I'm running a Sandy Bridge hackintosh, much the same build as yours (see my sig). It works great for me - not a lick of trouble. Several months ago I decided to take the plunge and move from BIOS to UEFI, so that I could install Clover, so that I could install El Capitan. It was a scary move but it all went smoothly and I've had no problems since, other than the same problems as you've got: no USB3, no sleep/wake. I haven't put the effort into figuring out how to fix those, and it's really not worth me building a new computer. This one's plenty powerful for anything I throw at it. (Gets about 11000 Geekbench 32-bit score.)
I do have a dilemma, though, and that's why I came to this site today; I'll post it in a new thread. In brief: I'm tired of constantly having to be careful that upgrades don't leave me unable to boot, and I'm tired of being too afraid of compatibility issues if I upgrade my Radeon HD 6850 to a GeForce 970. So I'm considering weaning myself off the Heckintosh side, and making this a plain jane Windows 10 PC, and using my MacBook Pro for all my Mac needs.
(Edit: Where'd my sig go, with my specs? Darn. I'll have to look for a copy to put it back in my profile here.)
[Please pardon my over-use of parentheses.]
Mine is similar to the one in the first post — GA-Z68XP-UD4… RAID5… I think it is a 2600 (non-K) offhand. As others have noted, Moore’s law is well and truly dead for CPUs; my i7 is about as fast is a new one (as opposed to being — what is it? — 1/16th of the speed?). I think my USB 3.0 is fine. (I do not recall any special relevant moves I might have made, but it *was* a while ago. Conversely, you might mean under El Capitan, particularly.) I never upgrade the OS; I am afraid to. I am on Yosemite (10.10.3).
I am glad to hear that mine is not the only one that will not sleep! (It is not the BluRay drive is it? — I read that somewhere.)
<TL;DR>
I use my machine for philosophy. I have had a 560Ti running two FHD screens (actually one 1920x1200 — a 6+ -year-old AOC, still going strong); I need heaps of screen real estate so I can see my whole argument at one go. [My brain works by place; if I scroll part of an argument, it ruins the continuity of my thinking.] Recently, I began getting towards the end stretch [80/20 rule — nowhere near actually finished!], and I bought a UHD screen so that I could see more argumentation at once. (I bought a Bratek stand for the two FHD screens; expensive but seems (very?) good quality.)
The point is that I bought a GTX970 (Gigabyte GV-N970WF3OC-4GD (F41), in case it matters.). Use WebDriver-346.01.02f04.pkg. (The 02f01 one does not work.) *From *memory** — it works fine. … I had a problem with sleep; if ever I slept the machine… when I tried to wake it up, it was no good. (I can’t remember the exact details of what would happen; nothing, I think.) However… it would corrupt the BIOS so badly — even with a password set — that I had to reset the CMOS settings, and reconfigure all the BIOS settings. (!!?!) From what I read online [not endorsing this conclusion], I concluded that it must be because it is PCI 3.0, so I bought a Gigabyte GT730. (This is about the only card in the universe that is PCI 2.0 and has UHD support.) I have to do without specific drivers (on the Mac side); it goes blank for a second whenever anything interesting happens. It is fine for word processing, but quite un-workable for games. (It is a GV-N730D5-2GI, and I am using NVidia driver for Mac 343.01.01f03.)
I have got my argument up on screen now, with 30 or 40 or 50 windows open (I have gone on several tangents!) and I try to never restart the machine; it takes a good half hour to hour to re-position all the windows, scrolled to the right place! I never put it to sleep, of course. It has been up for several months now. I could put the GTX970 back in, and I am pretty sure it would be fine (unless I put the machine to sleep!).
</TL;DR>
The point of all that is that I do *not* think it was the GTX970 card’s fault; it was the fault of trying to sleep the machine. The card works perfectly fine. [Actually, I did get occasional artefacts on the screen; I concluded (rightly or wrongly) that this was because the network card antenna is right next to the HDMI cable; I noticed that it seemed to happen when (e.g.) I opened my browser. (I bought a “proper” HDMI cable; no difference.)]
p.s. Endless Legend looks brilliant in UHD; if I try to play it in FHD, it looks like a fuzzy, poor replica.
p.p.s. On re-reading your post… you are now on El Capitan, and I read that NVidia drivers are specific to the OS version; nonetheless, I would expect that the (right) NVidia driver would be fine, just the same [for what that’s worth].
p.p.p.s. It is possible, and possibly relevant, that I might not have the hardware-reading software installed (that goes with HWMonitor); that could conceivably be related to the BIOS getting corrupted with sleep — if other people do not have that problem.
Tags: “UHD on PCI 2.0”, “PCI 2.0 UHD”, “PCI2 UHD”, “UHD PCI2”, “4K on PCI 2.0”, “PCI 2.0 4K”, “PCI2 4K”, “4K PCI2”.
