Hack Pro w/ Xeon E3, Asus P8C WS and ECC RAM

[sebideluxe]

Hi Everyone,

I am planning on a Hackintosh Pro Workstation with a Xeon E3-1245V2.
My preffered board would be the ASUS P8C WS (C216), but as I read here, there are problems with ASUS UEFI boards.
I could not find a gigabyte board that supports ECC RAM, my second choice would be the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP4 TH (no ECC support).

Could anyone clarify what difficulties would arise in building a osx 10.8. hackintosh based on the Asus board in comparison to the gigabyte board?

Thanks!

 

[pwalth21]

There are a few options to use the ASUS boards.

The ways to sort this are to use one of these options:
1. use nullcpupowermanagement (also included in easybeast)
2. use a patched appleintelcpupowermanagement.kext
3. flash a modified bios

The flashed bios are here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/dsdt/43486-asus-1155-patched-bios-repository.html
The board you are looking at doesn't seem to have one. Depending on what you plan to use it for though, one of the other options may work just fine. I'm sure you know this already, but just wanted to confirm that you realized that the Xeon chips don't have graphics built in and so you must have a graphics card.

 

[sebideluxe]

Thank you pwalth21.

I read about nullcpupowermanagement, but I try to avoid that since the CPU will run @100% all the time (as I understood it).
That leads to unecessary energy waste and will heat up the case which leads to noise (which I hate).

So 2.) and (if it can be done) 3.) seems to be my options.
If anyone can point me to a patched appleintelcpupowermanagement.kext or a patched UEFI version, I would be grateful.

The XEON ending on '5' have indeed integrated graphics as can be checked on http://ark.intel.com/de/products/65729/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1245V2-(8M-Cache-3_40-GHz). It has the Intel HD Graphics P4000.

 

[Thinkcat]

Did this build go anywhere?

I'm asking because I am planning something along these lines, but all information I can gather seems to lead nowhere.

 

[sebideluxe]

Hi,

this build ended up with a Gigabyte GA-z77x-up5 TH and a xeon E3-1245v2.

I had to give up on ECC, since I didn't like the idea of "hacked" uefi which I did not know would work.
The only thing I am using now is "FakeSMC". Thats it, everything else works out of the box.
No, hacking any .kext, no hacked UEFI.
But OSX 10.8. does not boot if you activate Vt-d. So no real virtualization is possible, one of the reasons i bought that xeon.

 

[Bimmer325Ci]

Hi,

this build ended up with a Gigabyte GA-z77x-up5 TH and a xeon E3-1245v2.

I had to give up on ECC, since I didn't like the idea of "hacked" uefi which I did not know would work.
The only thing I am using now is "FakeSMC". Thats it, everything else works out of the box.
No, hacking any .kext, no hacked UEFI.
But OSX 10.8. does not boot if you activate Vt-d. So no real virtualization is possible, one of the reasons i bought that xeon.

No real virtualization because VT-d is disabled??? All you need for VM's is VT-x (Virtualization Technology) enabled in BIOS, VT-d is just an extension of VT-x, which under OS X, has no need to be enabled, because there are no programs that support it.

 

[Thinkcat]

As far as I know, there has been support for VT-d in VMWare Fusion for some time now. A reason why they are also adding it to Parallels Desktop. At least according to a discussion I stumbled upon in Parallels' forum.

 

[Bimmer325Ci]

As far as I know, there has been support for VT-d in VMWare Fusion for some time now. A reason why they are also adding it to Parallels Desktop. At least according to a discussion I stumbled upon in Parallels' forum.

Not true, at least on the OS X side. I have both programs and there are no options for VT-d, plus I contacted their customer support regarding VT-d, as of now, they are not supporting VT-d on OS X. I wish they would, I'm a ESXi System Administrator at work, get to use there everyday, wish I could use it at home with OS X, I would add a second Video card, assign it to the VM and have hardware acceleration with in the VM. No reason to reboot into Windows then!!!! As of now, can only dream.....

 

[sebideluxe]

I would add a second Video card, assign it to the VM and have hardware acceleration with in the VM. No reason to reboot into Windows then!!!! As of now, can only dream.....

I was even hoping to run the vmware hypervisor 5.1 on bare metal and install osx in a VM, but that is not supported
But your idea sounds good, too. Since I already have two GPUs (HD4000 and GTX680).

 

[fisherwei]

I want to build a xeon-base and without graphics card hackintosh, but P4000 seems cannot active qe/ci in os x.

In your hackintosh, which GPU is using? HD P4000(xeon 1245v2) or gtx680??
Is QE/CI working OK?