[Guide] Dell XPS 15 9560: 4K Touch, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, 100% AdobeRGB

[ferchizzle]

For Sierra, yes.
High Sierra, on the other hand, supports the 960s natively.

for more info on it check Rehabman's FAQ under the "Q. Is my NVMe SSD supported?"

@tgmac thank you very much for your reply. I did check Rehabman's FAQ and went through the config.plist you posted before I reached out to you and wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything before playing around with your files

 

[ferchizzle]

XPS 15 (9560) on macOS 10.13 (17A405)

Motherboard: Dell 05FFDN
CPU: i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16GB 2400Mhz DDR4
Storage: Samsung EVO 960 250GB
Wi-Fi: Dell DW1560 (BCM94352Z)
Extras: Dell DA200 USB-C Travel Adapter & Dell WD15 180W Docking Station (USB-C)

BIOS Settings (aside from OP):

Thunderbolt Adapter Configuration: All Disabled with No Security
SD Card: Disabled
TPM: Off
Computrace: Disabled
Intel SGX: Disabled
Wake on Dell USB-C Dock: Disabled
Battery Charge Profile: Standard
Numlock: Enabled
FN-lock Mode: Disable/Standard
Fastboot: Minimal
BIOS POST Time: 0s
Intel Virtualization Technology: Enabled
VT for Direct I/O: Disabled
Wireless Switch: All Disabled (WLAN & Bluetooth)
Wireless Device: All Enabled (WLAN & Bluetooth)
Auto OS Recovery Threshold: OFF
SupportAssist OS Recovery: Disabled

Not Working:

• Shutting down while either DA200 or WD15 are connected to the USB-C port results in a restart. Without either connected the machine shuts down correctly.

• Mini DP on the WD15 gives no video output. System does see a second monitor but I get a black screen resulting in sleep mode after a few seconds. HDMI on the WD15 works fine though.

• Boot is noticeably slower on HS compared to Sierra. Up to 30sec compared to <10s before.

• No Windows partition to compare, but the Wi-Fi feels really slow. On a 500mbps connection I barely scratch the 20mbps down, and up is always 10-15mbps faster. USB LAN 10/100/1000 hits 520-535mbps up&down so that’s good.

• Not sure if it’s a HS bug, but the “show item info” in “Show View Options” in Finder seems to get “stuck”. For instance, having 10 items in folder, going in, deleting 3, going back, you still see “10 items” info under the folder. Relaunching Finder updates the values but doesn’t really fix the issue.

• Not a problem really, but while shutting down, when macOS is killing all tasks I get a green screen(on built-in display or external monitor when connected). Might be related to one of the display issues mentioned above so I thought I’d add it.

All else seems to be working correctly.

Side note; Bluetooth is working better than it did on Sierra for me. Much larger range, no drags, lags or cut offs in BT audio, BT mouse/keyboard etc.

Still need to figure out how and what to patch correctly. Using OP SSDTs which I’ve been informed are over patched and not a good idea to do so to begin with (differences in BIOS, hardware etc etc), but have to do for now until I figure out how to do it myself and get around the PARSEOP errors etc.

first off would love to thank @KNNSpeed @RehabMan @tgmac @sbeanie for making my setup all possible

@tgmac I am experiencing the same issue with slow downloads. I have the DW1830 card using all three antennas. I am getting download speeds off of Speedtest at around 27Mbps. However, my MacBook Air is getting over 45Mpbs. My connection is quoted at 50Mbps by the cable company

Both laptops are using the same Airport Extreme connected to the 5GHz connection using the same channel. However, the "width" of the connection on the 9560 is at 40Hz while the "width" of the MacBook Pro's connection is at 80Hz (screenshot is attached)

Also, when I run System Information and look at the wifi connection (screenshot attached) the Transmit Rate is only 450 while the Transmit Rate on my MacBook Air is at 867 (screenshot attached)

I am using the same files and kexts as you and have only moved FakeSMC.kext and VoodooPS2.kext to S/L/E using Kext Wizard. Lilu.kext to v1.20 and AirportBrcmFixup.kext are being used. FakePCIID.kext and SATA-100-series-unsupported.kext have been removed.

@RehabMan Do you think this could this be a hardware issue with the DW1830 I installed? Is there a way to see if all three antennas are being recognized?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[Spartan2381]

I'm thinking about getting the XPS 9650, is the guide in the beginning of this thread with the files still valid?

 

[sbeanie]

For anyone struggling to update to 13.1 I fixed a gIOLockScreenState boot display issue after applying the update by updating several kexts and rebuilding the kernel kext cache (I had to do this once booted to get display brightness working again).

I pretty much updated all the Lilu kexts that are in the kexts folder. https://github.com/vit9696/Lilu/blob/master/KnownPlugins.md

I've attached my clover folder (most up to date clover version as of writing) and have redacted several SMBIOS serial numbers. You will need to add yours back again.

 

[ferchizzle]

For anyone struggling to update to 13.1 I fixed a gIOLockScreenState boot display issue after applying the update by updating several kexts and rebuilding the kernel kext cache (I had to do this once booted to get display brightness working again).

I pretty much updated all the Lilu kexts that are in the kexts folder. https://github.com/vit9696/Lilu/blob/master/KnownPlugins.md

I've attached my clover folder (most up to date clover version as of writing) and have redacted several SMBIOS serial numbers. You will need to add yours back again.

@sbeanie thank you for posting. can you please tell me if you are using the DW1560 or DW1830 wifi card?

 

[sbeanie]

@sbeanie thank you for posting. can you please tell me if you are using the DW1560 or DW1830 wifi card?

The card is the DW1830 although I believe my setup should work for both. I have also just managed to get P-States correctly working as the Clover folder provided by this guide only provides half the solution. I'll post another post later regarding how I did this and attach my new Clover folder.

 

[blazinsmokey]

rebuilding the kernel kext cache (I had to do this once booted to get display brightness working again)

This is probably an important step people will need to do. I had no problems with updating, except having to do this. Maybe my lilu and plugins were already updated enough to handle the update without issues. Thanks for the tip.

 

[ferchizzle]

The card is the DW1830 although I believe my setup should work for both. I have also just managed to get P-States correctly working as the Clover folder provided by this guide only provides half the solution. I'll post another post later regarding how I did this and attach my new Clover folder.

@sbeanie Thank you for all of your contributions and the time you have put into this. I have been playing around with some of the configurations and did manage to get High Sierra installed. But was not seeing a 1.3GBps connection on 802.11ac using the two kext/lilu solutions discussed on earlier posts. At first, I thought it was hardware related. I then I did a clean install of Win10 on the same machine and after updating all the drivers, Win10 was showing a 1.3GBps connection. Have you seen/experienced the same issue with your build?

 

[sbeanie]

So here's my follow up post on how I got a full range of P-States to work on MacOS.

The guide provided does indeed tell MacOS to use P-States but it is using a subset of the available states and bottoms out at a 1.3GHz state. Following these steps will allow your CPU to drop to 0.8GHz leading to power savings.


Step 1:

Backup a file from a kext that we are about to overwrite. This file tells MacOS which power states it can use. Since it defaults to a subset, we want to override it to tell it to use more of them to help us achieve lower idle frequencies.

In the SMBIOS tab of CloverConfigurator, note down the Board-ID. For Macbook13,3 this is Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C. There is a corresponding file called Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C.plist in '/System/Library/Extensions/IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/X86PlatformPlugin.kext/Contents/Resources/'. Copy this file to a safe place. E.g.:

"sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/X86PlatformPlugin.kext/Contents/Resources/Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C.plist ~"

Step 2:

Clone https://github.com/Piker-Alpha/freqVectorsEdit.sh.git into a directory and run freqVectorsEdit.sh and choose the option corresponding to your SMBIOS board id. For me this was the option with Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C.plist. This will overwrite your file in the kext and trigger a kextcache update.

"./freqVectorsEdit.sh"

Step 3:

Once the command has exited, I chose to rerun the kextcache command to make sure it worked.

"sudo kextcache -i /"

Step 4:

Reboot. You should now have a working set of P-States. You can analyze this by using the AppleIntelInfo kext or IntelPowerGadget and you should see an idle frequency of around 800MHz.


CREDITS: Piker-Alpha for his awesome scripts!

 

[sbeanie]

@sbeanie Thank you for all of your contributions and the time you have put into this. I have been playing around with some of the configurations and did manage to get High Sierra installed. But was not seeing a 1.3GBps connection on 802.11ac using the two kext/lilu solutions discussed on earlier posts. At first, I thought it was hardware related. I then I did a clean install of Win10 on the same machine and after updating all the drivers, Win10 was showing a 1.3GBps connection. Have you seen/experienced the same issue with your build?

I've checked my transfer rate to my wireless network and MacOS reports a speed of 1170Mbps. I have not validated this value, however.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that my transfer rate and signal strength was significantly worse before installing the third antenna for the DW1830.