[Guide] El Capitan on the Skylake Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac

[flok3r]

Any progress on the sleep/wake issue?
This is a deal-breaker for me. What could be causing this issue?

Anyhow, big thanks for your great tutorials ammulder!

 

[Badeendje]

The half-memory thing happened to me too. When I put the detailed memory settings into the SMBIOS, that fixed it. But you need to fill out all the fields -- just make something up for any that you're not sure about (vendor, model, serial).

There's a sample of the whole memory settings block in Section 3 of the http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capitan-desktop-guides/179221-skylake-starter-guide.html

Yeah, I actually found out the hard way by plain trying, was nothing te be found on it. On a hunch started to adding info and behold I got 8GB again but for 1 stick.... turned out the ports are 0 and 2 instead of 0 and 1.

Another fun thing; I don't need to exclude USB ports; they all seem to work fine when using the .aml from this topic; http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capitan-desktop-guides/179221-skylake-starter-guide.html (I now see it's yours ).
All but the internal headers are tested and working, also can't test the 3.1c port yet. But at some point I was planning using that internal header for an apple branded bluetooth 4.0 stick (one of those cheap eBay ones with just the BT part working of some macbook module). I actually have a frontpanel connector ready for testing those 2 ports with the module a bit later on.

Apart from sleep (haven't tried looking into it yet) (doesn't that bios pmpatch work or whatever t's called?) everything seem to work and also work really well at that... just struggling finding a good heatsink that fits both my case and the asrock. The Noctua NH-C14 doesn't make a good fit... now using an intel stock cooler temporally.

Also using a 960 btw, this setup was expensive as it is already but would have loved to get me a 970... with a 75 euro rebate the 960 was just to good not to go for. Parallels still doesn't do dx11 so I guess OSX wise I'm settled now. Oh and I'm working on a little something for the wifi so stay tuned for that... might take a while though.

 

[ammulder]

Any progress on the sleep/wake issue?
This is a deal-breaker for me. What could be causing this issue?

I haven't tried much, because I leave the machine on all the time. I can check again after the holidays.

Normally a crash like I originally saw is caused by a driver problem, though sometimes ACPI settings can contribute to it by making the machine do things the driver doesn't expect. I haven't tried on 10.11.2 with the latest Ethernet drivers, so it might be resolved.

 

[flok3r]

I haven't tried much, because I leave the machine on all the time. I can check again after the holidays.

I'm looking forward to it!
I would be happy to replace my GA Z170N Wifi, which started crashing and bootlooping lately..
Did you have similar instabilities with your H170N? Seems to be quite common among these models.

 

[ammulder]

Well, I tried a sleep/wake and it crashed. It seemed to partly wake -- the monitor sync'ed to a resolution though all it showed was black -- then when I hit some keys on the keyboard it rebooted with a vague and generic kernel panic. I would want to play around with some BIOS settings a bit before giving up on it.

The system as a whole uses very little power when idle, perhaps 5W including the video card, so you could use it without sleep/wake, so long as it's not a noise issue.

My H170N-WIFI hasn't given me any problems. I like the future potential of this (ASRock) board a bit more, with HDMI 2.0 and the Z chipset instead of H, but I find both quite usable.

 

[einz]

Long time lurker, first time asking for help publicly. I tried following the guide to the exact letter, but when I try booting Clover, it says "This version of Mac OS X is not supported on this platform!"
Any ideas/help for the newbie?

 

[flok3r]

Well, I tried a sleep/wake and it crashed. It seemed to partly wake -- the monitor sync'ed to a resolution though all it showed was black -- then when I hit some keys on the keyboard it rebooted with a vague and generic kernel panic. I would want to play around with some BIOS settings a bit before giving up on it.

I'd greatly appreciate that, before blindly buying this board! Can you post the panic, if it isn't totally useless?

The system as a whole uses very little power when idle, perhaps 5W including the video card, so you could use it without sleep/wake, so long as it's not a noise issue.

This is astonishing, what is the idle consumption of your h170n setup?
My z170n takes a lot more..

My H170N-WIFI hasn't given me any problems. I like the future potential of this board a bit more, with HDMI 2.0 and the Z chipset instead of H, but I find both quite usable.

Good point, maybe I should just try a RMA..

 

[ammulder]

Long time lurker, first time asking for help publicly. I tried following the guide to the exact letter, but when I try booting Clover, it says "This version of Mac OS X is not supported on this platform!"

Are you booting from the USB install drive or booting the copy of OS X that you already installed? You should have selected UEFI install in UniBeast or MultiBeast. I would try using the BIOS hotkey to select a boot device and select UEFI:YourBootDevice from the list to be sure.

 

[einz]

Are you booting from the USB install drive or booting the copy of OS X that you already installed? You should have selected UEFI install in UniBeast or MultiBeast. I would try using the BIOS hotkey to select a boot device and select UEFI:YourBootDevice from the list to be sure.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was able to get all the way to "Install El Capitan" portion of the guide, and I get stuck on step 2. I created UEFI install with UniBeast, am able to see the USB thumbdrive under UEFI boot, and can get to the Clover boot menu. It gives me UEFI External device as the only boot option, and when I select that it pops up with the error message.

 

[ammulder]

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was able to get all the way to "Install El Capitan" portion of the guide, and I get stuck on step 2. I created UEFI install with UniBeast, am able to see the USB thumbdrive under UEFI boot, and can get to the Clover boot menu. It gives me UEFI External device as the only boot option, and when I select that it pops up with the error message.

OK, so if I understand this correctly, you:

1. Confirmed that the BIOS is configured to boot UEFI only or UEFI and Legacy
2. Re-partitioned your USB drive as GPT with format Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
3. Ran UniBeast 6.0.1
4. Selected El Capitan and UEFI install in UniBeast and completed the install
5. Plugged in the USB drive
6. Used your BIOS hotkey to select a boot device
7. Selected UEFI:YourUSBDrive from the BIOS boot menu
8. Got a Clover Menu with the option to Boot Mac OS X from YourUSBDrive

If that's all right, hit space bar from the Clover menu, select verbose boot, and post a photo of where it stops or the error it's giving you.