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

[ImaPirate]

Hello from Newb corner!

I just wanted to give a big thank you to kgp for the installation guide! I can safely say I would NEVER have managed to get it up and running without it...

I made the unwise decision to get the Asus X299-A motherboard, thinking that it would be "close enough" to his configuration and save a couple of hundred dollars... <blush> The guide has mostly worked for this motherboard, but I still have some things to iron out (audio... bluetooth...).

I did also notice that it won't boot when I use the Lilu.kext v1.2.1 -- once I went back to 1.1.7 it started booting happily again.

Thanks to everyone for all your time and great information!

- Nathan

Nathan, if you want to save a few bucks, just get it on eBay for $400. Some guy (who had it for $445 initially) is now selling it for $389.00 (+$12.00 for shipping). Offer him $385.00 (plus free shipping) and see what he says. That's what I did, I got mine for around that much and saved $$$. Just sayin'...

By the way, the Prime X299 Deluxe board and what KGP (and I) went through with the AORUS X299 Gaming 9 board was not good. Pretty glitchy board. But thanks to KGP and his trial and errors he's got close to perfect, it's a very stable system. In the end you may want to do the right thing and go that route. Also, if you have a new AMD Vega card, keep it! That works native to Mac OS X. I tried getting the nVidia drivers installed on my backup drive and booting from there and it's too much work to make make that happen. Then comes into question, what happens one day if nVidia stops supporting Apple's Mac OS X, then what? You're better off staying with a setup that is native to Mac OS X and it looks like Apple is going to stay with AMD with their new systems that they're going to be coming out with sometime in the first quarter of next year. Hope this info helps.

On a side note, all I have to do now is get Monoblock and the water blocks on the AMD Vega Frontier cards installed and put it all back together. I'm sure my CPU temps will increase some with the CPU and both GPUs, as they will be water cooled in one loop. That's okay. If I'm averaging around 32˚ to 34˚ that's pretty typical in a 72˚ room.

My only issue now is the when the monitors goes to sleep (as I have it set to 10 min if I'm not using the system while it's on), that sometimes when I get back on, the middle monitor doesn't wake up and then I have to unplug the DisplayPort and re-plug it and half the time it turns right back on the other time it doesn't. I then have to restart the system. Don't know if there's a work around on that, as I seem to be one of the only ones that is using 2 x Vega Frontier cards with 3 x 28" Asus 4K monitor setup. I just don't want to always keep the monitors on and burn-in whatever is on the screen or shorten the life of these monitors. Any input would be great. If not, such is a Hackintosh I guess?...

 

[kgp]

Thanks a lot @kgp and @paulotex and @mgregrs, I have checked C9 and worked it accordingly.

kgp, I have also checked your advice and have tried the old kext versions with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi, but I would not get to the +++++++++++++ section, so the kext's would not make that big difference anyways, I guess.

Anyways - now back to a working system. I tried Nvidia with their latest web driver version, but the system got unstable after 2 boots (boot freeze again), so there is something really wrong with the web drivers. I am back to Vega FE only in my system and everything works flawlessly. I will continue to report how stable the system is over the next couple of days and weeks, but it looks good so far.

Now I am on the dark side ^^ (AMD Vega). Nvidia Titan xP will be sold soon.

Again... THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ACTUAL WEB DRIVER!!!!

ENOUGH FRIENDS!!!

MOST OF THE LAST TWENTY POSTS HAVE BEEN FULL OF WRONG AND MISLEADING STATEMENTS AND COMMENTS!!!

PLEASE THINK BEFORE DISTRIBUTING UNQUALIFIED AND WRONG STATEMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS IN PUBLIC!!!

IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO PROPERLY CONFIGURE YOUR SYSTEM, DON'T BLAME OTHERS FOR YOUR PERSONAL INABILITY!!!

THANKS!

 

[vulgo]

Again... THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ACTUAL WEB DRIVER!!!!

ENOUGH FRIENDS!!!

MOST OF THE LAST TWENTY POSTS HAVE BEEN FULL OF WRONG AND MISLEADING STATEMENTS AND COMMENTS!!!

PLEASE THINK BEFORE DISTRIBUTING UNQUALIFIED AND WRONG STATEMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS IN PUBLIC!!!

IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO PROPERLY CONFIGURE YOUR SYSTEM, DON'T BLAME OTHERS FOR YOUR PERSONAL INABILITY!!!

THANKS!

Charming

 

[ImaPirate]

Charming

LOL! Is that what you said in all of your 1,387 posts so far?

 

[ImaPirate]

Thanks a lot @kgp and @paulotex and @mgregrs, I have checked C9 and worked it accordingly.

kgp, I have also checked your advice and have tried the old kext versions with the OsxAptioFix2Drv-64.efi, but I would not get to the +++++++++++++ section, so the kext's would not make that big difference anyways, I guess.

Anyways - now back to a working system. I tried Nvidia with their latest web driver version, but the system got unstable after 2 boots (boot freeze again), so there is something really wrong with the web drivers. I am back to Vega FE only in my system and everything works flawlessly. I will continue to report how stable the system is over the next couple of days and weeks, but it looks good so far.

Now I am on the dark side ^^ (AMD Vega). Nvidia Titan xP will be sold soon.

Funny, it's what I just stated right after your post. My thoughts are; stick to what is native to Mac OS X. Plus, this AMD Vega Frontier GPU is a great card. Works just as good for what you're getting. Again, here are my scores:

GeekBench Score: CPU: 60,558 / OpenCL: 163475 / Metal: 135176
Cinebench: CPU 4292 cb
LuxMark: 44,686 - CPU and GPUs

To me, this is a killer setup! I'm finally glad things are working and hope that it continues to give me years of use. I've also been able to break some Hackintosh Records finally; again thanks to KGP (and his awesome guide) and my to installer: Clover King Chris.

 

[paulotex]

I tried Nvidia with their latest web driver version, but the system got unstable after 2 boots (boot freeze again), so there is something really wrong with the web drivers.

Like @kgp, I also don't agree that the NVIDIA WebDrivers are faulty. I have the 1070 and it has been working very well for several hours of continuous work. I use CUDA for some of my work (hence the NVIDIA instead of AMD), and the drivers work just fine. And my system overall behaves very stable (with the core voltage adjusted manually, as I have said a few times already).

For example, I spent this weekend doing some intensive Matlab computations, that used all 8 cores for 10 min and then heavy I/O for 5 min. This simulation ran for 25 hours straight, producing 160GB of data. Then I used Paraview to visualize this, spending perhaps a couple of hours extracting features, scrolling through the 100 time slices (500MB per time slice), using several visualisation techniques (stream lines, line integral convolution, etc).

No issue whatsoever. Matlab did crash once because of a bug it has (reproducible on another machine that is different than this one), using up all the memory and spilling it to virtual memory, and then filling up the SSD with virtual memory. But the macOS caught this, killed Matlab, recovered the unused virtual memory files, and everything continued as expected, no need for reboot.

I am convinced that the X299 is very stable, and that the NVIDIA drivers are good. Very happy with the system.

Note that I went for a cheap route, I have the MSI SLI Plus as motherboard (less than £300) and the 7820X as CPU (£500). But even under these limited conditions, the system is very stable.

And in case anyone is interested, my GPU scores with the GFX 1070 are:

Geekbench OpenCL: 139184
Cinebench: 135.3
LuxMark OpenCL Luxball HDR:17372
Unigen Heaven Extreme 2560x1440 fullscreen: 1753 (69.6FPS)

 

[ImaPirate]

Like @kgp, I also don't agree that the NVIDIA WebDrivers are faulty. I have the 1070 and it has been working very well for several hours of continuous work. I use CUDA for some of my work (hence the NVIDIA instead of AMD), and the drivers work just fine. And my system overall behaves very stable (with the core voltage adjusted manually, as I have said a few times already).

For example, I spent this weekend doing some intensive Matlab computations, that used all 8 cores for 10 min and then heavy I/O for 5 min. This simulation ran for 25 hours straight, producing 160GB of data. Then I used Paraview to visualize this, spending perhaps a couple of hours extracting features, scrolling through the 100 time slices (500MB per time slice), using several visualisation techniques (stream lines, line integral convolution, etc).

No issue whatsoever. Matlab did crash once because of a bug it has (reproducible on another machine that is different than this one), using up all the memory and spilling it to virtual memory, and then filling up the SSD with virtual memory. But the macOS caught this, killed Matlab, recovered the unused virtual memory files, and everything continued as expected, no need for reboot.

I am convinced that the X299 is very stable, and that the NVIDIA drivers are good. Very happy with the system.

Note that I went for a cheap route, I have the MSI SLI Plus as motherboard (less than £300) and the 7820X as CPU (£500). But even under these limited conditions, the system is very stable.

And in case anyone is interested, my GPU scores with the GFX 1070 are:

Geekbench OpenCL: 139184
Cinebench: 135.3
LuxMark OpenCL Luxball HDR:17372
Unigen Heaven Extreme 2560x1440 fullscreen: 1753 (69.6FPS)

That's great especially using a 1070 card. I realize why nVidia made drivers for Apple, it was (like it always has been) about money. They know Apple MacPro users (and guys like us) are using them in their builds. I already talked to somebody that knows that "inside" info, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist (sorry KGP) to know that anyway.

I like nVidia and wanted to use both my Titan X (Maxwell) cards but it's just too many hoops to jump through and for what I need it for (using Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Indesign and a little of Premiere Pro), the computational rendering pull the Vega Frontier cards are basically the same as the 1080 Ti's. Heck I had a water blocked 1080 Ti that I just sold because the Vega's just worked right out the of the box, no issues.

Whatever you guys choose and how they meet your needs is what matters. I just want to use 3 x 28" 4K monitors and nVidia just won't cut it with this (or any particular Hackintosh setup at the moment) and I've waited long enough (3 years) to get this to work. I'm just glad it finally working!

 

[ImaPirate]

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[ImaPirate]

Hey have you tried the 10.13.2? My vega GPU scores are 20 to 30% better and no GPU crashes now. Benchmarks are pretty well the same as Windows. So they're making progress on getting the drivers more mature.

Isn’t that the beta version? If it is I’m going to wait until they actually come out with the full updated version before I decide to do that. I just want to make sure. But thank you for letting me know I appreciate that.

 

[felipeip]

I have the gtGTXx 980 Ti and I can not boot with UniBeast, any ideas?