How to build your own iMac Pro [Successful Build/Extended Guide]

[kgp]

The real iMac Pro have some insane SSD speed (3.5GB/s read and write), iFixit tear down showed that for the 1TB option, they were using two 512GB SSD in RAID0.

If we could duplicate that setup that would be awesome

Well just go ahead.. Guess that's straight forward...

 

[RuleBreaker01]

Well just go ahead.. Guess that's straight forward...

I don't think so, does Apple have drivers for the Intel Raid (which is supported by the bios). I know Windows and Linux supports it.
And making it bootable is another thing

 

[kgp]

I don't think so, does Apple have drivers for the Intel Raid (which is supported by the bios). I know Windows and Linux supports it.
And making it bootable is another thing

You can create any NVMe soft raid with disk utility and it will double the transfar rate of the raid if you use two NVMes..

Don’t understand where are the problems you see. Guess your way of thinking is by far to complex and complicated ...

Well thinking in terms of a raid system disk, things indeed turn more difficult. You might indeed need a hardware raid. One needs to think about it in detail. But if that works on the iMac Pro, why not also on a hackintosh?

 

[RuleBreaker01]

You can create any NVMe soft raid with disk utility and it will double the transfar rate of the raid if you use two NVMes..

Don’t understand where are the problems you see. Guess your way of thinking is by far to complex and complicated ...

I have no use for a fast disk that I can't boot.
Create a RAID (or encrypted disk) with Disk Utility, but AFAIK, you can't boot a Core Storage based disk (not the way a real mac boot loader can..

So that leaves two possibility:
1- Find Intel RAID mac drivers
2- Implement a boot loader supporting Core Storage.

The later would be better, I could encrypt my disk once again...

 

[zzmadd]

Well, now that I'm testing I found that sleep doesn't work.
Basically as I click on sleep the machine dims the screen and after a little while goes into sleep
but then it awakens immediately, after a couple of seconds, on its own.
How can I fix it?
Thanks a lot.

 

[reitermarkus]

Hi all, new hackintosher here!

So I followed this guide and I can successfully boot from the USB installer. But then I am faced with extreme lag, to the point where it is completely unusable and freezes completely. It feels like I am missing something obvious. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Markus

 

[kgp]

I have no use for a fast disk that I can't boot.
Create a RAID (or encrypted disk) with Disk Utility, but AFAIK, you can't boot a Core Storage based disk (not the way a real mac boot loader can..

So that leaves two possibility:
1- Find Intel RAID mac drivers
2- Implement a boot loader supporting Core Storage.

The later would be better, I could encrypt my disk once again...

Well, please let me know once you found a solution..

Good luck,

KGP

 

[lajiyujian]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial. It seems that everything works fine except the GPU temperature. It seems that only two GPU fans are running even the temperature is running high. My initial thought is that the GPU sensors are not properly set up. I'm using the FakeSMC included in your EFI-X299-10.13.3-Release-iMacPro1,1-200218.zip. I only see the SSD temperature in HWSensor. So I tried download RehabMan-FakeSMC-2017-1017.zip and put FakeSMC_ACPISensors.kext, FakeSMC_CPUSensors.kext, FakeSMC_GPUSensors.kext, and FakeSMC_LPCSensors.kext into EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other/. But it caused a panic.

May I have your suggestions? Did I miss something regarding the GPU? Thanks a lot!

I installed 10.13.3 and graphic driver is 387.10.10.10.25.157.

My parts include:
Motherboard: ASUS rog strix x299-xe gaming
RAM: G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 64GB (4 x 16GB)
CPU: Intel Core i9-7900X
GPU: ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 1080 Ti O11G
Wifi & BT: Apple Broadcom BCM94360CD
CPU water cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H115i

 

[izo1]

Is there a way to enable F1/F2 on real Mac keyboard and real Mac display for brightness control without running Native Display Brightness Control app?

 

[izo1]

The real iMac Pro have some insane SSD speed (3.5GB/s read and write), iFixit tear down showed that for the 1TB option, they were using two 512GB SSD in RAID0.

If we could duplicate that setup that would be awesome

iMac Pro uses a new T2 chip which has a NVME controller and other things like image processor. I wouldn't recommend RAID0 even on SSD, there's twice the chance of failures. Most likely the T2 chip has some type of hardware error correction. You're not really going to feel the difference between 2.5GB/sec and 3.5GB/sec unless you're doing some major file transfers.

You are better off just getting a 960 Pro NVME drive instead and then just putting a cheap 2TB+ HDD in for hourly Time Machine backups.

I use an older 512GB AHCI 950 Samsung PCIe SSD (not even NVME) and it works perfectly fine. It's not as fast as a 960 Pro but it works well and I can open large files very quickly in Photoshop, etc. Even big red raw or uncompressed files have no problem playing back. I use a Hitachi Enterprise drive I got cheap off eBay from server pulls as a hourly Time Machine backup.