A 2011 MBP and a Gigabyte P67A-UD4-B3

[scorcho]

I bit the proverbial bullet a few weeks ago and purchased a new 15" MBP for some on-the-road quad core goodness. It appears that the 2011 models have a different build of OSX that supports Sandy Bridge, which would be great considering I upgraded my desktop to the 2500k and P67A a few months back.

Now, I've already imaged the OS to an external firewire/SATA disk that used to contain my old hackintosh backup, thus having a hidden EFI partition ready to modify.

What specific kexts do I need to swap in and out in order for this to work? Would I need to change the bus-ratio on the new OS, and will I have to dial back the overclock on the desktop (running at 4.3ghz)? I'm hoping less hacks need to be involved now that the kernel identifies Sandy Core and the latest P67/H67 mainboards. And, most importantly, does anyone have a working/edited DSDT file to use?

Thanks in advance!

 

[scorcho]

Well, after an hour of trial and error I have a fully working system. I used an exact image of my 2011 MBP 15", updated the drive's EFI partition to include a new version of Chameleon, the latest DSDT for my mobo (extracted from Ubuntu), ran it through DSDT Auto-Patcher, located the latest Realtek networking driver for their P67-B3 boards, and reinstalled NVidia's latest drivers for my GTX460. Using vanilla kernel and didn't specify any bus-ratio settings for Chameleon. I am, however, using an external USB sound card.

Only change in the BIOS was to lower the multiplier from 43 to 32. Oddly enough, my 2.0ghz quad core is benchmarking higher in Geekbench than the desktop - 9600 vs. 8600.

Has anyone found a way to maintain overclockability with OSX?

I have to say - not bad for such little work. Thank god for external Firewire - eSATA drives!

 

[scorcho]

Latest update, while my cat annoyingly kneeds my legs as i type this.

Have been able to overclock the system by increasing each of the core's turbo boost multiplier instead of changing the chip's multiplier directly. That way the kernel sees the chip at defaulting at 3.2ghz, but each core will scale to, in my case at least, 4.3ghz under full load.

I just tested this in Geekbench, which now returns a score of 10922 instead of 8600. Using CPUTest proves the system is quite stable. I'm still not seeing the performance I think I should be from this chip and overclock, but it'll do for now. Not bad for half a night!

 

[scorcho]

More updates! Looped Rember twice to make sure all 8GB of memory is being read and used correctly in OSX. Next, ran CPUTest for 100 repetitions on small, big and primenet to ensure the CPU wasn't acting wonky with the boost up to the higher frequencies.

Updated FakeSMC to the latest build through ProjectOSX, and disabled all C and P-State generation since that cause a few kernel panics. Oddly enough, my GTX 460 finally appears to be running stable, which I'm very pleased with.

Tightened up some of my RAM timings while I was in there adjusting the Turbo Boost and now have a Geekbench score of 12002, breaking down as 11126/17258/7028/6627

Very, very pleased with how easy this was This system was a lot less hassle to set up and configure (and at this point, more stable) than my old Q6600 hackintosh that now serves duty as a media PC.

The Vanilla kernel is running well, and I hadn't put any busratio qualifier in my boot.plist. I will crash hard if the chip's multiplier is set for anything higher than 32, though. Mouse movements and clock appear to be running fine.

 

[zeeko30]

Latest update, while my cat annoyingly kneeds my legs as i type this.

Have been able to overclock the system by increasing each of the core's turbo boost multiplier instead of changing the chip's multiplier directly. That way the kernel sees the chip at defaulting at 3.2ghz, but each core will scale to, in my case at least, 4.3ghz under full load.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing. I don't have a nice new MacBook pro but multibeast has been serving me well so far. I will try your turbo boost trick!