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Evilgnz's Build - Asus P8Z68-v Pro/GEN3 - i5-2500k - 560ti

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Joined
Apr 9, 2012
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Motherboard
Asus P8Z68 pro gen3
CPU
I5-2500k
Graphics
Nvidia 560ti
Mac
  1. 0
Classic Mac
  1. 0
Mobile Phone
  1. 0
Foreword
Hi there, I thought I would start my first post here with a bang and try to create an comprehensive build.

I have been lurking on the forums for a couple of weeks and after looking at my current hardware, I decided that what I had was (mostly) able to be used as a hack.

Well I can say it's been an enjoyable experience, and my hack is 95% perfect (I will explain later)

So without further adieu, here is my build:


Evilgnz's Build - Core i5-2500k - Asus P8Z68-v Pro/GEN3 - 8GB RAM - EVGA 560ti 1 gig superclocked
top1.jpg
This will soon be in a Power Mac G5 case - build coming soon.​


Components

Apple Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AMHWP8/
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A

Apple OS X Lion @ Mac Apps Store
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-lion/id444303913?mt=12

Asus P8Z68-v Pro /GEN3 socket 1155 Intel Z68 ATX Motherboard
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005UDITPK/

EVGA nvidia 560ti 1gig superclocked
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004XUCCRM/

Intel i5-2500k CPU
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EBUXHQ/

Kingston Hyper-x Ram 2 x 4gb sticks
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0037TO5C0/

LG DVD Drive GH24NS90 ****DO NOT BUY THIS DRIVE IF YOU WANT SLEEP TO WORK AUTOMATICALLY
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00632SB2I/

Western Digital 500gb Sata III Hard drive Black series
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004DMFAJ2/

Cooler Master Silencio 550 Silent case - soon to be Power Mac G5 case
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005ET4KYO/

Corsair AX-750 Modular Power Supply
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PJ6QWE/


Other Equipment (not relevant to mac os install)

OCZ Vertex 3 120gb SSD running windows

Western Digital 500gb black Hard Drive for data storage (windows)

LG 22" LED screen

Logitech Wireless Mouse and Keyboard (separate USB dongles)


Comments:

I decided on joining the hackintosh community as I am interested in developing apps, and as we all know there is no windows version of XCode.

I decided to give it a crack with all the current equipment I owned to test the waters so to speak. I realized there is a preference for Gigabyte boards on this forum, however thanks to the likes of Samisnake and Revogirl and others, I was confident in the asus platform build.

Installation Methodology

1) Snow Leopard - installed only in order to get to the app store and procure Lion

-- Computer Hardware preparation
I didn't need to do a lot here as everything was up and running pretty well in windows. I removed the sata cables from my other two drives (SSD and WD 500gb black) which were plugged into the intel sata III ports. I plugged my new Mac OS specific Hard Drive into the one of the sata II ports (didn't want to use the Marvell Sata III ports so as to keep things simple) and I plugged my new LG DVD drive (previously used a USB external when needed) into another Sata II port. Lastly I removed one stick of RAM to drop to a single 4Gb stick (I don't know if this was necessary, however I did it anyway).
Lastly I left my bios as is, aside from turning on legacy USB so that my keyboard would work in chimera, and changing the boot drive to the DVD.

-- Using iboot
I mostly followed this GUIDE from Tonymacx86 going forward. I ignored the BIOS settings as they mostly apply to Gigabyte boards.

-- Settings needed for successful boot into SL installer
I only needed one thing at the chimera screen and that was PCIRootUID=1 - or the installer never came up. After that the installer went without a hitch. Booted into SL and watched the lovely video inbetween distorted and stuttering audio .... blerghh!! (Thanks to Tonymacx86 for including the youtube version of the video so I could watch it properly)

-- Post installation settings
At this point clearly sound was a problem. I ran multibeast as recommended, using Easybeast, and to get sound up and running I ticked ALC8xxHDA, AppleHDA Rollback, Non-DSDT HDAEnabler. I am unsure as to whether I used a network kext as I recall only downloading multibeast once the mac was up.

-- Upgrading to 10.6.8
As this is a Sandy Bridge install, I followed Tonymacx86's METHOD for the 10.6.8 combo upgrade.

I don't remember if it was at this point or before the combo upgrade, but the system started getting a little unstable. Safari was having random crashes (especially trying to get to these forums) so I installed Chrome. I just needed her to hang on long enough to complete the OS X Lion download from the app store.

-- What a mess.... lets get to Lion ASAP... which method?
I looked at using the xMove METHOD but decided after a bit of forum hunting, that a clean install using the UniBeast METHOD seemed to be more sophisticated, and gave me the option of using a USB stick to start all over if it went pear shaped...... good decision on my part!


2) Lion - using unibeast method

-- First attempt - the legacy of Snow Leopard
After installing Lion using the above UniBeast method (ignoring the partition instructions as I was already set up) I proceeded with what I thought was a clean install of lion. Boy was I wrong. I booted into my "fresh" lion install only to find that Safari was still having a bad day, and that chrome was still there, along with the previous glitches. Snow Leopard had returned to haunt me. Somehow in the next few minutes I managed to brick my install (it was probably recoverable, but I decided to format and start from scratch)

-- Second attempt - Clean Install
Trusty UniBeast Lion install in hand, I re-installed from scratch and started with a fresh hard drive. The install took half the time of the previous method!!

-- Post installation settings using multibeast
Once again I ran multibeast using EasyBeast, and the requisite ALC8xxHDA, AppleHDA Rollback, and Non-DSDT HDAEnabler tick boxes. At this point I think I ticked Hnak's AppleIntelE1000e Ethernet.

At this point I stopped with the tinkering to just try and get a feel for the OS. It seemed pretty stable for general things. I was able to download and install XCode without a hitch, and it mostly seemed to run okay.

-- Problems at this point
I tried to sleep the computer and that resulted in a reboot (my idiot mistake), the screen was locked at the only option available to me (1024x768), sound seemed to be working on every second re-boot (go figure), Speedstep was non existent and I was stuck on a 16 multipier so my geekbench result was less than satisfactory (6000ish as I recall), Graphics performance within safari (youtube) was terrible - stuttery and sluggish, the LG drive constantly checks itself every minute or less, and I hadn't put back all my RAM.

Needless to say, I wasn't willing to leave it at that.

Solving issues one by one

-- Getting Video card up and running, and openCL
At this point I was only getting the option for one screen resolution and this was 1024x768, so I went back into multi beast and picked the kext for nvidia 4xx/5xx support called 10.7.2/10.7.3 combo openCL enabler. Reboot and hey presto, I have the correct screen resolution. Unfortunately graphics are still running like a hairy goat.... with choppiness etc. So after more searching I found this thread: http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?t=52086&p=325481
I followed the instructions and after I was done, I had excellent graphics performance, and openCL was enabled. I then benchmarked using luxmark and cinebench to confirm against similar systems (Cinebench gave me 39.6FPS and luxmark was over 1000 for scala) - My Card is recognized correctly under "about this mac"
So I could call that success.

-- Asus Bios, Hacks, DSDTs and you
I was still have intermittent audio problems when I stumbled onto this thread by Samisnake: http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=49340
After reading the thread, and (at the time) ascertaining that I had a non-3k bios (I had bios version 0301 IIRC) I decided to take the plunge and follow the steps. I downloaded a version 0402 bios, flashed it, and followed the instructions for making my own DSDT. Before I loaded it with MultiBeast, I made sure to remove the kexts that EasyBeast installs first (Go into multi beast, select easyBeast and look in the window below, for what it installs, then delete them from S/L/E) - loaded the dsdt and rebooted.

-- Getting Audio functioning correctly
All I needed to do now was go back into multi beast and select two of the audio kexts (AppleHDA Rollback and ALC8xxHDA) - Bam audio is working... stable, no noise and consistently

-- Getting Speedstep going
This took me a little longer as I didn't read Samisnake's post number 7 in the above DSDT thread. Follow that to the letter, and speedstep will work. I used MSRDumper to confirm and ended up with 2 P States (low and high) - I changed a setting in the bios to auto and bam all states now present.

Edit 22/04/2012: The setting I changed in the bios was "Turbo Ratio" I had it set on "By all cores" - I changed it to "Auto" and I had more than two P states.

I have now discovered that I don't actually have Speedstep working yet.... I have Turbo working with multiple states..... watch this space Speedstep is working, and it is normal for bdmesg to give the C and P states not enabled error, as long as you can confirm they are working via MSRDumper or another method.

-- Solving sleep issues one at a time (still one small issue remaining)
Sleep was now (owing to the bios mod) working quite well (by manually selecting sleep) however after waking, I would have to wait approximately 1 minute before keyboard and mouse were responding, and the network card was unconnected. Once again back to the forums, and I noticed a post somewhere (sorry can't remember who said it, so would give credit if I could) where a member mentioned getting an up to date version of hnak's AppleIntelE1000e ethernet kext. I found this file over at InsanelyMac here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=205771
I downloaded the most up to date version, deleted my old next, and installed this one using next wizard... reboot and hey presto sleep works (manually) - it still didn't seem to work automatically. No problem, I figured this must be the DVD drives issue, so unplugged this and boom, sleep works automatically - one caveat, it took 4 minutes to sleep instead of the indicated 1 minute in the settings. This is good enough for me!
I tested further by putting a random CD in the drive, and sleep also works this way - so either purchase a sony optiarc or pioneer drive, or use my LG but keep a CD in the drive.

-- USB3 (W.I.P.)
USB3 will work using the USB3.0 - NEC/Renasis and etron kext in multibeast, however this breaks sleep. Once the computer hits sleep, about 3 seconds later it wakes. I am working to find a solution to this, but in the meantime I have removed USB3 support (by deleting PXHCD.kext) This means the ports are not even recognized, not just working but only at USB2 speeds.

-- Benchmarking
-- Chimera Boot Loader settings, and customization
-- Future solutions (Apple Bluetooth, with keyboard and magic mouse)

MultiBeast Configuration (Coming soon)​

---- This area reserved for the last two issues issue with the build - USB3(Have a fairly good idea what to do here tried some things and come up blank... I think a new kext is needed.... but that is beyond my abilities at this point), and Automatic sleep (going to unplug LG DVD drive and test ....manual sleep works)

Massive thanks to:
Tonymacx86, Samisnake, Revogirl, Brycv, Hnak and anyone else who I have forgotten to reference. There is just no way I could have this level of functionality without the amazing hard work of these intelligent individuals. Massive props to you all. (If I have missed your name, please let me know and I will add it!)
 
21/04/2012

Updated the lion section to show individual component solutions
 
Gronko said:
Nice build bro!

What did you change in BIOS to get all four p states working? I only have 2 when running MSRDumper, using the same motherboard as you!

Also, how did you get sleep working properly, I have the same problem as you where I can't move my mouse or keyboard after sleep..

EDIT: I tried sleep and the mouse and keyboard are working directly after waking from sleep :)


Hi Gronko, thanks for taking a look at my build.

To get all the P states, I changed a section in the bios called "Turbo Ratio" from "By all Cores" to "Auto" and this fixed it.

Glad to see your sleep is fixed.

----
On a different note, I typed bdmesg in terminal and noticed that there is an error that basically says:

Read HFS+ file: [hd(0,2)/Extra/DSDT.aml] 41862 bytes.
ACPI table not found: SSDT.aml
FADT: Restart Fix applied!
FADT: Using custom DSDT!
ACPI CPUs not found: C-States not generated !!!
ACPI CPUs not found: P-States not generated !!!
FADT: Restart Fix applied!
FADT: Using custom DSDT!
ACPI CPUs not found: C-States not generated !!!
ACPI CPUs not found: P-States not generated !!!
Starting Darwin x86_64

I checked my DSDT file and noticed that there is nothing in it with respect to my processor - so I tried recreating it - still nothing in there. For some reason my bios (or something??) is not releasing that information.

So I guess I need to hunt down an i5-2500k SSDT and add that in.

But before that I will probably need to post in Samisnake's thread and see if he knows why this is happening. As far as I was aware, with his modded bios I shouldn't even need a DSDT?

Also, whilst my turbo states are working, it would appear that Speedstep probably isn't considering I get a jump in multiplier from 16 to 34ish....

More little things to figure out!
 
thanks for posting, i've built a similar rig and have the same sleep issue so i'll give that latest next a try, i also get very random kernel panics, when the machine is idle and occasionally browsing or in mail - hard to figure out the exact reasons.
 
okay so the bdmesg error I was getting is irrelevant.... so that is speedstep sorted.

It appears that the bios does not release processor info for a dsdt, nor is it needed.

Good news indeed.
 
EDIT: oops, sorry for the offtopic, this supposed to be a PM. :S

Gronko said:
Also, if you would like to monitor your CPU/Motherboard temps etc like this: Use the installer I attached to this post and install choose FakeSMC, IntelThermal, and SuperIOSensors :)

Hello man! :)
i have installed your file, also with the RadeonX tool picked.
But what app do you use to monitor the sensors?

i am using the free istat pro, but i cant see the cpu clock neither the vcore.

cheers!
 
Wow thank god for this thread! i just purchased a power rig off newegg and ill be using this motherboard.

thank you!
 
just one question about the case. you are using the stock fans? any overheating issues?
I'm asking this because I saw some reviews online and they all complaint about the temperature inside the case
 
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