Advice on Yosemite -> Sierra Upgrade and upgrading Chimera -> Clover

[scottb23]

Hey Guys,
So I've been using Yosemite 10.10.5 on a Sandy Bridge 2600K since the earlier days of hackintosh. I used lots of the tools on this site to get it all running nicely, and its been my reliable daily driver ever since.

My mother board is still using the old award bios, but it does have the capability to install a UEFI one on it.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3-rev-13#ov

Right now, im booting off my SDD with Chimera, to Yosemite.

Ideally, I would like to upgrade all the way to Sierra and to Clover, so that I can benefit from things like iMessage (mine doesnt work right now) and some of the upcoming features.

Would I be able to update my 'in place' install, using the sierra installer? I upgraded to Yosemite using the app store, so I am assuming with a stable Clover install, I should be able to just update to sierra all the way?

Also, moving to Clover would maintain things like my speedstep for the 2600k? Its overclocked to 4.2ghz and I intend to give it a bump with a new cooler soon to get a bit more life out of it, but in the past having UEFI on the board seemed to kill speedstep.

I'm relatively technically capable, and have troubleshot a bunch of install issues in the past, so im pretty familiar with the general method of installing OSX using the tools on this site, but wanted to get some thoughts as to how to particularly go about this upgrade as its at BIOS level and more difficult to roll back (although back2awd.exe has worked for me in the past).

So, my key questions are...

AWARD bios -> UEFI? - I assume I will have to do this to use clover & sierra
Chimera -> Clover? - Is there an installer I can use to move to clover with my existing install?
Yosemite -> Sierra? - Can I then just update to sierra, or must I do a clean install entirely?

I am aware I can always just buy a new SSD for a sierra fresh install, and migrate, the only 'destructive' step for my current build is moving to the UEFI in the bios, but advice would be excellent.

*Other potentially useful info*
I use a USB sound card & mic, so motherboard audio doesnt matter that much
Sleep doesnt have to work, it hasnt ever worked but I havent missed it
Im using a 980 ti GPU
I have 16gb of RAM

 

[vulgo]

It is not a true UEFI firmware, you may well be better installing Clover in legacy mode - tianocore/duet UEFI implementation (for BIOSs) and it is developed mainly for loading macOS.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/

https://clover-wiki.zetam.org/Technical-Background

 

[scottb23]

Im talking about the U1n UEFI Bios available here

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3-rev-13#support-dl

Right now I am on BIOS F12

 

[vulgo]

Sorry, your previous post linked to the product overview and 'Hybrid EFI' - if there is a true UEFI firmware available for your motherboard it could be worth upgrading. Depends if beta=buggy.

 

[VioletDragon]

Im talking about the U1n UEFI Bios available here

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3-rev-13#support-dl

Right now I am on BIOS F12

UEFI on Series 6 boards is buggy but might be worth Booting Clover in UEFI only because its faster.

 

[scottb23]

UEFI on Series 6 boards is buggy but might be worth Booting Clover in UEFI only because its faster.

Yes I heard this was a problem, what do you mean by buggy?

 

[vulgo]

Yes I heard this was a problem, what do you mean by buggy?

If you upgrade to Gigabyte's UEFI, Clover will use that native EFI environment. For legacy installs on BIOSs Clover comes with its own complete EFI implementation. Search threads for user feedback on the beta UEFI. Some report it works OK, others have had problems.

 

[vulgo]

Also, moving to Clover would maintain things like my speedstep for the 2600k? Its overclocked to 4.2ghz and I intend to give it a bump with a new cooler soon to get a bit more life out of it, but in the past having UEFI on the board seemed to kill speedstep.

See link in post #2. Maybe something you could try is making a bootable Clover USB (MBR way, link 4077), having your mobo boot from that. Then you can take some time to get a working configuration and see how it goes.