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

[pastrychef]

My m1 Mini used Fresco Logic FL1100 for USB.

FL1100 should be USB 3.0 only.

ASM2142 is USB 3.1 gen 2.

 

[scottkendall]

The fans in the Mac Studio have been completely inaudible to me. I don't think that pushing the GPU cores would add to any noise.

Another great thing about Apple Silicon Macs is that we can install and use iPhone/iPad apps. I've been able to install my favorite app, the Yahoo Finance app and no longer need to prop my iPad next to my monitor anymore.

New Mac Studio discoveries:

• It appears that the Mac Studio still uses ASMedia ASM2142 controller for USB.
• It appears that the Mac Studio still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chipset.
• It appears that the Mac Studio still uses Aquantia for 10GBase-T.
• My Mac Studio's Ethernet will refuse to connect after wake from sleep if IP address is set manually. It works fine if I leave it set to DHCP.

I have issues with static IP address if I do not set the last number above 200 and also set the DNS entries.

 

[pastrychef]

I have issues with static IP address if I do not set the last number above 200 and also set the DNS entries.

Setting to DHCP and and enabling Jumbo Frames has solved the issue for me.

 

[pastrychef]

My quest for fast, reliable external storage...

My original plan was to use an old 4 bay external enclosure with USB3 and eSATA to add external storage to my Mac Studio... I first tried using the eSATA connection via a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor. This proved to be a failure as transfer speeds degraded steadily on large transfers to the point if approx 20mb/s before I aborted.

Next I decided to give the USB3 connection a shot. Performance was fine and it maintained approx 130-160mb/s throughout a large transfer. Unfortunately, the drives would disconnect when the Mac Studio went to sleep and resulted in, at times, dozens of "Did not eject properly" notifications. I tried all sorts of suggestions found on the internet including purchasing an app called Jettison. None of the fixes worked 100%...

I finally threw in the towel and decided to transplant all the internals of my NAS from an enclosure with 8 hot swap bays to an enclosure with 12 hot swap bays and put the remaining 4 unused SATA ports to work. I would use these four SATA ports to create a storage pool with three volumes (1) iTunes, (2) Time Machine, and (3) Downloads/Junk. I would then use an app called AutoMounter to automatically mount these shares on the desktop. Since I will be putting four hard drives in to an array, performance will exceed that of single hard drives. It will also provide redundancy in the event any of the drives died. Having 10GBase-T means there won't be any bottlenecks for transfer speeds.



The most difficult part of this is the transferring of all the hardware from one case to another. The Synology DSM made setup very easy. If I didn't already have a NAS in place, I would probably have attempted something similar using a Raspberry Pi 4. The only caveat being that transfer speeds would be limited to the 1GBase-T on the Pi. I plan on testing this setup anyway to see how fast speeds are in real world use.

 

[pastrychef]

I finally had a little time to test out some emulation on the Mac Studio...

aetherSX2 is an awesome PS2 emulator and the M1 Max has been able to easily upscale the games I've tested to 4K. It can probably upscale further but I haven't tested. The games look stunning when upscaled to 4K.

RPCS3, the PS3 emulator, has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. I have only tried God of War III, Oblivion, and Skyrim. Oblivion and Skyrim are among my all time favorite games and I was looking forward to playing them again. Unfortunately, Oblivion does not run well (or at all sometimes) on this early build of RPCS3. Skyrim booted and ran fine. I'll have to do more testing.

God of War III is one of, if not THE, most challenging titles to emulate and it ran quite well at native resolution. Frame rates are still not quite 30 in the first battle but still very playable and I haven't tried any tweaks to improve FPS yet. So far, from what I can tell, it performs better than my HP ProDesk with i9-9900 and RX 560 under Linux.

RPCS3 is still in alpha and already looks really promising. I can't wait for the devs to iron out some of the bugs. Power consumption still stays under 50W when running these emulators. Both emulators are using the Metal api.

 

[pixelmambo]

Hi Pastry and All,
I have not seen any posts about updating the system to macOS Monterey 12.4. Is it a smooth process on a hackintosh using the Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi AC) motherboard? Many thanks!

 

[pastrychef]

Hi Pastry and All,
I have not seen any posts about updating the system to macOS Monterey 12.4. Is it a smooth process on a hackintosh using the Asus ROG Strix Z370-G Gaming (Wi-Fi AC) motherboard? Many thanks!

Yeah. No problems updating for me...

 

[pastrychef]

OpenCore EFI updated to version 0.8.1

AppleALC and WhateverGreen also updated.

 

[Mech314]

Hey Chef, it has been a while. I'm happy to see that you are updating the thread. However, since I'm here - I need some help... I cannot boot into may Catalina anymore.

I had to use windows on this computer for 2 years from a separate drive, now I am reverting back to hackintosh and it just doesn't boot.
First I couldn't make clover window to start, the screen flickered a couple of times and then BIOS. I made a USB stick with Catalina install using unibeast. After that I booted Clover from the USB but I cannot boot into macOS, the line slowly slowly moves right and when it reaches the end nothing happens.

System configuration is absolutely the same, UND630 graphics. I have not changed anything in this computer and I don't understand what could be wrong. Do you have any thoughts what can I try to do?

 

[pastrychef]

Hey Chef, it has been a while. I'm happy to see that you are updating the thread. However, since I'm here - I need some help... I cannot boot into may Catalina anymore.

I had to use windows on this computer for 2 years from a separate drive, now I am reverting back to hackintosh and it just doesn't boot.
First I couldn't make clover window to start, the screen flickered a couple of times and then BIOS. I made a USB stick with Catalina install using unibeast. After that I booted Clover from the USB but I cannot boot into macOS, the line slowly slowly moves right and when it reaches the end nothing happens.

System configuration is absolutely the same, UND630 graphics. I have not changed anything in this computer and I don't understand what could be wrong. Do you have any thoughts what can I try to do?

You already have Catalina installed or are you trying to do a new install of Catalina?

Have you tried one of the older versions of the EFIs? I have not tested newer EFIs with older versions of macOS.