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PSA: Gigabyte F20B BIOS changes

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GIGABYTE H170N-WIFI / BIOS version: F20

I just upgraded my BIOS to version F20. It seems to work now. Hier is what I needed to do in the BIOS to get the hackintosh to boot and work properly.

After the BIOS upgrade I did reset the BIOS (on the motherboard with a jumper on the BIOS reset pins for a second by disconnected power cable).

After reboot I opened the BIOS settings and did the following changes:

Save & Exit

--> Load Optimized Defaults

BIOS
Full Screen LOGO Show -- Enabled
Fast Boot -- Disabled
Window 8/10 Features -- Other OS
LAN PXE Boot Option ROM -- Disabled
Storage Boot Option Control -- UEFI

Peripherals
Initial Display Output -- IGFX

Peripherals /Network Stack Configuration
Network Stack -- Disabled

Peripherals / USB Configuration
Legacy USB Support -- Enabled
XHCI Hand-Off -- Enabled

Chipset
VT-d -- Disabled
Internal Graphics -- Enabled
DVMT Pre-Allocated -- 64M
DVMT Total Gfx Mem -- 256M

Power
Platform Power Management -- Disabled
 
Based on what I'm reading here, I'm too scared to update to F20 on my GA Z170N-Gaming 5. I'll live with the gazillion boot entries since I think that's all the F20 would do for me.
Bit the bullet and updated to F21 on my GA Z170N-Gaming 5 was able to boot with Patch APIC and then fixed the GPU issue “EVGA GTX 950” by reinstalling clover with EmuVariableUefi-64 checked, all working!
 
Bit the bullet and updated to F21 on my GA Z170N-Gaming 5 was able to boot with Patch APIC and then fixed the GPU issue “EVGA GTX 950” by reinstalling clover with EmuVariableUefi-64 checked, all working!

Any discernible differences?
 
F21 differences?
 
I've installed F20 bios on my Z170x Gamin 7. What a Nighmare.

Beware: Don't update to F20 if you have similar setup. I had to downgrade from F20 to F8 with fpt tool. and hex edit the bios file with my Intel Gb mac Address...what a pain //

Yes I had exactly the same experience. Really stressful morning.

F20 Bios should be avoided unless you need Kerby Lake support. They lock the MSRS and destroy native nvram support meaning you have to use the clover options and emuvariable drivers as already noted in the thread.

It would be good if someone on close to gigabyte could feed back?
 
Updated to F21, it boots fine but Sierra (10.12.3) has a weird lag now. It only lags on certain activities, all apps open really fast but if I try to copy a file it'll take minutes for the copy window to even pull up let alone copy the file. Not really sure what to make of this but I wouldn't recommend upgrading at the moment. Will keep trying stuff, hopefully there's a way to fix it.
 
I've updated to F21 and I had problems booting but it was because of the BIOS settings.

Now it boots but I can't boot directly from the SSD, I can only boot clover from the USB stick.

Thunderbolt apparently works now in windows and osx. Weird thing is that the thunderbolt card is not seen in OSX but I can use my thunderbolt hard drive.

Also, I don't have sound anymore.

Anyone has any idea?
 
I was able to downgrade back to a BIOS version previous to F20.

I use the FTP Z170 Tool for DOS from https://www.mediafire.com/?p66jhts7cfi26y8

Then I...

1. Formatted a USB drive to DOS bootable with Rufus
2. Copied the contents of the zip above into the root of the USB drive overwriting the AUTOEXEC.bat
3. Downloaded the the BIOS I wanted to downgrade to from Gigabyte.us site
4. Move the BIOS binary to the root of the USB and rename it "bios.bin"
5. Boot the machine from the USB drive and it will automatically overwrite the BIOS to the desired version.
6. Ctrl-Alt-Delete once it says it's done

** Be sure to copy down the MAC address of your Intel NIC as it will be overwritten and you'll have to change it back once you're back up and running.

Reflashed to an older bios using this. Thanks!

F20/21 isn't worth the trouble.

Unfortunately, Even on fresh install with old bios the lag is still there. My Hackintosh partition is unuseable for now not to mention my Fenvi T1919A is no longer functioning in macOS either. Hopefully there's a fix for this.

Edit: Reset the motherboard's BIOS and Cmos and everything is working again in 10.12.3 interesitng... I wonder if I would've reset the BIOS and Cmos on Bios version F21 if it would've fixed it... I might be forced to test this lol

Update: [SUCCESS] Decided to try resetting the Bios and Cmos after flashing version F21 and it worked! Haven't tested everything as of yet but it is running great so far, will update.

Update 2: Kernel panics when I try to start Sierra, might have something to do with my settings in Clover or Multibeast, but will probably be reverting for now. It's a shame because seeing all those ghost boot partitions kills my OCD and the updated BIOS fixes that, but there's another interaction with the new BIOS that causes kernel panics. I think the 7th gen CPU support is messing something up, will fool around with settings and see if there's a workaround.
 
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