[Guide] El Capitan on the Skylake H170N-WIFI

[SimbaLion]

Couple questions:

1) If I want to install Windows on a different drive, will that be a big deal...is there a guide on doing that? (Can that drive be a NVMe drive if I might want to use it under Parallels?)

2) iMessage working fine for you?

3) Are you using ethernet at all? Or are you just using wifi until the 219 drivers are ready? Can you add a different ethernet card to the board and have ethernet working?

4) Hmmm, now that I look at parts more...are there any PCIe x4 M.2 drives that are actually not NVMe that are still 2000+ in performance?

Thanks! I'm sure I'm have more questions, but those are the ones that still are a bit unclear to me after pouring over pages and pages of these forums.

 

[McEntosh]

Here's how those things work on my build, which was surprisingly painless:

1) Have Windows 10 installed on a separate drive. Have set my OS X / Clover drive to be the boot drive and just choose from there. Issue: it seems a UEFI boot drive is added with each boot (have like 30 now in my BIOS boot order)

2) iMessage and all iCloud-related worked "out of the box" just using ammulder's guide (except Keychain, which hasn't carried over)

3) I'm using Ethernet on the Z170N-WiFi right now. Issue: it doesn't reactivate after sleep or logging out of the user account. Also seems to stop working now and then.

 

[busanut]

I have been using the attached kext by hnak and alreadystarted for the i219 ethernet and haven't had any issues except for no ethernet when waking up from sleep.
I have found when using the Mausi and AppleIGB kexts I get a lot of disconnections and kernel panics at startup.

 

[ammulder]

1) If I want to install Windows on a different drive, will that be a big deal...is there a guide on doing that? (Can that drive be a NVMe drive if I might want to use it under Parallels?)

2) iMessage working fine for you?

3) Are you using ethernet at all? Or are you just using wifi until the 219 drivers are ready? Can you add a different ethernet card to the board and have ethernet working?

4) Hmmm, now that I look at parts more...are there any PCIe x4 M.2 drives that are actually not NVMe that are still 2000+ in performance?

1) It's reportedly easier with separate drives, if you install them one at a time (disconnect the other during the install). You probably want to also apply all pending OS updates on each side before connecting both drives, because I think some of the early ones mucked with the boot setup. Anyway, I just haven't done it that way myself so I don't have a detailed procedure.

2) No. But I have done a lot of crazy stuff with this machine, so I could easily have generated a too-many-configurations-for-this-ID sort of alert. I did eventually ensure that all the settings are stable across boots and I get a consistent customer iD in the failure message, but I haven't bothered to call Apple to get it fixed. Probably you should not take my experience as representative.

3) There are some i219 Ethernet drivers posted now, which I would consider "beta" releases. Reportedly the Mausi driver is the better of the two. So far I've been using Wi-Fi only. You can only add a PCIe Ethernet card on this board if you don't use a GPU, which I would not recommend. A USB3 Ethernet device should work fine if the Mausi driver doesn't work for you and you want better than WiFi speed or whatever.

4) I think the fastest are the Samsung SM951 AHCI and Kingston HyperX Predator. I think the Samsung has higher sequential rates, but I saw a review showing the Kingston was better in other regards. Bottom line they're both fast. As far as I know OS X won't see a non-Apple NVMe drive *at all*, so I don't think Parallels will see it either. Probably that will be fixed as soon as the right person looks at it in depth, but so far it doesn't seem like that's happened. I will say, I'm not sure the price/performance is there on these drives -- an 850 EVO m.2 is cheaper for twice the capacity, and it's not THAT much slower.

 

[SimbaLion]

Cool! I'm almost set on getting up the courage to do this.

So are you guys just setting it to not sleep so ethernet doesn't die? Might a hitch for me as I do like setting a computer to sleep...

It's kinda funny that I'm even doing this, as I was set to get an iMac...but Apple's continuing decisions to gouge the customers on storage options made me look at alternatives!

 

[McEntosh]

I just installed the IntelMausiEthernet.kext using Easykext Utility and plugged in my Ethernet in the plug next to the audio outlets. Just brought the computer out of sleep and Ethernet works! Still early days, so I may encounter bugs, but so far so good.

 

[SimbaLion]

Does the brand of RAM matter at all?

 

[ammulder]

No.

 

[Ailment]

Just wanted to say thanks for this guide, really helping me along with my first build. I have the z170n Gaming 5, so not exact same thing but I am working on getting it up and running. I got the install USB finally setup but am hung there at the moment. I do not have a "supported" way of running unibeast so I had to manually install clover so I am probably just missing some things that unibeast would have done for me. Anyway...rambling, with the amount of times I have looked over this guide in the last few days I figured I owe you some props, so thanks again.

 

[ammulder]

Just wanted to note that I've upgraded to 10.11.2 with no problems (though I did need to update the Nvidia Web driver and re-apply the AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy fix).