Haswell-E + X99 Motherboard Temporary Guide - OS X 10.9.4 / 10.9.5

[Manic Harmon1c]

hi guys !

dont want to polute the debate so i'll be straight :

i've seen that some of the X99 mobo can run XEON E5 V3 , do you think it is possible that the hack would work with those ? not that i'm looking for more speed, but it looks that you could possiblely have way more ram.... and by extension should dual processor mobo such as super micro X10 AI with thunderbolt header should work?

is it true that as long as the list of component of the mobo are known, it's just a matter of loading the right Kext for those component, or is there any trick in the bios that could possibly prevent OSX installation such as not being a EFI bios?

the board would have to have the microcodes for Xeon processors, most of them should but I don't know if all of them do. Unless you get a board with more than 8 RAM slots (none of the X99 boards do, not sure about the server boards), you won't be able to have more than 64GB RAM at this time until some 16GB sticks are released, in which case you could have 128GB of RAM. Most of the X99 boards will support that when it's available, regardless of what CPU you use. No idea about the SuperMicro board, nobody has tried one yet so it might be a gamble on whether or not it would work. In theory, yes it should work as long as the individual components are compatible, but seeing as how there are various problems with booting on the enthusiast X99 boards (Legacy bootloaders not booting from internal drive, Clover not booting at all on some boards, etc.) who knows what problems you could run into with the SuperMicro.

Unless you really need more than 8 cores, you're better of with a regular Haswell-E processor IMO. If you do need more than that, I know some of the X99 boards claim to have Xeon support. The Asus X99-E WS has support for up to a 14-core Xeon, the ASRock boards have support for up to 18-core Xeons listed.

If you want to run a Xeon you might as well go with something like an Asus X79-E WS and the previous gen Xeon since power management will be supported.

 

[festr2]

Haswell-E i7 can handle 64GB ram (max) there is no point to put E5 to X99 motherboards.

 

[samtimbaud]

Jamie, stinga, tony,
Do you know if a kernel support already exist for Yosemite on Haswell-e ?

 

[trs96]

Jamie, stinga, tony,
Do you know if a kernel support already exists for Haswell-e in Yosemite ?

That's still under NDA as of today. We should all know by the time Yosemite is
released for download by the general public in the MAS. Maybe later this week ?

 

[samtimbaud]

That's still under NDA as of today. We should all know by the time Yosemite is
released for download by the general public in the MAS. Maybe later this week ?

Ok thank you

 

[festr2]

ok well I have now almost perfect setup with the asus X99-A and haswell-E i7 but two outstanding issues which I'm not able to help myself yet -

1) sleep/wakeup - sometimes it wakesup sometimes it does not. I'm not sure if it might be related to overclock so I will try to make it default and report but I think it is not since the windows 8.1 does not have issues

2) power management / performance - I had to install null cpu power management kext and disable speedstep to get the best performance so the macos is not changing the overclocked values and I'm able to get 4000 number in geebanch. But this is probably not energy efficient since I do not need to have 4ghz on all 6 cores all the time. Is there any recommendation on this? (tweak bios - but how?) remove nullcpupowermngmt? c states / p states?

 

[Manic Harmon1c]

ok well I have now almost perfect setup with the asus X99-A and haswell-E i7 but two outstanding issues which I'm not able to help myself yet -

1) sleep/wakeup - sometimes it wakesup sometimes it does not. I'm not sure if it might be related to overclock so I will try to make it default and report but I think it is not since the windows 8.1 does not have issues

2) power management / performance - I had to install null cpu power management kext and disable speedstep to get the best performance so the macos is not changing the overclocked values and I'm able to get 4000 number in geebanch. But this is probably not energy efficient since I do not need to have 4ghz on all 6 cores all the time. Is there any recommendation on this? (tweak bios - but how?) remove nullcpupowermngmt? c states / p states?

Is C1E enabled in the BIOS? I don't remember if C1E still works with speedstep disabled but if it does then the CPU would still be able to use the lowest state.

I'm pretty sure the reason speedstep hurts performance right now is just because it's not able to use any frequencies between 4 GHz and 1.2 GHz, so it's stepping down to 1.2 at some point during Geekbench. I would say this isn't a big deal except it has the potential to cause dropouts in DAWs. What are you using your hack for, are you using it for DAWs?

Install Intel power gadget with Pacifist and see if it's stepping down to 1.2 with speedstep disabled.

 

[festr2]

so it should all work out of the box? the macos is able to use turboboost etc?

 

[Manic Harmon1c]

so it should all work out of the box? the macos is able to use turboboost etc?

Pretty sure turbo boost is working, it doesn't really matter if you're overclocked though.

 

[festr2]

Pretty sure turbo boost is working, it doesn't really matter if you're overclocked though.

I thought that some special kexts / ssdt etc. shoudl be installed? I had only 3000 points in the cpu benchmark so I had to overclocked to 4ghz to get 4000 score. And the speedstep was enabled as well as the turbo. I also now have cpu null powermanagement which I presume should remove and try again to not overclock and just see if the turbo boost work? I managed to manually install intel power gadget and I can see cpu frequency which is now on the overclocked 4ghz - though the power conspumption is lying because I see 0.9W used. But the cpu clock and temperature seems to work.