El Capitan Clean Install on Slugnet Golden Build - Success!

[PapachoSneak]

Posting this mostly to document what I did but hopefully someone out there will find it helpful.

History:
I followed this guide 3 years ago, with almost identical hardware (I got a GeForce 650 and 32 GB of RAM):
http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-bu...d5h-i7-3770k-gigabyte-geforce-gtx-660-ti.html

Everything worked great. Since then, I've done clean successful clean installs of Mavericks and Yosemite with mostly good results. This has always been with Chimera / Unibeast. I always had to go back and add audio (ALC898) and it's been the one thing that's always been a little wonky (periodic crackling noises, etc.). In Yosemite, I had to install the NVIDIA Web Driver - it would fail to boot half the time without it. Also, I never got iMessage working in Yosemite. When Tonymacx86 put up the guide for El Capitan using Clover, I decided to give it a go.

As far as I can tell, almost everything is working perfectly, better than it ever has! Audio works great, sleep/wake works great, all of the hardware seems fine. iMessage/Messages and FaceTime worked immediately. The only issue I have left at this point is that after sleep, external USB drives all say they disconnect improperly. I'll update if/when I get that figured out.

Installation:
I followed this guide exactly:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capita...-el-capitan-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html

In Unibeast, I chose UEFI Boot Mode, and used the defaults for everything else.

I did not make any BIOS changes at this point.

I installed on a fresh 256 GB SSD. Unplugged all of the other drives.

Booted to USB, formatted the SSD, and installed El Capitan.

Post-Installation:
Downloaded El Capitan Post-Install and ran the UEFI Boot Mode Clover installer.
Ran CustoMac Essentials.
Clover Configurator - Chose Mac Pro 3,1, didn't do anything else.
I ran the CloverALC110 script, but it gave me an error message in Terminal. Finally figured out that I had to run EFI Mounter to get it to work. Once EFI was mounted, I ran the command again and accepted all of the defaults, and it reported back that it was successful. Audio then worked.
Download and installed the Alternate NVIDIA Drivers. Before I did this, it would sometimes go into a reboot loop when I restarted.

At this point I had everything working except it would not boot from the SSD - I had to boot from USB every time. I believe I fixed this in the BIOS, I had to make sure to boot to UEFI for the SSD.

Now, I could boot from the SSD but still had to choose the boot drive from the Clover menu every time. Got that fixed by running EFI Mounter again, then navigating to EFI\CLOVER\config.plist and opening that in Clover Configurator. Went to the Boot tab and for "Default Boot Volume" I put in "El Capitan" (the name of the SSD). To get it to automatically boot to that drive (rather than make me choose every time) I set the "Timeout" value to 10.

Conclusion:
Everything seems to work great!

 

[nesafarm1]

Hi, thanks for the guide. Have exactly same mobo. What about audio? Mine loses audio after sleep/wake. Do you have that issue?

 

[utnuc]

Thanks. Worked for me as well. I do have one issue, on resume after sleep I go into a sleep/wake loop. Have you noticed this? For now disabled sleep.

 

[Isoyalat]

I have the same build. Originally as a 10.8 box used as a render machine.. I followed all the instructions here to upgrade to El Cap, but am unable to get the system to boot off the internal drive. It boots, but the boot bar goes halfway, and hangs.. Since I am a relative newbie, I am at a loss of what to try next.. Machine functions perfectly when I boot off USB Stick and then choose the HFS partition to boot from. Any thoughts of what I should try next.. thanks in advance.