I have an 8300 with an i7-3770. Is the macmini6,1 still the best SMBIOS choice for me, or should I stick with iMac13,2? What if I want to add a Radeon RX580 and want full HEVC hardware acceleration — macmini6,1 or imac13,2 or imacpro1,1?
Thanks for the great guide!
Edit: It looks like if I choose imacpro1,1 and then inject imac13,2 frequency vectors via CPUFriend.kext I can get full hardware acceleration and proper CPU power management. Any downsides to this approach?
@Lonelytanker,
I don't have an i7-3770, so I can't give a very educated opinion if you want to
run your machine without a graphics card. This guide works out a lot of the issues
for a Macmini6,1 in that mode, and its not clear how an iMac13,2 as recommended
by the
@trs96 guides would compare. Sniki has settings for better HD4000 graphics in
the device properties and boot arguments of his sample config.plist.
Generally, it seems an iMac13,2 SMBIOS might be preferred if you are using an
Nvidia card, since they came with Nvidia graphics originally, and because you might
have Nivdia dGPU power management pre-configured. See Toleda's native dGPU power
management guide.
I think you only get HEVC hardware acceleration with an iMacPro1,1 or MacPro7,1 SMBIOS.
MacPro7,1 issues memory configuration error messages, although it seems to work ok.
Generally it seems the preferred mode for HEVC is with IGPU disabled. See shuhung's
Standalone RXXX guide for details, and he is the one who asserts the limitation on HEVC model
numbers.
To me its not clear what I get out of using CPUfriend. An older version of ssdtPRGen.sh complained
if you used an iMacPro1,1 SMBIOS with an Ivy processor, but the new version produces the
same file, without complaint with SMBIOS set to iMacPro1,1 whether you use the command
./ssdtPRGen.sh -b Mac-FC02E91DDD3FA6A4 -target 1 -t 77
or the command
./ssdtPRGen.sh -target 1 -t 77 -x 1.
It could be that I simply don't know how to use CPUfriend correctly, but these PRGen power management
ssdt's already give the minimum 1600 to the maximum turbo of 3600 (i5-3470) or 3800 (i5-3570).
I don't think you can get HWP working on the Ivy processors. If you get any CPUfriend benefits, please
let us know what to look for and how to accomplish it.
Another question you may encounter is setting up native power management for your RX580 with
iMacPro1,1. I'm using a modified dGPM.kext from Toleda with an added iMacPro1,1 IOkitpersonality
for my RX560 card. I'm not sure how much I'm getting out of it, but I can see Sony Food Fizzle cranking
up from an idle consumption of about 20W to 67W playing HEVC file Sony Food Fizzle.
You may want to use VideoProc cautiously, because it does not always give accurate reports whether
HEVC is working correctly. However, VideoProc gives higher (4K) resolution scores for me with an
iMacPro1,1 SMBIOS than for a MacMini or iMac13,2 profile in H264, and also 4K for HEVC.
Hope this helps,
Lisa