This is my first Hack build in about 3-4 years. Maybe longer. Pandemic time warp you know. Prior to this, I'd built 4 or 5 Kaby Lakes and maybe 10 Coffee Lake Machines on Gigabyte Z370 mini-itx boards. They're all still using Clover and running Catalina right now. Humming along pretty nicely. They've been good workstations for general Internet use, and good computers for kids.
But, I decided I wanted to tinker with a new machine for myself. The previous build I made for myself was a i7 coffee lake
These are my goals:
-Stupid, hella fast
-Use a dedicated GPU. This will be a first for me. All my prior builds used iGPU because I was trying to make these builds as small as possible. Those machines are in 8.5 x 9 x 2.5 inch cases! Still bigger than a Mac Mini, but REALLY compact as far as hackintoshes go.
-Dead Quiet. I used a CPU cooler and PSU from BeQuiet. They are legit quiet! I'm very happy with these. My previous machine had an EGVA PSU and a Corsair Liquid Cooler. The BeQuiet stuff is MUCH quieter.
-OpenCore. I've NEVER
successfully built a hack with it before. I tried updating my CL Hacks to OpenCore, maybe 2 years ago, but I failed. OpenCore is now MUCH further along in development and documentation, so I thought it was time to finally figure it out.
-Dual boot windows. Surprisingly, I've never bothered to set this up on any of my hackintoshes. Time to try. My oldest daughter is turning into a little gamer, so I think she'd really appreciate it if I got her setup with a dual boot machine so that she could tap into the big world of PC games (instead of Roblox).
So, this is what I bought:
Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X DDR4
i7-12700K
Asus Radeon RX 6600
Using guides here on tonymac, I've got the thing running on OC 0.8.7. Happy about that!
However, I do have a few glitches that are making me just a little bit bananas.
1. Retro 80's Green Screen
At startup the screen takes on this greenish tint, very much like an 80s monochrome monitor. The UI scale is also fubar. I see something like the upper left corner of the screen with the apple logo cut in half on the right side of the monitor.
Interestingly, this happens right away at boot, meaning the initial bios screen, boot picker, and apple logo/progress bar also does this. Once booted up, the display goes black for a second, then comes back up in 3840x2160 and works great.
As far as I can tell, this glitch is just cosmetic. REALLY ugly bootup screen. However, since it also affects the bios screen it makes bios changes very difficult since you can only see a portion of the screen!
The monitor is a Samsung LS32AM702UNXZA
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/computing/monitors/smart-monitor/m7-series-32-ls32am702unxza/.
It is a 32 inch 3840x2160 smart monitor. Pretty cool. You can AirPlay to it; it has Alexa; you can run Netflix, Plex and what not on it, and it actually has decent audio. think the only downside to it may be that it only has HDMI ports (which is how I have it connected to the RX 6600).
Now, if I connect the display to the onboard graphics port I can get the display to revert to behaving normally, but only for 1 startup. Once I reboot it takes on that retro 80s green tint with the abnormal UI Scale.
I've futzed around with settings in UEFI/Output, including the resolution and UI Scale, but haven't found a fix. If i change the UI scale, it seems that I can make the scaling even worse. But nothing fixes the green tint.
In system info, its seems to me like the setup is ok and the system is seeing my GPU and display:
View attachment 560627
The next thing I am planning to try is hooking up using a DP=>HDMI cable. Seems like people find hooking up by DP just works better.
The UI scale is really the annoyance here. I could actually live with the green. Heck, its made me think about learning how to make an OpenCanopy picker that tried to mimic an 80's green monochrome monitor, but that is a problem for another day.
2. Processor Type.
I'm not sure if this issue is purely cosmetic vs functional, but for the life of me I cannot get the Processor to show correctly in about my mac or Hardware overview.
View attachment 560628
It shows 20 cores and shows the base speed of 3.6 ghz, but getting it to show the correct processor type has just stymied me.
I've tried different SSDT's, Ive used SSDTime to create my own. No help.
I've looked at the Kernel CPUUID info and Quirks.
I've tried CPUFriend vs CpuTopologySync. Seems like there are issues to be worked out with CpuTopologySync now? So, i've stuck with CPUFriend.
I've set NVRAM UUID 4D1FDA02-38C7-4A6A-9CC6-4BCCA8B30102 to show revcpuname 12-Core Intel i7-12700K
I've tried different System Product names in PlatformInfo. Currently using MacPro7.1. I'd like to change to something else because I get that stupid warning on startup about installing memory in pairs or something like that, apparently since I only have 1 pair of Dimms.
Funny thing is that in Geekbench it shows intel core i7-12700k @ 3.6 Ghz. Why can Geekbench see the correct processor but apple system info can't?
I'm a little disappointed in the geekbench scores. Getting 1204 and 13487.
I've attached my current EFI and would appreciate any help on these issues.
