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Darkthing#1 - Z68XP-UD3 + i7-3770 + EVGA GT 210

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Computer science is really a vast subject... ;)
As for drives, you must distinguish between mechanical defects (typically bad blocks — of which TestDisk can do nothing about, AFAIK) and logical/structure issues. While TestDisk, TechTool, DiskWarrior and the likes deal with HFS structure, (B-Trees and so on), only reformatting the drive puts physical bad blocks aside for not using them.
I had a few dead HDDs, even in real Macs, it can happen even after a few days of existence, but usually it either happens very soon or very late... Anyway, if you begin to have bad blocks, and the number of them increases in the next days/weeks, it's time to replace the drive before it's too late.
Run some SMART utility from time to time to check your drives. :thumbup:
(that's were filesystem is important: ZFS and APFS have some form of security, duplicating files before actually copying it, checking data integrity, etc. that HFS+ has not)

As for learning the guts of MacOS, you first need to understand its structure, it's not that complicated once you get it, and I'm sure you already know the basics.
To summarize a few things:
1) you have more or less the same folders at System level (System/Library...) which are used for the overall working order, then in /Library which apply to every user once they log in, then ~/Library which loads for that specific user only
2) in any of those /Library folders, there are LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders that contain any kind of processes — you can create your own for mounting a disk image at login, launch a particular app when a particular event happens, set variables for an app, change your monitor calibration, etc. It's really powerful!
3) the captain of your OS is launchd, a daemon that runs constantly and is in charge of loading quite anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
You can ask him not to load useless or faulty processes, or only load a kext when you need it, etc.
There's a lot more to say and it would need a big tutorial that exceeds the scope of this discussion (every folder has a role, and I don't know them all... :oops: ), but once you understand those basics, you understand better what we do with our hackintoshes with kexts, etc. and maybe feel that you can optimize things a bit by getting your hands in those muddy folders. :D

How recent MacOS optimizations for SSD and multicore CPU work, I have no idea, but it's plain to see when you compare things. I think it's a bit expensive to change my i3 for a 300$ i7, though, just for the sake of installing the latest OS or having a snappier Finder... :crazy: Especially for an old build like mine where the mobo could die even before the new CPU is delivered... :mrgreen:
Hence my optimizing as much as possible what I have.

Very useful my friend. Thankyou :thumbup:. Having read the Launchd reference I find it fascinating. The nearest I get to the deep, dark heart of macOS is probably Terminal and the Linux command-line reference book which I often use to explore :D.

Sadly here in the UK an i7 is just too expensive for me. The quad-core i3 I have now is a superb CPU but probably uses the same power as an i7-8700 with 6-cores. Buying an older one as @trs96 suggests seems a good, cost-effective, way to go.

:)
 
Better yet, you can buy a low cost refurb Dell or HP business desktop with the chip you want, remove the CPU yourself and install the old i3-2100 in that and resell it with Windows 10 installed.
Excellent! :lol: Thanks for that good advice! I've already found a few interesting things on eBay.
 
Sadly here in the UK an i7 is just too expensive for me.
Got a little gift for you! ;)
https://goo.gl/vUBFzn
I've just missed one this afternoon at 99€, here in France, it's been sold in a wink! o_O
I think with a little patience you might be able to get something interesting.:D
Hope we'll have a pint of Guinness someday to celebrate our new CPUs! :lol:
 
Got a little gift for you! ;)
https://goo.gl/vUBFzn
I've just missed one this afternoon at 99€, here in France, it's been sold in a wink! o_O
I think with a little patience you might be able to get something interesting.:D
Hope we'll have a pint of Guinness someday to celebrate our new CPUs! :lol:

Ah, excellent find :thumbup:

As for the Guinness - Great idea!!:D
 
Yippee! Got myself an i7-3770 for about 50€, the installation was as easy as could be (I even forgot to move away the SSDT I made for the i3 but it started anyway :mrgreen: ).
I generated a new SSDT following Toleda's procedure: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/mavericks-native-cpu-igpu-power-management.128926/ (had to change SMBIOS to iMac 13,2 as iMac 12,1 (my usual one until El Capitan) and iMac 14,2 were marked as incompatible and iMac 13,3 booted to a black screen).

The peculiar thing is in the UEFI BIOS: I used to be able to get a slight 4% OC with the i3 (although it wasn't supposed to be possible at all... :wave:), but now I can't change any value, even for the RAM — seems logical, after all, as the CPU frequency is variable (3.40 GHz to 3.9 GHz), the RAM frequency has to be fixed. The fun part is that if I load a saved BIOS setting with a RAM multiplier of 16 (which I used with the i3 instead of the stock 13.33), there's a positive impact on performances!
The tests (GeekBench, Cinebench) are impressive (more than doubled the values for the i3) but the impact on boot time, apps launch and everyday life is negligible (a little smoother), I guess I'll see the difference when converting videos and such heavy calculations tasks. Of course, it gets quite hotter during the tests but cools down immediately — I kept the Intel fan from the i3 and still can't hear it even when it ramps up.

While I was at it, I also changed the thermal paste on the graphics card and it makes a great difference as the original one was nearly 8 years old.

As I mentioned in the recent update I made on my build description, I could have kept on living with my i3, so this is a welcome little "luxury" I can afford to refresh my beloved hackintosh... :D

EDIT 01/2021: I ended up following RehabMan's advice at https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...-power-management.177456/page-45#post-1837731 and only using PluginType=true with no SSDT, it works the same and has even more speedsteps! Only downside, it creates a sleepimage with any SMBIOS above iMac 12,1, but it's easily circumvented.
I've had no success running the IGPU together with the NVidia (tried in 10.13 and 10.14), even setting precedence in BIOS, only worked if I physically remove the NVidia — which I won't. :mrgreen:
 
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OpenCore trial: my two cents
For the sake of science, I gave a try to OpenCore 0.6.7.
Although with a different approach, it's relatively close to Clover (boot flags, kexts, patches, etc.)
- as the PluginType setting doesn't exist, I had to go back to generating a SSDT.
- one important thing is patching the nvidia, instead of the Inject NVidia checkbox in Clover.
- I had to disable SIP, although it's not supposed to be needed, otherwise I had a few issues and couldn't install NVidia web drivers.
I won't detail every setting, as Dortania's guide covers nearly every situation. In the end I had everything working on the 3 OSes I've tried (10.14, 10.11 and 10.9)
Only strange thing: the Apple boot screen is affected (grey on white for 10.14 and absent for 10.11 and 10.9!) I'll see with the coming 0.6.8 if it cures something.

Conclusion: there's no real need to switch from Clover to OpenCore on a working build but it's noticeable that the versions of Clover post 5106 are all having issues or won't work at all with my build, where OpenCore is ok.
OpenCore is easier to tame when you're an experienced hackintosher. It's easy to have KP just because of a syntax error, even on a disabled kext's path name!
I think I would have had a hard time if I was trying to make my first build, compared to Chameleon and Clover, but the great strength of OpenCore is its abundant and constantly updated documentation.

EDIT: a welcome side effect of my trying OpenCore is that it gave me the idea to port to Clover some of the settings I had to make (namely: adding SSDT-IMEI.aml and the IGPU settings), which led to a faster boot time and better Geekbench/CINEBENCH results! :thumbup:
 
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OpenCore: Never say never!
Well, what was initially just an experiment drove me to switch, in the end... :mrgreen:
My attempts to reproduce in Clover the settings for headless IGPU, although working, had the strange side effect of frequent crashes involving USB, that I never solved.
In comparison, once everything is set up, OpenCore gives me an unprecedented impression of stability and speed — booting 10.9 is quite instantaneous! :eek:
I'm losing my nice Clover boot screen (but it's 3s time in the whole day ;)) and my customized Apple boot screen for 10.9, but that's really trifling.
I never understood why I had those weird behaviours of Apple boot screen but now it's ok (0.6.8): normal (white apple on black) for 10.11 and 10.14, and replaced by complete black screen for 10.9.
 
OpenCore: Never say never!
Well, what was initially just an experiment drove me to switch, in the end... :mrgreen:
My attempts to reproduce in Clover the settings for headless IGPU, although working, had the strange side effect of frequent crashes involving USB, that I never solved.
In comparison, once everything is set up, OpenCore gives me an unprecedented impression of stability and speed — booting 10.9 is quite instantaneous! :eek:
I'm losing my nice Clover boot screen (but it's 3s time in the whole day ;)) and my customized Apple boot screen for 10.9, but that's really trifling.
I never understood why I had those weird behaviours of Apple boot screen but now it's ok (0.6.8): normal (white apple on black) for 10.11 and 10.14, and replaced by complete black screen for 10.9.
OpenCore can be setup to have a nice boot screen like Clover, albeit not as many themes exist. Do a search about OpenCanopy.
 
OpenCore can be setup to have a nice boot screen like Clover, albeit not as many themes exist. Do a search about OpenCanopy.
Yes, I know, but I don't want to spend my time for 3s a day, for the time being. ;)

What was nice with Clover's GUI is that it offered a turnkey solution that you could customize later if you wished, but, after all, I don't really suffer too much from having a text-only picker. :lol:
Instead, I like the ability to select a partition by typing its number — which I don't think it was the case in Clover.
And also, being a real Mac user since the nineties: the return of Mac's boot hotkeys (alt key to show the picker, Cmd+Opt+P+R to clean NVRAM, Cmd+S for Single User mode, etc.)
Thanks anyway! :thumbup:
 
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Yes, I know, but I don't want to spend my time for 3s a day, for the time being. ;)

What was nice with Clover's GUI is that it offered a turnkey solution that you could customize later if you wished, but, after all, I don't really suffer too much from having a text-only picker. :lol:
Instead, I like the ability to select a partition by typing its number — which I don't think it was the case in Clover.
And also, being a real Mac user since the nineties: the return of Mac's boot hotkeys (alt key to show the picker, Cmd+Opt+P+R to clean NVRAM, Cmd+S for Single User mode, etc.)
Thanks anyway! :thumbup:
I would guess that all the things you like about it would work with the pretty face but I do not know. Never tried and my system is not dual boot. It is pretty simple that you add some files to the resource folder and set the picker to external in your config. Probably take less then 10 mins.
 
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