Gigabyte Z390 M Gaming build with working NVRAM

[tedyun]

Maybe there was some temporary issue with the Apple server or something. I had to go to gibMacOS to get the full installer. There was an error during the process and I thought I messed up my system drive. I rebooted from Recovery, and it gave me the option to install Big Sur again, then everything went fine. If I do that again, I will definitely back up Big Sur before updating. Things have been running so smoothly that I've been getting lazy in backing up the system before these updates.

I noticed that a good number of people were having difficulty downloading/updating to the latest Big Sur Public Beta. No problems here... Everything went smooth as silk.

 

[pastrychef]

Things have been running so smoothly that I've been getting lazy in backing up the system before these updates.

Lol. I'm guilty of this too. I haven't done backups before updates in years.

 

[pastrychef]

It was a rainy day and I got bored so I decided to flash my GC-Titan Ridge card to one of the hacked firmwares. Flashing was easy and fast and the card worked as advertised. But I ended up pulling the card out afterwards because my Thunderbolt 10GBase-T adaptor was prevented sleep. To be clear, it was the 10GBase-T that prevented sleep, not the GC-Titan Ridge.

For those of you who want to do this, all the info you need is here. Remember to install the SSDT-DTPG file and create an SSDT-DROM file.

Btw, for those of you who pick up a Raspberry Pi to do this and don't know what to do with the thing afterwards, here are my favorite ideas:

• Pi-Hole. Ad blocking on a DNS level.
• VPN router. Share a single VPN connection between all your devices.
• NextCloudPi. An extremely feature rich server that allows you to share files, collaborate, and much much more with friends/clients/colleagues.
• RetroPi. Classic game emulation.

 

[Humanate]

I noticed that a good number of people were having difficulty downloading/updating to the latest Big Sur Public Beta. No problems here... Everything went smooth as silk.

Are you testing this on your Z390MG rig? How is it going? Close to being usable as a daily driver or is that some way off?

 

[pastrychef]

Are you testing this on your Z390MG rig? How is it going? Close to being usable as a daily driver or is that some way off?

I tested on both my Z390 and Z370. Not extensive testing, just installation, but I would imagine it should be pretty solid by now. I expect Golden Master very soon.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I tested on both my Z390 and Z370. Not extensive testing, just installation, but I would imagine it should be pretty solid by now. I expect Golden Master very soon.

Yes, you are the Golden Master in my view

 

[CatBus]

Hey, just wanted to extend a HUGE thanks to pastrychef for the excellent build guide and the EFI. I came from work this afternoon at 1 PM and started with a bunch of parts that had just arrived from Amazon - by 5 PM I had a fully functioning macOS Catalina Hackintosh!

How do I say thanks enough...

Here are the details:

Parts list:
MB - Gigabyte Z390 Gaming M, rev 1.0
CPU - Intel Core i5-9660K
GPU - Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580
WiFI/BT - Fenvi T919
STORAGE - Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD

Other Bits...
RAM - HyperX 16 GB (2x 8Gb) 3200 MHz DDR4
CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-L9x65 low-profile

I've temporarily got this hooked up to a ViewSonic 1080p monitor via DP.

Build Notes:
- I followed pastrychef's recommendations and flashed the BIOS to one of the Beta versions (F9j) - this has the explicit stanza for 'CFG Lock' - I used Q-Flash and everything went without a hitch. My last full PC build was nearly 7 years ago and I am seriously impressed at how much easier things are now. The BIOS is nicely laid out and easy to navigate. As a style point - I used the INS key to tag all of the options that needed to be customized so all of them show up in the Favorites (F11) section. Sweet.
- I used my trusty old MacBook Pro 2012 to download the latest installation for Catalina (10.15.7) and create the USB boot stick from that
- I used a couple of the Opencore tools - MountEFI, ProperTree, and GenSMBIOS - to handle mounting the EFI partition and editing the config.plist
- I made no changes to the EFI contents or config.plist - the system booted the first time and installation went without a hitch
- Post-install, I used GenSMBIOS to create entries for the usual things and then looked up my actual Ethernet MAC address to fill in the ROM stanza in config.plist

What Works:
Well... pretty much everything I need:
- Ethernet
- WIFI
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Audio

Once I got the post-installation items taken care of, I logged into my iCloud account and the App Store. To my great joy, Air Drop worked flawlessly as did audio - I was able to plug my cheapo, but fun, tube headphone preamp into a free USB port and it was recognized and worked OOB.

Total sweetness.

The only thing that I haven't tried is iMessage, which - honestly - I'm not planning to use with this rig. That's what my iPhone is for...

So, right now, all of the guts of the system are sitting on top of the Gigabyte MB box on my dining room table - much to the chagrin of my (long-suffering) wife. My plan is to install everything into the mATX case - I've got one of those little ThermalTake cubes that will house everything for the time being.

My plan is to install an NVMe drive and see if I can clone the boot disk onto it and boot off of it - the Samsung was a drive left over from a prior project.

Longer term, if the system remains stable, I'll consider upgrading the CPU to add a bit of horsepower and bump the RAM up to 32 GB. I'm not sure that I'll need much more than that, but the board will handle up to 128 GB in case I want it. I may also consider upgrading the GPU - but since I don't really play video games, I'm not sure that this is as much of a priority right now.

Usage:
I do a fair bit of semi-professional photography and use Adobe PS, LR, ACR, and Bridge pretty heavily. I am hoping to do some videography with FCPX. I play in a band and use MainStage3 for live performance and a mix of FL Studio 20, Ableton Live 10 Suite, and Logic Pro X for odds and ends messing around.

So - once again - HUGE thanks to pastrychef and the many posters on this hugely helpful thread!

I've attached a couple iPhone shots of this afternoon's build.

Cheers, J

 

[pastrychef]

Hey, just wanted to extend a HUGE thanks to pastrychef for the excellent build guide and the EFI. I came from work this afternoon at 1 PM and started with a bunch of parts that had just arrived from Amazon - by 5 PM I had a fully functioning macOS Catalina Hackintosh!

How do I say thanks enough...

Here are the details:

Parts list:
MB - Gigabyte Z390 Gaming M, rev 1.0
CPU - Intel Core i5-9660K
GPU - Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580
WiFI/BT - Fenvi T919
STORAGE - Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD

Other Bits...
RAM - HyperX 16 GB (2x 8Gb) 3200 MHz DDR4
CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-L9x65 low-profile

I've temporarily got this hooked up to a ViewSonic 1080p monitor via DP.

Build Notes:
- I followed pastrychef's recommendations and flashed the BIOS to one of the Beta versions (F9j) - this has the explicit stanza for 'CFG Lock' - I used Q-Flash and everything went without a hitch. My last full PC build was nearly 7 years ago and I am seriously impressed at how much easier things are now. The BIOS is nicely laid out and easy to navigate. As a style point - I used the INS key to tag all of the options that needed to be customized so all of them show up in the Favorites (F11) section. Sweet.
- I used my trusty old MacBook Pro 2012 to download the latest installation for Catalina (10.15.7) and create the USB boot stick from that
- I used a couple of the Opencore tools - MountEFI, ProperTree, and GenSMBIOS - to handle mounting the EFI partition and editing the config.plist
- I made no changes to the EFI contents or config.plist - the system booted the first time and installation went without a hitch
- Post-install, I used GenSMBIOS to create entries for the usual things and then looked up my actual Ethernet MAC address to fill in the ROM stanza in config.plist

What Works:
Well... pretty much everything I need:
- Ethernet
- WIFI
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Audio

Once I got the post-installation items taken care of, I logged into my iCloud account and the App Store. To my great joy, Air Drop worked flawlessly as did audio - I was able to plug my cheapo, but fun, tube headphone preamp into a free USB port and it was recognized and worked OOB.

Total sweetness.

The only thing that I haven't tried is iMessage, which - honestly - I'm not planning to use with this rig. That's what my iPhone is for...

So, right now, all of the guts of the system are sitting on top of the Gigabyte MB box on my dining room table - much to the chagrin of my (long-suffering) wife. My plan is to install everything into the mATX case - I've got one of those little ThermalTake cubes that will house everything for the time being.

My plan is to install an NVMe drive and see if I can clone the boot disk onto it and boot off of it - the Samsung was a drive left over from a prior project.

Longer term, if the system remains stable, I'll consider upgrading the CPU to add a bit of horsepower and bump the RAM up to 32 GB. I'm not sure that I'll need much more than that, but the board will handle up to 128 GB in case I want it. I may also consider upgrading the GPU - but since I don't really play video games, I'm not sure that this is as much of a priority right now.

Usage:
I do a fair bit of semi-professional photography and use Adobe PS, LR, ACR, and Bridge pretty heavily. I am hoping to do some videography with FCPX. I play in a band and use MainStage3 for live performance and a mix of FL Studio 20, Ableton Live 10 Suite, and Logic Pro X for odds and ends messing around.

So - once again - HUGE thanks to pastrychef and the many posters on this hugely helpful thread!

I've attached a couple iPhone of this afternoon's build.

Cheers, J

Message should work fine.

If you live near a Micro Center, they are currently selling i9-9900K CPUs for very cheap.

You can clone your drive using either Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, or just boot in to Restore and restore from Time Machine. Remember to copy your EFI folder over to new drive after cloning.

Cool amp!!

 

[CatBus]

Hi @pastrychef!

Thanks for the heads up about Micro Center - $360 is pretty sweet. Unfortunately, I live _way_ out in the Boonies in upstate NY. Hence, Amazon...

I just ordered a WD Black NVMe 1 TB M.2 - should be here by Monday. I'm pretty old school, so I'll probably just boot to Restore and let Disk Utility do its magic.

Thanks for the reminder about the EFI partition. I would have been pulling my hair out over why this wasn't working.

And yeah... I LOVE this little headphone amp. Like I said - I'm pretty old school analogue and tubes really sweeten the music up. Totally easy to tube roll... I've got a couple Russian military grade NOS tubes and they just sing.

cheers! J

 

[buzzworm]

What an incredible build guide! Thank you for all of your time on this pastrychef! I downloaded the EFI from post #1360 because I don't have a dGPU. It boots into my Mojave system fine and the screen is able to sleep and then wake backup. I'm only putting the screen to sleep. I've set it to 1 minute. After it goes black, it wakes back up. But my Catalina does not wake up when I do this same process. I set up screen sharing on the Catalina drive so I can access the machine remotely even after the screen has gone black.

I double checked my BIOS, running F9k.

Also tried plugging monitor in via DVI/DVI and HDMI/DVI cable, but same results.

I've attached my config.plist which is the same from post #1360, but with some bogus imacpro serials.

I hope you'll be able to see what I'm missing.