pastrychef's Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (WI-FI AC) build w/ i9-9900K + AMD 6600 XT

[dclive]

I'm pretty sure the card he uses handles both WiFi and Bluetooth via the two antennas that the mobo comes with.

I wrote the above poorly! Here's what I should have said:

I didn't see your response about bluetooth. Wifi is clear - M2 slot traffic to the motherboard directly with no extra cables going to the motherboard; no worries on that. How is bluetooth handled? For most of the add-in cards there's a port on the add-on card that connects to motherboard USB2. How did you handle it with the direct-to-M2/NGFF at the 'top' of the Asus -G motherboard? There's nothing going to motherboard USB....

 

[pastrychef]

Understood about wifi. However, I didn't see your response about bluetooth. Wifi is clear - two or three tiny pins attach to external antennas; no worries on that. How is bluetooth handled? For most of the add-in cards there's a port that connects to motherboard USB2. How did you handle it with the direct-to-M2/NGFF at the 'top' of the Asus -G motherboard?

The M.2 slot has USB built-in. Bluetooth is supported on the card.

 

[Maya2013]

Excellent description. I'm running an old mATX Hackintosh which I'm planning to replace in the New Year. This board sounds like a great option.

Do the native Intel integrated graphics work out of the box?

 

[LasseBauer]

@pastrychef

Thanks a lot for the huge undertaking of creating this amazing guide for us! It´s highly appreciated

Would you kindly help with some specific info for my "ASUS Maximus X Hero" build?

1) USB Ports:
I´m building a fresh machine with a ASUS X Hero Z370 (wifi-AC) MB (full specs in profile), and I am not sure how to proceed when it comes to the USB ports:

• Is it absolutely necessary to manually map each USB port and then create an .aml file for my EFI folder?
• If so, doesn´t ASUS have a complete mapping of the MB with specifics on each USB port, or will I have to map it all myself?
• If I stick to only using the “USBInjectAll.kext” will that cause issues with my machine somehow?

I can´t find a functioning build with my specific MB, hence I can´t find any corresponding USB patches or similar, and the guides I can find seem to be written for people with a math IQ of around 200 (I´m around 45 in that department ) - so any help would be amazing

2) Audio driver: S1220A vs S1220
I can see my MB has a slightly different driver CODEC than your Z370-G:
X Hero uses S1220, Z370-G uses S1220A.
Will I need to take this difference into consideration and modify anything?
If so; do you have any idea which files to use and where/how to get them?

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

[pastrychef]

Excellent description. I'm running an old mATX Hackintosh which I'm planning to replace in the New Year. This board sounds like a great option.

Do the native Intel integrated graphics work out of the box?

I haven't personally tested the Intel UHD 630 graphics but based on all that I've read, it is working great. Better than HD 530 and HD 630 from Skylake and Kaby Lake because sleep/wake is working.

 

[pastrychef]

@pastrychef

Thanks a lot for the huge undertaking of creating this amazing guide for us! It´s highly appreciated

Would you kindly help with some specific info for my "ASUS Maximus X Hero" build?

1) USB Ports:
I´m building a fresh machine with a ASUS X Hero Z370 (wifi-AC) MB (full specs in profile), and I am not sure how to proceed when it comes to the USB ports:

• Is it absolutely necessary to manually map each USB port and then create an .aml file for my EFI folder?
• If so, doesn´t ASUS have a complete mapping of the MB with specifics on each USB port, or will I have to map it all myself?
• If I stick to only using the “USBInjectAll.kext” will that cause issues with my machine somehow?

I can´t find a functioning build with my specific MB, hence I can´t find any corresponding USB patches or similar, and the guides I can find seem to be written for people with a math IQ of around 200 (I´m around 45 in that department ) - so any help would be amazing

2) Audio driver: S1220A vs S1220
I can see my MB has a slightly different driver CODEC than your Z370-G:
X Hero uses S1220, Z370-G uses S1220A.
Will I need to take this difference into consideration and modify anything?
If so; do you have any idea which files to use and where/how to get them?

Thanks a lot in advance!

• As I've stated, many people use their systems without ever applying the "proper" USB fix without any issues. YMMV...
• I don't know if Asus has any mapping pre-done. I've never heard of any such thing. I manually did the mapping on both my Z170 and Z370 motherboards. It's a little tedious, but not really hard.
• Again, your mileage may vary. I know that many people use their systems everyday with just using the USB 15 port limit patch.

It depends on which installation approach you take. I think my EFI should work fine for you. if you have any problems, you can always install S1220 kexts from MultiBeast.

 

[LasseBauer]

• As I've stated, many people use their systems without ever applying the "proper" USB fix without any issues. YMMV...
• I don't know if Asus has any mapping pre-done. I've never heard of any such thing. I manually did the mapping on both my Z170 and Z370 motherboards. It's a little tedious, but not really hard.
• Again, your mileage may vary. I know that many people use their systems everyday with just using the USB 15 port limit patch.

It depends on which installation approach you take. I think my EFI should work fine for you. if you have any problems, you can always install S1220 kexts from MultiBeast.

Great! Thanks SO much for taking time to respond with specifics. It really helps me a lot

 

[pastrychef]

Very curious what you think about the Cerberus case once you build it. I've been looking at that as well as the Cerberus X. Excellent design seemingly but cramped for the front-to-back airflow. No opportunity to place a 120mm on the back plate. Other compromises depending where you place the PSU... Challenging all around. Hence, folks seem to orient toward water cooling for higher temp CPUs.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

I've detailed the Cerberus build a bit here.

 

[rahzah]

Hi @pastrychef
thanks a lot for your great build and the effort to document all of your work. Really appreciate it. I am new to all of this hackintosh thing and finally made the decision to build my first hackintosh. Currently I am running a decent Mac Pro 2010 with 2 E5620, R9 380, Samsung SSD blade and 16GB of RAM, in it. It is not bad but not as good as I want it to be. I want to speed up my workflow with Adobe Software and Cinema4D and kind of came up with a very similar build to this you shown up here. Budgetwise I am a little bit more limited to less ram and a 1070 Ti but all in all it points into the same direction.

I don't know wether my question fits here and if not, i am very sorry but I just want to know if building this hackintosh really gets me into the speed dimension I imagine right now. Currently I am really disappointed by my rendering times and scrolling through and working with big image databases in Lightroom or CaptureOne. Also I really want to have some thing I can work on for some years and I do not expect my Mac Pro to be future proof any longer. I am assuming that now it is the last moment to sell this bad boy while getting something out of it. Next year maybe Apple will bring out a new Mac Pro which would be really harming the price tags for the older machines (Even when Apples Machine will cost over 10 grand).

So to sum up my question a little: I saw the Cinebench and other benchmarking numbers just for the 8700K in comparison to my E5620 for example. 780 points to 1500 points and I do not really actually know what this means for actual "feelable" performance. I am not that thrilled of my single core performance as well because all Adobe software rely on this but I also want to have better rendering times in Cinema. Do you think a setup like yours would get me the productivity i am looking for?

I would be really thankful for an answer by any of you guys! Thanks a lot and a wonderful Christmas time to all of you!

 

[pastrychef]

Hi @pastrychef
thanks a lot for your great build and the effort to document all of your work. Really appreciate it. I am new to all of this hackintosh thing and finally made the decision to build my first hackintosh. Currently I am running a decent Mac Pro 2010 with 2 E5620, R9 380, Samsung SSD blade and 16GB of RAM, in it. It is not bad but not as good as I want it to be. I want to speed up my workflow with Adobe Software and Cinema4D and kind of came up with a very similar build to this you shown up here. Budgetwise I am a little bit more limited to less ram and a 1070 Ti but all in all it points into the same direction.

I don't know wether my question fits here and if not, i am very sorry but I just want to know if building this hackintosh really gets me into the speed dimension I imagine right now. Currently I am really disappointed by my rendering times and scrolling through and working with big image databases in Lightroom or CaptureOne. Also I really want to have some thing I can work on for some years and I do not expect my Mac Pro to be future proof any longer. I am assuming that now it is the last moment to sell this bad boy while getting something out of it. Next year maybe Apple will bring out a new Mac Pro which would be really harming the price tags for the older machines (Even when Apples Machine will cost over 10 grand).

So to sum up my question a little: I saw the Cinebench and other benchmarking numbers just for the 8700K in comparison to my E5620 for example. 780 points to 1500 points and I do not really actually know what this means for actual "feelable" performance. I am not that thrilled of my single core performance as well because all Adobe software rely on this but I also want to have better rendering times in Cinema. Do you think a setup like yours would get me the productivity i am looking for?

I would be really thankful for an answer by any of you guys! Thanks a lot and a wonderful Christmas time to all of you!

I don't use Cinema 4D, so I can't tell you how much difference there will be between your current MacPro5,1 and a hackintosh. But I also came from a Mac Pro and I had 2x Xeon 5680 CPUs. After switching, everything felt much snappier, probably primarily due to the massive leap in single core performance.

I"ve read a little about Lightroom performance and think much of Lightroom's performance is dependent on hard drive/SSD speed.

All of the parts aside from motherboard and CPU are carry overs from my previous Z170 build. If I were to start fresh today, I would seriously consider going with an AMD GPU rather than Nvidia. With High Sierra, there has been many reports of performance issues with the current Nvidia web drivers. There has been many advancements with using AMD GPUs in hackintoshes and, in my opinion, they are probably a better choice today. The Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Pulse has native macOS support and, hopefully, Vega support is not far off.

I recommend you do a little research on the current GPU situation. At this point, I would only recommend Nvidia if the apps you normally use rely on Cuda.

Merry Christmas to everyone!!!