neilhart
Moderator
- Joined
- May 25, 2010
- Messages
- 2,686
- Motherboard
- ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming - ITX/ac
- CPU
- i7-7700T
- Graphics
- GTX960
- Mac
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neilhart’s ASUS Maximus VII Impact w M.2 XP941 booting OS X via Clover [XW1]
Background: I read the bit-tech review of the ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard and was strongly attracted to it. I purchased the board and started a G4 Cube project thread: ( http://www.tonymacx86.com/powermac-g4-cube/150747-maybe-another-cube-project-just-idea-point.html ).
I found that it was a no go for a cube and proceeded with this build.
I had a SilverStone TJ08B-E case under my work desk from some prior and forgotten project.
I pulled it out and dusted it off and thought it would be nearly perfect home for the ASUS Maximus VII Impact with the i7-4790K CPU and the MSI GTX760 ITX GPU. On second thought, it was just too massive for an ITX case.
Here is the case on Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163182&cm_re=Silverstone_case-_-11-163-182-_-Product
Humm… what to do? Oh! Why not just make it smaller? So I did that and I took about 4 inches out.
The original front to back was 385mm and now is 280mm (15.25 inches to 11 inches).
To get the case this small required that I cut the frame vertically and reassemble the two pieces removing the 4 inches. I cut down the removable motherboard tray and retained the neat removability feature. Then to maintain the great looks of the SilverStone case, I sectioned the top and two side panels (adding a window on the right side).
Even with my resizing the case, it will still accept a Micro-ATX form factor motherboard.
As indicated in the past, I now use 2.5 inch drives (HDDs and SSDs) and no longer purchase 3.5 inch hard drives although I still have a stack of them sitting around. So here I made up a drive stack for 4 2.5 inch drives and currently running two 120 GB SSDs, in a RAID 0 drive set, along with 2 1TB HGST Travelstar HDDs for backup partitions, data and Time Machine.
And I have used an Antec h2o 950 AIO CPU cooler which fills much of the space adjacent to the Mini-ITX motherboard. This cooler was a Black Friday purchase that was too good to pass up.
And one of the main attractions of this motherboard is the M.2 socket which sets on a 4x PCIE buss interface. So in theory this setup should boot and run a Samsung XP941 M.2 drive.
The XP941 is too expensive IHO. Anyway I used up some VISA Reward Points on Amazon along with some cash and purchased a 256GB XP941. Here it is installed in the motherboard.
As you can see this a very compact MB and to get the XP941 installed I had to completely diss-assemble the machine. So I brought up the new Samsung drive on the bench.
I went through the UEFI BIOS pages setting the machine to boot to the M.2 device. The first boot with the M.2 drive installed defaulted to my RAID 0 SSD drive set and booted into Mavericks. But OS X did detect a new drive and the dialog asking to “initialize” the drive popped up. I saw this as good news.
I was able to use the Disk Utility app and format/partition the XP941 (looking good)! So I cloned a copy of Mavericks 10.9.5 onto the drive and the ran the Chimera 4.0.1 boot loader app hoping that I was making the XP941 bootable.
No such luck. Long story short, after exhausting my bag of tricks trying to boot the XP941, I conceded that it was beyond my technical understanding and gave up on conventional means.
I suspected that this would be the case as I could find no leads in my WEB searches that indicated that Chameleon or Chimera would boot this device.
I was very pleased the when I used my “TonyMacX86 Clover/Yosemite USB flash drive installer” and booted into the XP941 cloned Mavericks 10.9.5 with everything working (well Ethernet, WiFi and sound).
For the record, I am standardized on Clover_v2k_r2976 and won’t move a newer version until there is a need.
I then set off on installing Yosemite 10.10.2 with the Clover/Yosemite installer. I followed Tony’s guide and installed Clover to the EFI partition on the XP941. This worked and the machine happily booted the XP941 into Yosemite. YEA!!!
Well okay I proved the point that I had set out to do, “be able to boot OS X from the XP941”.
However I am not a fan of Yosemite (can I say that?) and used SuperDuper to clone my Mavericks 10.9.5 RAID 0 to the XP941.
So I now have this system with Clover booting to anyone of 6 partitions. The boot to the XP941 and the RAID 0 set of SSDs are “silly fast”.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test bench marks follow;
XP941:
SSDs:
Other Bench marks (note the system is not OC’d at this point);
Other things:
I made up a touch panel. It is the lighter grey panel in the upper front. The panel contains 4 touch pads, unmarked at the moment. The sensor is identified here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-parts/155762-touch-sensors-three-models.html
The touch pads are pennies attached with RTV to the reverse face of the grey panel with leads to the “Standalone 5-pad Capactive Touch Sensor Breakout”. And seen here is the relay panel that I made up for Power, Lamps On, Lamps Off and Reset functions.
And the Lamps are this strip of white LEDs that sit just above the top of the right side window. When on they provide enough light to see the guts of the system…
The ASUS motherboard arrived with the original BIOS. I updated it to the latest version found on the ASUS Support Web site; version 2102.
My original installs were made using Tony’s tools; Unibeast and MultiBeast installing Mavericks and Yosemite booting with Chimera 4.0.1 and the MB optimized UEFI/BIOS default setting.
When trying to bring up the Samsung XP941 I set everything that I could find in the BIOS to boot the M.2 device.
This is the BIOS screen that shows the version:
This screen is an enable M.2 function:
And setting the boot order to have the Samsung XP941 as the default UEFI boot device:
This is where I am at today. I intend to move a copy of Yosemite 10.10.2 onto the RAID-0 SSD drive set. Or I may pull the SSDs as they will see little use with the XP941 being the main system drive.
I also intend to try a little tuning and over clocking just to see what there is to see. As it is in this case, the system is very quite and appears solid but only time will tell that story.
I am open to questions.
Good modding,
neil
XW1 = Xtream Wee One
Background: I read the bit-tech review of the ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard and was strongly attracted to it. I purchased the board and started a G4 Cube project thread: ( http://www.tonymacx86.com/powermac-g4-cube/150747-maybe-another-cube-project-just-idea-point.html ).
I found that it was a no go for a cube and proceeded with this build.
I had a SilverStone TJ08B-E case under my work desk from some prior and forgotten project.
I pulled it out and dusted it off and thought it would be nearly perfect home for the ASUS Maximus VII Impact with the i7-4790K CPU and the MSI GTX760 ITX GPU. On second thought, it was just too massive for an ITX case.
Here is the case on Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163182&cm_re=Silverstone_case-_-11-163-182-_-Product
Humm… what to do? Oh! Why not just make it smaller? So I did that and I took about 4 inches out.
The original front to back was 385mm and now is 280mm (15.25 inches to 11 inches).
To get the case this small required that I cut the frame vertically and reassemble the two pieces removing the 4 inches. I cut down the removable motherboard tray and retained the neat removability feature. Then to maintain the great looks of the SilverStone case, I sectioned the top and two side panels (adding a window on the right side).
Even with my resizing the case, it will still accept a Micro-ATX form factor motherboard.
As indicated in the past, I now use 2.5 inch drives (HDDs and SSDs) and no longer purchase 3.5 inch hard drives although I still have a stack of them sitting around. So here I made up a drive stack for 4 2.5 inch drives and currently running two 120 GB SSDs, in a RAID 0 drive set, along with 2 1TB HGST Travelstar HDDs for backup partitions, data and Time Machine.
And I have used an Antec h2o 950 AIO CPU cooler which fills much of the space adjacent to the Mini-ITX motherboard. This cooler was a Black Friday purchase that was too good to pass up.
And one of the main attractions of this motherboard is the M.2 socket which sets on a 4x PCIE buss interface. So in theory this setup should boot and run a Samsung XP941 M.2 drive.
The XP941 is too expensive IHO. Anyway I used up some VISA Reward Points on Amazon along with some cash and purchased a 256GB XP941. Here it is installed in the motherboard.
As you can see this a very compact MB and to get the XP941 installed I had to completely diss-assemble the machine. So I brought up the new Samsung drive on the bench.
I went through the UEFI BIOS pages setting the machine to boot to the M.2 device. The first boot with the M.2 drive installed defaulted to my RAID 0 SSD drive set and booted into Mavericks. But OS X did detect a new drive and the dialog asking to “initialize” the drive popped up. I saw this as good news.
I was able to use the Disk Utility app and format/partition the XP941 (looking good)! So I cloned a copy of Mavericks 10.9.5 onto the drive and the ran the Chimera 4.0.1 boot loader app hoping that I was making the XP941 bootable.
No such luck. Long story short, after exhausting my bag of tricks trying to boot the XP941, I conceded that it was beyond my technical understanding and gave up on conventional means.
I suspected that this would be the case as I could find no leads in my WEB searches that indicated that Chameleon or Chimera would boot this device.
I was very pleased the when I used my “TonyMacX86 Clover/Yosemite USB flash drive installer” and booted into the XP941 cloned Mavericks 10.9.5 with everything working (well Ethernet, WiFi and sound).
For the record, I am standardized on Clover_v2k_r2976 and won’t move a newer version until there is a need.
I then set off on installing Yosemite 10.10.2 with the Clover/Yosemite installer. I followed Tony’s guide and installed Clover to the EFI partition on the XP941. This worked and the machine happily booted the XP941 into Yosemite. YEA!!!
Well okay I proved the point that I had set out to do, “be able to boot OS X from the XP941”.
However I am not a fan of Yosemite (can I say that?) and used SuperDuper to clone my Mavericks 10.9.5 RAID 0 to the XP941.
So I now have this system with Clover booting to anyone of 6 partitions. The boot to the XP941 and the RAID 0 set of SSDs are “silly fast”.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test bench marks follow;
XP941:
SSDs:
Other Bench marks (note the system is not OC’d at this point);
Other things:
I made up a touch panel. It is the lighter grey panel in the upper front. The panel contains 4 touch pads, unmarked at the moment. The sensor is identified here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/hardware-parts/155762-touch-sensors-three-models.html
The touch pads are pennies attached with RTV to the reverse face of the grey panel with leads to the “Standalone 5-pad Capactive Touch Sensor Breakout”. And seen here is the relay panel that I made up for Power, Lamps On, Lamps Off and Reset functions.
And the Lamps are this strip of white LEDs that sit just above the top of the right side window. When on they provide enough light to see the guts of the system…
The ASUS motherboard arrived with the original BIOS. I updated it to the latest version found on the ASUS Support Web site; version 2102.
My original installs were made using Tony’s tools; Unibeast and MultiBeast installing Mavericks and Yosemite booting with Chimera 4.0.1 and the MB optimized UEFI/BIOS default setting.
When trying to bring up the Samsung XP941 I set everything that I could find in the BIOS to boot the M.2 device.
This is the BIOS screen that shows the version:
This screen is an enable M.2 function:
And setting the boot order to have the Samsung XP941 as the default UEFI boot device:
This is where I am at today. I intend to move a copy of Yosemite 10.10.2 onto the RAID-0 SSD drive set. Or I may pull the SSDs as they will see little use with the XP941 being the main system drive.
I also intend to try a little tuning and over clocking just to see what there is to see. As it is in this case, the system is very quite and appears solid but only time will tell that story.
I am open to questions.
Good modding,
neil
XW1 = Xtream Wee One