Contribute
Register

Gigabyte X299X - Catalina Support

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hi @beltzak! Thanks for the advice, I tried but unfortunately the problems showed up after a couple of reboots.

I tried to download and install the Catalina 10.15.7 combo update, but after 3 reboots the problems returned.

At this point I tried to use OnyX and run the maintenance scripts. For now the problem of the icons of the two HDs that reposition themselves seems solved.
Unfortunately after 3/4 reboot the wallpaper went back to black. I logged out and logged in and the background reappeared for the moment. I can't understand what the cause could be, because it only happens to the primary monitor (connected to the displayport).

I hope that with the next security update 2020-001, which will surely come out soon with Big Sur, the problem will be solved.

I have another question, is it normal that the PCI Cards section in About This Mac is empty?
I currently have installed on:
Slot 1: GPU
Slot 2: empty
Slot 3: empty
Slot 4: Thunderbolt card
Slot 5: Wifi/Bt Card

Also the Memory section shows only 2 modules installed, but it correctly detects 4 and at the correct frequency.
The suggestions say to install the modules in triple channel, which may depend on the CPU detected by the OS?
Memory.png
 
Last edited:
Hi @beltzak! Thanks for the advice, I tried but unfortunately the problems showed up after a couple of reboots.

I tried to download and install the Catalina 10.15.7 combo update, but after 3 reboots the problems returned.

At this point I tried to use OnyX and run the maintenance scripts. For now the problem of the icons of the two HDs that reposition themselves seems solved.
Unfortunately after 3/4 reboot the wallpaper went back to black. I logged out and logged in and the background reappeared for the moment. I can't understand what the cause could be, because it only happens to the primary monitor (connected to the displayport).

I hope that with the next security update 2020-001, which will surely come out soon with Big Sur, the problem will be solved.

I have another question, is it normal that the PCI Cards section in About This Mac is empty?
I currently have installed on:
Slot 1: GPU
Slot 2: empty
Slot 3: empty
Slot 4: Thunderbolt card
Slot 5: Wifi/Bt Card

Also the Memory section shows only 2 modules installed, but it correctly detects 4 and at the correct frequency.
The suggestions say to install the modules in triple channel, which may depend on the CPU detected by the OS?
View attachment 493777
Check this post: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/gigabyte-x299x-catalina-support.288625/post-2155500

It may help you. I guess is the same issue, I am not sure but could be just cosmetic. I would not follow the memory slots installed the way Apple recommends in a hackintosh but the motherboard's manual ;)

About the black display it may be a bug of Apple and not your setup issue. You could create a LaunchDaemon, or maybe easier a script with killall Dock on startup. I know is not a nice or clean solution but if gets fixed you may not become crazy ;)

Found this:
Method 1: https://www.maketecheasier.com/use-launchd-run-scripts-on-schedule-macos/
Method 2: http://15.223.126.172/running-script-on-macos-startup/
 
It may help you. I guess is the same issue, I am not sure but could be just cosmetic. I would not follow the memory slots installed the way Apple recommends in a hackintosh but the motherboard's manual ;)
Yes, sure! ;) It was just to see if there could be a better implementation in MacOS.
The Mac Pro 2019 uses CPUs that work in 6-channel, maybe there is a way to "tell" him that our CPU works in quad channel.
But I suspect it would only be cosmetic, and it wouldn't lead to any performance improvements.

Same thing I suppose goes for the PCI Cards section. But it is strange that it appears completely empty.
PCI card.png
I have tried the SMBIOS MacPro7,1 on the second configuration that I have, with the Z390 motherboard, and the GPU was displayed correctly on the first slot.

Out of curiosity, is there a way to see the GPU temperature and the CPU Watt consumption on Istat Menu?
I have lost a lot of information since I use VirtualSMC and now with the new MacPro7,1 SMBIOS I no longer see the consumption of the cpu.
istat.png
 
Update on a couple of things:

Just to expand on my edit to my previous post: I still need to investigate exactly what changed, but as soon as I installed @beltzak 's BIOS F3C config file, my onboard USB started working fine.

And so did my Ethernet, which had also been broken: I had only one of the two NICs detected, and it showed a MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00 and always showed cable unplugged. This was fixed as soon as I booted with beltzak's BIOS.

This is a huge relief, so thanks so much beltzak for posting that config. I'm going to trawl through the differences to work out what might have caused such a big difference for me. The only thing I can immediately see that's different is that you had Above 4G and VT-D enabled, which I'd left disabled as per dolgerran's config.
I've confirmed that it was Above 4G Decoding that fixed this problem. Today I booted without it following a CMOS reset, and once again my main USB ports and Ethernet were dead. This time I was able to confirm that the USB-C port did work OK, so it was only the main USB controller that was affected, not the separate USB-C controller.

I don't really know what Above 4G Decoding is exactly, but it seems it's definitely important for working USB and Ethernet on the Designare 10G.

When overclocking, booting OpenCore after going into the BIOS menus is causing boot failure 100% of the time, and causes my overclock / CPU voltage settings to be reset.

I think this option is only available in OC 0.6.2 ... I cannot confirm. I guess our option should be to put it YES lol
  • DisableRtcChecksum: NO
    • Prevents AppleRTC from writing to primary checksum (0x58-0x59), required for users who either receive BIOS reset or are sent into Safe mode after reboot/shutdown

I tested that option and it hasn't fixed the issue.

The issue isn't actually a BIOS reset. All BIOS settings remain the same. What happens is that the system reboots at the end of the OpenCore initialisation procedure, and when it comes back up the CPU and RAM will be running at default settings.

It feels to me like it might be related to CPU power management or something like that. OpenCore causes a hard reboot, and the BIOS temporarily resets all overclocking-related settings to default. The settings can be restored just by hitting F10 in the BIOS to re-apply them.

What I find confusing and strange is that this only happens when OpenCore is loaded directly from the BIOS - eg by selecting it from the Boot Override menu. It doesn't happen when OpenCore boots normally. I might raise it with the OpenCore experts some time.

I have found another issue that might be related: whenever I do a shutdown in macOS, my "CPU System Agent Voltage" (also known as VCCSA) resets to default. Again, the BIOS setting is not affected, but the current value resets to default and has to be re-applied in the BIOS with F10.

This only happens when I do a shut down in macOS, not a restart.

I've actually seen a possibly related issue when testing in Windows: if during overclocking stress tests Windows locks up (no blue-screen-of-death, just the system freezes and has to be manually rebooted), when it comes back up the VCCSA will be reset to default like I described above.

This suggests to me that:
  1. The issue is related to the CPU cache (Uncore / Mesh), because that's what VCCSA is responsible for, and I've been told that a Windows freeze/lock up is usually cache related.
  2. The fact that VCCSA resets might be a BIOS bug, or at least a peculiarity of this BIOS.
  3. During shutdown macOS must be doing something to the cache voltage that's invalid, or causing some cache-related problem that causes the BIOS to think the VCCSA needs to reset. Shutdown seems to complete normally though.
This will only affect anyone who is overclocking, just like with the boot-from-BIOS issue I described earlier, and in this case only anyone doing a cache/Uncore/Mesh overclock who needs to raise the VCCSA to do it. It's possible to get a pretty good overclock without touching VCCSA, though higher overclocks will need it else you either can't overclock the cache, or will run into throttling issues that lower performance.


I'll report back in the next few days with what I've learned about overclocking this board and my results.

The brief summary is: I've got a working and tested all-core 4.6Ghz overclock with cache running at 3.0Ghz (up from 2.4Ghz), and ram at XMP 3600Mhz. It works in both Windows and macOS. However my benchmark results in macOS are lower than in Windows, eg Cinebench R20 scores of 10484 (Windows) vs 9904 (macOS). I don't yet know why this is.

EDIT: After upgrading to F3C I gained 189 points in Cinebench on macOS, taking me to 10093. Windows went up to 10513, only +29. Still a clearly higher Windows score (by 4.1%), which I'd like to try and figure out. It seems a bit too high to be explained by differences in Cinebench on macOS vs Windows.

I haven't managed to overclock as much as I hoped - I can't reach all-core 4.8Ghz at all - so I'm currently considering getting a full custom loop water cooled setup so I can make the most of what my 10980XE can do.

I can say already that for anyone wanting to get the best possible overclock, the Gigabyte motherboards are not good. I'm jealous reading details of people with eVGA, ASUS and other motherboards who have much better OC options than I do, including per-core voltage controls that enable fine tuning an overclock to get the maximum possible result for a given level of cooling. I bought this MB for Thunderbolt 3 and dual 10GBe NICs so I don't regret the purchase, but it's a shame Gigabyte seem to suck in this area; not to mention the BIOS lacks a lot of usability features, and has annoying bugs that it seems likely will never be fixed.
 
Last edited:
Update on a couple of things:


I've confirmed that it was Above 4G Decoding that fixed this problem. Today I booted without it following a CMOS reset, and once again my main USB ports and Ethernet were dead. This time I was able to confirm that the USB-C port did work OK, so it was only the main USB controller that was affected, not the separate USB-C controller.

I don't really know what Above 4G Decoding is exactly, but it seems it's definitely important for working USB and Ethernet on the Designare 10G.





I tested that option and it hasn't fixed the issue.

The issue isn't actually a BIOS reset. All BIOS settings remain the same. What happens is that the system reboots at the end of the OpenCore initialisation procedure, and when it comes back up the CPU and RAM will be running at default settings.

It feels to me like it might be related to CPU power management or something like that. OpenCore causes a hard reboot, and the BIOS temporarily resets all overclocking-related settings to default. The settings can be restored just by hitting F10 in the BIOS to re-apply them.

What I find confusing and strange is that this only happens when OpenCore is loaded directly from the BIOS - eg by selecting it from the Boot Override menu. It doesn't happen when OpenCore boots normally. I might raise it with the OpenCore experts some time.

I have found another issue that might be related: whenever I do a shutdown in macOS, my "CPU System Agent Voltage" (also known as VCCSA) resets to default. Again, the BIOS setting is not affected, but the current value resets to default and has to be re-applied in the BIOS with F10.

This only happens when I do a shut down in macOS, not a restart.

I've actually seen a possibly related issue when testing in Windows: if during overclocking stress tests Windows locks up (no blue-screen-of-death, just the system freezes and has to be manually rebooted), when it comes back up the VCCSA will be reset to default like I described above.

This suggests to me that:
  1. The issue is related to the CPU cache (Uncore / Mesh), because that's what VCCSA is responsible for, and I've been told that a Windows freeze/lock up is usually cache related.
  2. The fact that VCCSA resets might be a BIOS bug, or at least a peculiarity of this BIOS.
  3. During shutdown macOS must be doing something to the cache voltage that's invalid, or causing some cache-related problem that causes the BIOS to think the VCCSA needs to reset. Shutdown seems to complete normally though.
This will only affect anyone who is overclocking, just like with the boot-from-BIOS issue I described earlier, and in this case only anyone doing a cache/Uncore/Mesh overclock who needs to raise the VCCSA to do it. It's possible to get a pretty good overclock without touching VCCSA, though higher overclocks will need it else you either can't overclock the cache, or will run into throttling issues that lower performance.
I don't overclock so about that area I cannot talk ;)

About the received Bios reset or Safe Mode I don't think they actually mean that the settings get reset but that as you correctly explained when the hard reset happens you get the Bios Failure message and to me that looks like you load another Bios instead of the primary Bios.

I could be utterly incorrect about this, because I really don't know how it works todays safe bios and double bios an so on. I understand that we have Bios 1 and Bios 2 and I think that we have a Safe Bios as well. I am saying this because 50% of the time my motherboard loads a Bios with all the settings but the language is in French (bought in spain from a french shop). I don't change any settings, just the language Boot Override and OpenCore loads correctly.

What I really have to test is all the things you have said about when you get to load correctly OpenCore because I cannot do that. Does not matter if I shutdown, reset or whatever, it always loads Bios Failure. So I cannot load directly as you are saying.

I hope we someday get this "mistery" solved because is a pain in the ass ;)
 
About the received Bios reset or Safe Mode I don't think they actually mean that the settings get reset but that as you correctly explained when the hard reset happens you get the Bios Failure message and to me that looks like you load another Bios instead of the primary Bios.
The issues I've described are definitely not related to primary/secondary BIOS. If it loads the secondary BIOS you will know because it will tell you it has reverted to the second BIOS. I don't think that's happened to me yet, though I have had situations where the BIOS reset to default, and I have had the issue with the French language.

I originally tested on BIOS F3C, the latest. Then I had several occasions where the BIOS reset and went into French - I remember one time it was when I was using the Load Profile feature in the BIOS. It happened another time as well but I can't remember the exact cause.

Because of that, I went back to BIOS F3B. In this thread dolgerran said a couple of times that BIOS F3C is unreliable, and that the French language issue might be worse by being on BIOS F3C.

So if you have this issue a lot, one option is to try BIOS F3B instead. They don't list it on the Gigabyte site any more (though you can still download it with the direct URL), so I have attached it to my post here.

When I was on F3B I never had the French language issue when testing Windows or macOS.

Be aware that when you change the BIOS version, all BIOS settings will be reset, and you can't use a saved profile from a different BIOS version. So I suggest saving screenshots of all your BIOS settings to be sure you can restore them all (you can put a USB drive into one of the onboard USB ports then press F12 in the BIOS to save a screenshot of the current page.)

Yesterday I went back to BIOS F3C because I wanted to test overclocking on the latest BIOS. I found I got slightly higher performance in F3C so I would like to stay on F3C if possible. But maybe I will also find I get the bugs back (eg French language); I don't know yet, but I will be testing this further.

What I really have to test is all the things you have said about when you get to load correctly OpenCore because I cannot do that. Does not matter if I shutdown, reset or whatever, it always loads Bios Failure. So I cannot load directly as you are saying.

Are you saying that you can't ever boot OpenCore normally? You turn on your PC, you let OpenCore boot, and it fails?

If so, then based on what I have read in this thread, I think the most likely cause is that you have two EFI partitions visible to the BIOS at once. This is another major problem with this BIOS.

EDIT: However I just tested this on F3C and it worked fine. More details in next post.

Let me quote a post from dolgarrenan where he summarised the many issues and possible solutions:

Everything related to BIOS corruption/reset/french language and what not, is mostly due to:
  • Bad BIOS config.
    • Go through the painful process of configuring your BIOS.
  • Dual boot detected while trying to use OC or clover.
    • Try to remove any other boot device, e.g. USB with bootloader, other drives with Linux, windows or whatever else is there. The important part is to not try to boot with other bootloaders attached to your system.
  • Unsupported or non configured devices.
    • A PCI device might be giving you trouble to boot, check log.
  • BIOS rev 3c, known to be buggy, I had to revert to 3b to get it stable again.
    • I attached the 3b in the first post if I recall.
  • Switching from Clover to OC back and forth.
    • Every time you do that, you should also perform a CMOS and configure BIOS again, seriously, it can mess with your boot.
This sums up the issues we should try to avoid. For those of us with a multi boot I would recommend using n-d-k's fork of OC which currently sits at 0.5.8 since it has an option to block ACPI tables from loading on different partitions (which is what is happening every time you try to load e.g windows, from OC boot screen and fails), unless the main fork has added the feature embedded in and I'm not aware :lol:.

So if you are having major issues like being unable to boot OpenCore normally, I suggest following the above advice and see if it helps. First check if you have multiple bootloaders (EFI partitions) visible at once. And/or try going to BIOS F3B instead.

I have not yet tested for myself the issue with two EFI partitions, but I'm going to try it out today. EDIT: I have now, details in next post.

I have one NVMe drive with macOS, and another NVMe drive with Windows. Currently each NVMe has its own EFI partition (OpenCore on the macOS drive, Windows bootloader on the Windows drive). So far I have only ever booted with one NVMe installed - I physically swap the drives over when I want to go between macOS and Windows. Today I will try booting with both installed, and based on what dolgarrenan said, I expect to get the French language failure.

After that I am going to learn about setting up OpenCore to boot Windows, meaning I can hopefully remove the Windows bootloader and just have OpenCore booting both. I'll report back on how I get on.
 

Attachments

  • mb_bios_x299x-designare-10g_f3b.zip
    7.5 MB · Views: 67
Last edited:
If so, then based on what I have read in this thread, I think the most likely cause is that you have two EFI partitions visible to the BIOS at once. This is another major problem with this BIOS.
I just did a first quick test of this and it worked absolutely fine. At least, no BIOS errors, and no problem booting macOS. Booting Windows from OpenCore caused a blue screen, but I can boot Windows direct from the Boot Override BIOS menu.

Specifically:

  1. I installed both my NVMe drives at once. One with OpenCore EFI, and macOS partition. Second with Windows Bootloader EFI, Windows 10 partition.
  2. I set the OpenCore/macOS drive as top priority in BIOS, then reboot (I won't load OpenCore direct from the BIOS, because of the overclock-settings-reset issue I've described)
  3. On boot, OpenCore came up, and gave me the option of booting Windows or macOS
  4. Booting macOS worked fine, completely as normal as far as I can tell
  5. Booting Windows from OpenCore failed quickly with a BSOD "ACPI_BIOS_ERROR". I assume this is because I need to configure OpenCore not to use my SSDTs when booting Windows, which I will research soon.
  6. Rebooting and trying to boot macOS again worked fine, as before.
  7. I tested booting Windows directly from the BIOS Boot Override menu, and it worked fine.
  8. And having booted Windows, I was then able to reboot and boot macOS from OpenCore, again no problems.
  9. Unfortunately it seems that booting Windows causes it to make itself top boot priority in the BIOS, so I had to go into the BIOS and set macOS top priority again before I boot it.
So right now I can successfully boot either macOS or Windows. It's not an ideal setup because I can't yet boot Windows from OpenCore, but the main purpose of the test was to see if I got this boot failure / French language issue described earlier by dolgarrenan and others. I did not, even though I did have two boot loaders visible to the BIOS.

So now I'm wondering if maybe OpenCore has recent changes that fixed this problem? dolgerrenan did say he was using a fork of 0.5.8 which worked OK, and he wondered if the fixes might make it into the main OpenCore. So perhaps they now have and OpenCore 0.6.2 works OK on this motherboard? (Though there's still the issue of booting from the BIOS, which may be a different problem.)

Or it could be I'm not fully understanding the French language boot failure issue and it has a different cause. I'll keep testing.

But right now I can't recreate any problems related to BIOS failures and going into the French language. @beltzak if you are having issues booting OpenCore cleanly without boot failures, could you describe your BIOS settings and how your OpenCore is set up? If you like I can share my BIOS config and current OpenCore EFI.
 
Last edited:
Problem is that I cannot test it now as I am far from home.

Are you saying that you can't ever boot OpenCore normally? You turn on your PC, you let OpenCore boot, and it fails?

Yes. OpenCore resets the computer and then from Bios Failure - Enter to Bios - Boot Override - Now it boots LOL.
Bios is F3C and "tested" almost all the settings except overclocking ... But no one has found yet the "magic" setting.
I have 2 EFIs now (backup), but have had 1 EFI only for months and same issue.

I will read everything again when I came back home and test it thoroughly becaue for the next 2 month I won't be able to test it.

Thanks both for your help.
 
OK, that's weird. I do remember I did have that Bios Failure message a few times when I first got the motherboard and started testing, I think because I booted with bad OpenCore settings. But I have not had it at all since I got my OpenCore set up right.

It's a shame you are away from home for so long. But when you do get back, hopefully we can find a solution.

The first thing I would do is a complete CMOS reset (use the switch on the motherboard) then set up the BIOS from scratch, to be sure everything is right. There are only a small number of settings that need to change to get macOS booting: CSM disabled, Above 4G enabled, maybe a couple more.

The next thing would be to reset NVRAM, and then check OpenCore settings. Maybe you have one setting wrong somewhere. When you're back I can share my EFI which I know is booting for me OK.
 
Hey, I finally got my water cooling setup configured to a point where I can run it without the fear of drenching everything and am now embarking on the hackintosh journey for these parts as well.

Unfortunately I can somewhat corroborate beltzak's experience, though not entirely. I do encounter the BIOS "fake reset" bug quite often, but not consistently. I started out with your EFI @TheBloke because it was the only setup that was able to boot. I tried the original one, a custom one built from scratch and one from the german hackintosh-forum, neither of which got me past the OC init stage despite me fiddling with them for quite some time.

I currently observe some rather strange behavior in that if I even as much as sneeze in the wrong direction, OC will fail at the init stage. Sometimes however, it will boot normally and straight into a working macOS install (latest Catalina). I tried Big Sur as well, but no dice. Seems the APFS changes are screwing with things too much for the time being.

Either way, as soon as I do anything at all to the OC config, be that tweaking the config.plist in any way, removing, adding or even just updating an existing Kext or tweaking ACPI patches, I immediately get boot issues again.
These manifest in the sense that it will get right to the end of the OC init sequence and then hard reset. It will then show signs of the "fake reset" bug where the language switches to French and the XMP profile is maskedly reset.

I'd be really interested in what progress you've made on your EFI, to see what makes it work for you.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top