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Hey i have the same motherboard but cant seem to get mountain lion installer to boot up. i get kernel panic "couldn't alloc appleHDAcontroller" any help guys?
 
I did try the modded bios, but during all the issues with the GTX 560 I ended up flashing back to the stock version 2.4 and haven't had any issues with it.

What should the modded bios provide that the stock one doesn't?

Hi sixsixtysix,

Thanks for the reply.
I'm not so sure bout the modded BIOS, that is why I've consult you regarding it.
From what I read, with modded BIOS, it enables the SpeedStep without patching the SSDT. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

By the way, I am referring to your guide to now to setup my Mountain Lion. We have the same processor and motherboard combination.
 
I just installed the modded bios again just to see if it made any differences, and from what I can tell, I hasn't. I am still able to achieve the same overclock as before and everything is running fine.

AppleManPro, are you trying to install with a video card installed? Are you running the 2.4 version of the Bios? Not sure why the installer would KP off of the sound driver since audio isn't enabled yet.

I haven't gotten a single Kernel Panic off this board so far (Fingers Crossed).
 
Nope I have no video card just hd 4000 I seem to have gotten past that by updating the bios but now I'm getting still waiting for root device help!!!
 
Do you have your hard drive plugged into the Sata 6 or the Sata 3 ports? Make sure its the Sata 3 for install and you can switch it back after.
 
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