[SUCCESS] Gigabyte Designare Z390 (Thunderbolt 3) + i7-9700K + AMD RX 580

CaseySJ · Jan 26, 2020

juantrix said:
Yes, I know this part.
But I don't know where to see the log. ¿console? ¿Terminal command?

There are at least two ways:

Hackintool:
Terminal:

chrisrich93 · Jan 26, 2020

jiffyslot said:
You must power-up the device before the machine is started. Hotswap/re-power does not work for the UAD Apollo 8. If you turn off the Apollo, it will not reconnect to the driver until you restart the machine. I never use Sleep or Power Nap. It only causes problems for me and my Pro Tools 2018.12 and 2019.12 setups, even on my real Macs.

This is not the case for the FW400 connected Digidesign 003R that I can connect like this:
Hack<Apple TB3-TB2 adapter<Apple TB2-FW800 adapter<FW800-FW400 cable>Digidesign 003R audio interface. -This device I can load after boot. I can snap the power on and of and on and off all day and it always reconnects. This is also the case where I've recently reinstalled a 1394b Firewire 800/400 card into the last PCIe x1 slot for this build.

From a web search: “Windows enables the GC-TITAN RIDGE for PCIe tunnelling. This state doesn't change during a warm reboot. When macOS boots, the Thunderbolt controller acts as a normal PCIe switch and macOS can enumerate PCIe devices in the normal PCIe way using IOPCIConfigurator…”

Thanks for that info. I disabled sleep and power nap however If I leave the computer on with a session open after a couple hours the -38 error code still rears it's ugly head. Would you recommend having screen savers or no?

Also even when booting both UAD devices first some sessions still have the -38 error code happen. I assume I should be turning on the first device in the chain followed by the second device? Is there anything I can do BIOS wise to maybe change something to see if that would help? I'm somewhat at a loss now...

Racke · Jan 26, 2020

bvader said:
Hi all,

i have a nooby question but after whole two days of unsucessful trials I will need your help. So, my friend wanted to build a hackintosh since he is a long time Apple user. We went thorugh the forum guides and selected the components which are the following:

- Intel i7 9700K
- Gigabyte Z390 Designare
- Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+
- Corsair Vengeance Lpx 3200 MHz 32GB (2×16GB)
- Samsung 970 Evo 1TB
- Adata XPG 8200 Pro 1TB (For Windows)

i have put the components together yesterday and everything is working OK, BIOS version on the motherboard is F9. We have followed the guide in the opening post, set up the BIOS, prepared the USB drive. When we boot the Clover Install Catalina option some text lines appear for a minute or so, there are some errors such as location doesn't exist etc... I have searched the internet, tried different EFi configurations, different Clover Configurator settings, because each tutorial has very different settings for the same motherboard. When trying out outher EFI configurations, prepared by other users on the internet, I normally get the error "Error allocating 0x11c7f pages at......".

Can someone please point me to the right direction where to start from scratch since nothing seems to be working. I think that our Clover Configuration is not OK and want to set it up properly and try again. I can provide further details if someone is willing to help us at our first build.

Thanks in advance!

For a quick start, put this EFI on your USB Stick and the Drive where you install OSX on. Do a clover installation after installing OSX on the hard disk, to get the scripts installed.Then overwrite it with the EFI i send to you

This is Clover 5101 and iMac19,1. Serials are new generated. Please generate your own. iGPU has to be turned on in BIOS, but do not connect any monitor to it. Its in headless mode. Means, it does hardware rendering but nothing else.

Use Clover Configurator to edit and update your Clover EFI. You may have still problems with your Graphik Card. I have Vega VII so for your 5700 there may be some changes in "config.plist" necessary.

AND read a lot.

Racke · Jan 26, 2020

Racke said:
For a quick start, put this EFI on your USB Stick and the Drive where you install OSX on. Do a clover installation after installing OSX on the hard disk, to get the scripts installed.Then overwrite it with the EFI i send to you
This is Clover 5101 and iMac19,1. Serials are new generated. iGPU has to be turned on in BIOS, but do not connect any monitor to it. Its in headless mode. Means, it does hardware rendering but nothing else.

Use Clover Configurator to edit and update your Clover EFI. You may have still problems with your Graphik Card. I have Vega VII so for your 5700 there may be some changes in "config.plist" necessary.

AND read a lot.

Sorry Casey, please delete this second post of mine again. Seems like I'm a little confused.

CaseySJ · Jan 26, 2020

bvader said:
Hi all,

i have a nooby question but after whole two days of unsucessful trials I will need your help. So, my friend wanted to build a hackintosh since he is a long time Apple user. We went thorugh the forum guides and selected the components which are the following:

- Intel i7 9700K
- Gigabyte Z390 Designare
- Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+
- Corsair Vengeance Lpx 3200 MHz 32GB (2×16GB)
- Samsung 970 Evo 1TB
- Adata XPG 8200 Pro 1TB (For Windows)

i have put the components together yesterday and everything is working OK, BIOS version on the motherboard is F9. We have followed the guide in the opening post, set up the BIOS, prepared the USB drive. When we boot the Clover Install Catalina option some text lines appear for a minute or so, there are some errors such as location doesn't exist etc... I have searched the internet, tried different EFi configurations, different Clover Configurator settings, because each tutorial has very different settings for the same motherboard. When trying out outher EFI configurations, prepared by other users on the internet, I normally get the error "Error allocating 0x11c7f pages at......".

Can someone please point me to the right direction where to start from scratch since nothing seems to be working. I think that our Clover Configuration is not OK and want to set it up properly and try again. I can provide further details if someone is willing to help us at our first build.

Thanks in advance!

Hello @bvader

Some comments:

You might already know this, but we must download the full Catalina installer, which is about 8GB.
When the "location doesn't exist" error happens, please take a photo.
If you have verbose mode enabled (with -v boot argument) then a lot of log messages show various errors, which in fact are okay.

To repeat, when the fatal error occurs, please grab a photo or provide sufficient context (i.e. at what stage did it happen? Did Apple logo appear? Did progress bar move? At what stage of the installation process did this occur? etc.).

FormerUser-50757 · Jan 26, 2020

FormerUser-50757 said:
Hey all, and thanks @CaseySJ and all who've helped me sort things out with this build.

I believe I've finally got it all working as it should, so I thought I'd share what's worked with my setup & config in case it benefits anyone else.

Hardware:
-----------------------------
Designare Z390 (F7 BIOS - as it seems to give the best benchmarks)
9900K
Gigabyte 5700 XT OC 8GB
64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666 DDR4 - running with XMP Profile 1 in BIOS)
WD Black NVME 500GB (not the newer SN750 model)
Padarsey BCM94360CS2 WiFi Bluetooth Airport Wireless Card on this PCIE card:
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07NRYGZ7Q/?tag=tonymacx86c0c-20
Various other SATA SSDs (WD BLUE, 3x Samsung QVO in a Mac raid array, ADATA, Crucial MX etc)
Corsair 850w PSU (overkill prob, but quiet)
Universal Audio UAD Apollo hardware (Apollo DUO Silver, Apollo x8, Satellite Octo TB2 & a QUAD PCIE card - TB3 to TB2 adaptor where needed). TB1 devices do NOT work though.
-----------------------------

I believe the only piece of hardware that was an issue was the graphics, and it was the source of my problems in the end.

Initially I was using an install that reached Catalina from a few OSes back, and was transplanted across 3 machines over the last few years. I was getting random system freezes (completely unresponsive requiring a power cycle to reboot), bad audio performance, apps crashing all the time. I suppose I was asking for too much by upgrading and transplanting too much. Oops.

After a while I did the right thing and performed a complete wipe and fresh install. I followed @CaseySJ 's Catalina Fresh Install Mini Guide for Catalina and it worked out very well. My thunderbolt audio devices were acting perfectly, and actually connecting much quicker at boot and/or after a power cycle on any of the units. Apps no longer crashed. But...the dreaded system freeze still remained. At first I thought it was a sleep issue, but then the system began to freeze randomly while working on things, and not just when left idle or left/put to sleep.

My solution was to take @CaseySJ 's suggestions from when I was still tinkering with my upgraded install and apply some of those tweaks to this fresh install. What solved my last and worst problem was modifying the boot args in the fresh install config.plist so that:

shikigva=16 (changed from shikigva=32)
shiki-id=Mac-7BA5B2D9E42DDD94 (deleted)

All other boot args, drivers, kexts left as is from the 'config-AMD-GPU.plist' provided in the fresh install mini guide. The only other changes were updating to the latests kexts in the clover kexts/other folder. I'm guessing that my issues were the graphics freezing up the system. I tried everything from CPU/RAM/IGPU/VOLTAGE BIOS settings, to different EFI drivers, to sleep settings and tweaks. The freezing remained and it was consistent.

Everything works now: IGPU+DGPU, H264/HVEC hardware encode/decode, sleep, wake, handoff, messages, iCloud, airdrop, sidecar, protected content in TV+, Netflix, iTunes etc. I noticed that when testing out the DRM content on TV+ and Neflix etc, the playback and loading of the content was smoother faster than with shikigva=32 & shiki-id=Mac-xxxx (seeking ahead was snappier and playback resumed more quickly). Weird right? The irony is that I don't even use this machine to watch TV+ or Netflix etc, or use sleep functions ever, but it's worth noting I guess.

Thanks again to everyone on this amazing thread who put up with my cries for help . Running Catalina with a newly supported GFX card and and audio system that is not officially supported in Catalina yet is just asking for troubles really.

Also, the thunderbolt research you guys are doing is saintly, and I'll be watching it blossom into awesomeness with great excitement. I hope it turns out!

Ok, now back to work (finally - haha).

——-
Update to the update, the battle never ends:

It turns out that the system freezes were still there, but waaaaaaay fewer. But I did get 1 freeze yesterday after hours of working. I removed shikigva=16 enirely and lost DRM features. I still got graphics glitches like I used to before the system would freeze up, but now the system didn’t freeze up after a random screen glitch as it always has so far.

So I disabled my on-board graphics in BIOS and moved over to an iMac Pro 1,1 SMBIOS without any shikigva values in my confg.plist I still get DRM, and no screen glitching or system freezing to be seen yet. FCPX renders a little but slower with this SMBIOS but DaVinci Resolve works more than twice as fast During renders. DAW audio performance and Thunderbolt stuff seems the same. Overall my gut would say that this seems stable so far and probably more powerful in real use on the video side of things, although Geekbench 5 benches it a tad lower in CPU multicore scores on this SMBIOS.

FINGERS CROSSED

After the rollercoaster ride that is this build, I’m back to where I started with random and persistent system lockups and freezing. Although iMac Pro SMBIOS gives my build better video performance in apps with the 5700xt, it still gives me freezing issues which makes the build useless really. I had other issues with an upgraded install, but the system freezing is really the main one In the end.

At this point I think it’s all related to the 5700 xt and Catalina. I was reading in some egpu forums elsewhere about the issues that people were having with their 5700 xt egpu display ports and Catalina (10.15.2 specifically). They were also experiencing black screens, boot issues, complete system freezes, particularly when using display ports. I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of why, but it seems like the 5700 xt just isn’t ready for use yet.

I run 3 monitors from mine, so perhaps that’s the issue, but I tried 2, and still got the system freezing up. There are so many possibilities as to what’s causing the system to crash, but all things seem to keep pointing to the 5700 to my disappointment. Maybe it’s just mine or my brand (Gigabyte)? Maybe it’s my monitor configuration? PCIE slot? Etc? At this point after tweaking so many variables to no avail, it seems I should just try out a different graphics card and test things out.

It‘s funny, I went to Catalina in the first place so I could run a 5700 xt, but it’s crashing and the benchmarks for graphics are about the same as the old RX 580 that I had. I even tried out 10.15.3 beta 2 last night - same freezing problems.

I am going to try a 580 and see what happens, I just find it hard to believe that so many others have got their 5700 working fine on Catalina. What’s the secret? Haha.

On the bright side, looks like @CaseySJ and team are making great progress with the Thunderbolt 3 firmware/SSDT!

Ploddles · Jan 26, 2020

bvader said:
i have put the components together yesterday and everything is working OK, BIOS version on the motherboard is F9. We have followed the guide in the opening post, set up the BIOS, prepared the USB drive.

Thanks in advance!

Instead of the one in the opening post, try following the updated one in the mini-guide HERE. I haven't compared them to see what the differences are but it has been updated.

Ploddles · Jan 26, 2020

3Dman said:
I have hardware nvram fully working using clover. I just added SSDT-PMC.aml in patched ACPI folder, removed EmuVariableUefi-64 from drivers, removed nvram.plist from EFI partition, and removed clover rc scripts.

Variable persistence between reboots is working, clover remembers last boot drive, and changing startup volume from system preferences is working good.

I'm using latest F9b bios as well and didn't try this on earlier versions.

Where did SSDT-PMC.aml comes from?

CaseySJ · Jan 26, 2020

@FormerUser-50757

My main system with Catalina 10.15.2 and PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5700 XT is rock solid. And the test bench I built yesterday with an RX 580 and Catalina 10.15.2 (installed from scratch using the Catalina Mini-Guide) is also rock solid -- in fact it seems more tolerant of my Thunderbolt escapades than the primary system. For example, I don't lose network devices when Thunderbolt Local Node appears.

Anyway, as I've mentioned to others several times, often we must (a) Simply the Setup and (b) Use the Process of Elimination when faced with an intractable problem such as this.

In your case:

Simplify the Setup:
- Is the system reliable with just one monitor?
- Are there any non-"essential" devices connected? If so, disconnect everything but the essential devices.
Process of Elimination:
- Is the system reliable right after a fresh install?
  - This means: Do not rush to install your third-party applications. Just test the system for a couple of days with the basic apps that accompany Catalina.
- If basic system is reliable, then install one "major" third-party app at a time and check for system stability.
- If basic system is not reliable, then we must begin to isolate components.
  - Certainly, the graphics card can be an issue.
- If you suspect GPU, try with iGPU only (physically remove AMD GPU).
  - This means setting Platform ID to 0x3E9B0007 and preferably using a USB-C to DisplayPort cable to connect either of the two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports to a DisplayPort input on the monitor.
  - Again, connect only one monitor.

CaseySJ · Jan 26, 2020

Ploddles said:
Where did SSDT-PMC.aml comes from?

Please look here: