Contribute
Register

The 4K Dell OptiMac - 9020 MT - Core i7-4790 - Radeon RX 570 - LG 4K IPS Monitor

@trs96 any thoughts on the WX3200 as an alternative to the WX4100? Getting hold of tye WX4100 is pretty tough. The WX3200 is on sale at the moment on DELL online store for less than the WX4100 used.

I see mixed experiences in the forum.
I've never used any AMD workstation cards. I don't think the 3200 has native support like the 4100 does. It might take extra work to get it fully functional.
 
7020 SFF arrived today and I've got it up and running pretty quickly thanks to @trs96's work here. Monterey is working very well!

As mentioned previously, I wanted to use the PCIe NVMe card and 1TB NVMe stick that I had spare to make this DELL boot and run faster than my last 9020 build. While working on this today, I found that someone had customised the DELL bios to enable native NVMe support. You can find the link here. I followed the simple steps to get it working. (@trs96 may be worth adding this to the instructions in the NVMe section?)

My NVMe is Crucial P1 so it is not particularly fast. The figures below I think are OK for what it is. It is better than SATA!

Screenshot 2022-01-13 at 19.28.05.png


In summary, this is an awesome setup and I think it should be the way to go for all SFF builds. It feels fast and snappy and at £45 for the base machine, the cost performance is excellent. I do have the itch to upgrade the CPU to an i7-4790, but at £62, the price is putting me off.

(Tip: When you have no SATA drives, the BIOS will complain every time you boot up. Remember to disable the unused SATA ports in the BIOS. Also, remember to turn off the legacy support in the BIOS as that messes up the OC OpenCanopy picker and macOS login screen.)
 
Last edited:
I found that someone had customised the DELL bios to enable native NVMe support.
Good to hear it's working for you. Added the link to that post in my NVMe mini-guide.

 
I wrote that article on the NVMe mod, glad you found it useful. I am working on doing the same to some other machines now. I have never tried running Mac OS on one of these machines before, going to give it a try.

There is a part at the bottom of the article that instructs you how to get rid of the No Hard Drive message.

I am wondering if it would be possible to overwrite the BIOS from Dell completely and just put an Apple BIOS image in it's place.
 
I wrote that article on the NVMe mod, glad you found it useful. I am working on doing the same to some other machines now. I have never tried running Mac OS on one of these machines before, going to give it a try.

There is a part at the bottom of the article that instructs you how to get rid of the No Hard Drive message.

I am wondering if it would be possible to overwrite the BIOS from Dell completely and just put an Apple BIOS image in it's place.
Appreciate your work. It is super helpful. If you could look at the 9020 bios, that would be great.

In terms of running macOS, the Open Core process is relatively painless and works very well. However, I am sure no one would complain if a more native solution can be found on these machines!

I am currently playing with Xeon processors in these machines as the market for the regular desktop CPUs is mad at the moment.
 
Appreciate your work. It is super helpful. If you could look at the 9020 bios, that would be great.

In terms of running macOS, the Open Core process is relatively painless and works very well. However, I am sure no one would complain if a more native solution can be found on these machines!

I am currently playing with Xeon processors in these machines as the market for the regular desktop CPUs is mad at the moment.
I could look at 9020 (others have asked me to do the same also). But the problem is I am ending up with many computers laying around! I just the same mod on HP Elite 8300. If I can find a 9020 for little money I will buy one and update the post (again).

One think I have noted from the post that @trs96 wrote is that my guide depends on using the Windows tools. When I originally wrote the guide it used a DOS based boot disk to do the modification. I changed the post to use the Windows tools as I thought that would be easier for people to follow. But now I understand that there is a group of people that would have an easier experience with the USB Boot/Dos method. So perhaps I will go back and write it all over again :lol:
 
I could look at 9020 (others have asked me to do the same also). But the problem is I am ending up with many computers laying around! I just the same mod on HP Elite 8300. If I can find a 9020 for little money I will buy one and update the post (again).

One think I have noted from the post that @trs96 wrote is that my guide depends on using the Windows tools. When I originally wrote the guide it used a DOS based boot disk to do the modification. I changed the post to use the Windows tools as I thought that would be easier for people to follow. But now I understand that there is a group of people that would have an easier experience with the USB Boot/Dos method. So perhaps I will go back and write it all over again :lol:
I have one at the moment. Would getting the BIOS bin file be sufficient for you to build a guide?
 
Yes, it would certainly help. But you'd end up having to flash your own machine at the risk of bricking it completely. If you had an SPI programmer you could be a bit more confident as if you broke the machine you could just write the BIOS back to it. So it really depends what your appetite for risk is. If the machine is important/precious to you, then don't attempt it. But in the mean time if you could get me the BIOS backup I would love to have a look at it.
 
Back
Top