Mac OS X 10.6.7 Early 2011 iMac Sandy Bridge Update

[genzai]

^^ did you try 11,1?

No but i find it hard to imagine that would be better than, for instance, macbookpro8,1 because the chips and chipsets used in imac11,1 are nowhere near as close to the Sandy Bridge generation equipment we are using. I imagine you could put just about anything in there and get the same result. That is, when you use 11,1 it probably is not activating any special features or power managment of our chips. Possibly the case when using macbookpro8,1 as well judging from benchmarks and cpu temps at idle and load...

Its ACTUALLY rather interesting that imac12,1 has this effect. Bad as it is, the drivers are definitely doing SOMETHING with our chips when we identify as such. But obviously its not a complete configuration.

Please correct me if i am wrong, but is there any difference when using macbookpro8,1 imac11,1 macpro5,1 or even myteriosos3,1 (just some nonsense) as identifiers? i am guessing not.

 

[JoshNYC]

The new iMacs are 12,1/12,2/12,3 I believe.

 

[Yoga]

Hey guys,
Wanted to throw in my experience with this since i did things a little differently, though the results seem similar.

I started with a i5 2500k GA-P67A-UD5-B3:
- running 10.6.7 MBP '11
- identified as MacBookPro8,1 in smbios
- latest chimera
- no NullCPUPM
- geekbenching high 11k

In order to move the system over to the iMac install, i spoofed it to look like an imac 12,1.
I did this simply by changing smbios entries and by modifying the systemversion.plist in /S/L/C to read 10.6.6 and Build 10J4026. I also installed NullCPUPM just in case.

At this point software update kicked in and notified me of an update for my imac to 10.6.7.

So i ran the software update version of the update and all went well.
On reboot everything was working except for sound, which for some reason the latest versions of AppleHDA dont seem to work with the typical patch we used to use, so i went back to 1.9.9 (latest is 2.0.5).

In anycase there were no issues at all. geekbench was hitting 12k and all the software that got updated is working, etc.

Then i thought it would be a good time to get rid of NullCPUPM again. It was working fine on the previous macbook8,1 setup without it. So i removed it and reboot.

No boot problems at all, but... indeed performance dropped to abysmal levels, 4k geekbench, etc.

So it seems there is an issue with the imac12,1 identifier and the latest applintelcpupm on our hacks. This is a real bummer. I am a bit torn weather to go back to macbook8,1 identifier or just use nullcpupm. For now i am using nullcpupm, but i am not sure there is any advantage to running the imac identifier despite it being closer to the real hardware.

Hope we can come up with something to explain this soon. seems it wants to run our hacks at lowest performance setting all the time. On the other hand with nullcpupm or another identifier we get turbo back but probably not speedstep. Could this be any issue of bootloader and needing to generate p/c states?

thanks,
g\

Thanks for the report, I had been wondering about tweaking the systemversion to go this route. Shame the output was the same. Were you getting 11-12K at stock speeds, or with turbo/overclock?

 

[genzai]

Thanks for the report, I had been wondering about tweaking the systemversion to go this route. Shame the output was the same. Were you getting 11-12K at stock speeds, or with turbo/overclock?

It is with 32x mult and 43x turbos on each core.

 

[be11o]

Thunderbolt implementation have nothing to do with our hacks i belive?

 

[timy-t]

These new Support for NVIDIA Cards... Does that mean that there are not these Fermi-Freezes anymore? If so I will buy an GTX 470...

 

[Yoga]

These new Support for NVIDIA Cards... Does that mean that there are not these Fermi-Freezes anymore? If so I will buy an GTX 470...

Hold fire, pretty sure a lot of people will be testing very soon. That goes for 570/580 users also.

 

[timy-t]

So I am no very confused... Should I take the new Sapphire HD 5850 Xtreme (http://skinflint.co.uk/a630270.html) or a Sapphire HD 5870 (Rev 1.0 - http://skinflint.co.uk/a626111.html)?
Are both working with the new Kexts? Anybody out there with these cards and working Hack?

 

[be11o]

These new Support for NVIDIA Cards... Does that mean that there are not these Fermi-Freezes anymore? If so I will buy an GTX 470...

dont have any freezes tbh

 

[eelhead]

So I am no very confused... Should I take the new Sapphire HD 5850 Xtreme (http://skinflint.co.uk/a630270.html) or a Sapphire HD 5870 (Rev 1.0 - http://skinflint.co.uk/a626111.html)?
Are both working with the new Kexts? Anybody out there with these cards and working Hack?

Check out the Wiki, there is a Sapphire 5850 and Sapphire 5870 listed as working with notes on how too.