i7 3930K LGA 2011 Processor

[seedl0r]

I was stable - ran prime95 in windows for 2 hours and had it running at 4.2 in OSX under general use for almost 24 hours. Rebooted one time and the BIOS reported failure to overclock and it was downhill from there.

I'm using the P9X79 Pro board with G.Skillz Ripjawz 16GB RAM in a 4x4 config.

Also bizarrely just now OSX is refusing to mount a DVD that mounts just fine in Windows....

I've noticed that my asus p9x79 pro also randomly sometimes does the 'failed to overclock' and resets the clock to something lower.. just wondering do you have tpu on or off ?

I had mine in turbo mode last night and it hit 4.2 without me really having to do anything.. but then this morning had that same error and went back to 3.3.

 

[Octavean]

I’m still waiting for the C2 stepping of the Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 3930K before jumping in. However, even now its hard to find the Core i7 3930K anywhere in stock. Plenty of Core i7 3960X chips going for ~$1000+ though. About ~$600 is my limit for the CPU though, even though every review I have read says the price of the 3930K should be ~$555 USD not ~$600.

 

[maleorderbride]

I confirm stability through 12-18 hours of IntelBurnTest on Maximum. 2 hours of Prime95 does nothing unless you are running at least 12 instances of it and allocate the threads manually.

Your overclock was probably just unstable.

Turbo Boost is part of native power management, which does not work in OS X yet. Set the BIOS to run at 45x (or whatever overclock) and disabled all energy saving features in the BIOS so that it always runs at that speed.

I could boot into OS X at 4.9GHz, but did not have stability with decent temperatures at anything above 4.55GHz.

 

[dashbad]

I confirm stability through 12-18 hours of IntelBurnTest on Maximum. 2 hours of Prime95 does nothing unless you are running at least 12 instances of it and allocate the threads manually.

Your overclock was probably just unstable.

Turbo Boost is part of native power management, which does not work in OS X yet. Set the BIOS to run at 45x (or whatever overclock) and disabled all energy saving features in the BIOS so that it always runs at that speed.

I could boot into OS X at 4.9GHz, but did not have stability with decent temperatures at anything above 4.55GHz.

I figured as much - but was confused by the fact that you need turbo enabled in order to be able to overclock.

Did you change the voltages or just adjust the multiplier?

 

[ybott]

I figured as much - but was confused by the fact that you need turbo enabled in order to be able to overclock

Could you elaborate on that? I've found better overclock stability in the past in OS x (x58 build) by having turbo disabled. I got higher overclocks, but then again I've just realised a 4.5ghz overclock with turbo enabled could be better than a 5ghz overclock with turbo disabled. What are the numbers here exactly?

Thanks,

 

[dashbad]

I figured as much - but was confused by the fact that you need turbo enabled in order to be able to overclock

Could you elaborate on that? I've found better overclock stability in the past in OS x (x58 build) by having turbo disabled. I got higher overclocks, but then again I've just realised a 4.5ghz overclock with turbo enabled could be better than a 5ghz overclock with turbo disabled. What are the numbers here exactly?

Thanks,

Its a requirement of X79 that turbo be enabled to OC. You can OC by adjusting BCLK but you can only adjust the turbo multiplier if you want to go that route.

 

[maleorderbride]

I was just using x45 for the multiplier in OS X.

I have since built another box with just Windows (same motherboard/CPU) and used a BCLK of 130x35. That seemed to run slightly cooler than using a x46 multipler. I believe it was 1.34 under load after Vdroop.

And yes, you have to leave turbo enabled and then disable the other energy saving features. Benchmarks were as I reported in my original post.

If you do not have Speedstep disabled then it runs at the default clock and never turbos up, so you end up with a 9.6 or so on Cinbench. I also mention this in my original post.

 

[ybott]

Is there any reason 130x35 wouldn't work with OS X?

 

[ybott]

WOOOO! I'm writing this from my 3960X build! (P9X79 WS)

After checking AHCI was enabled and disabling CPU power management (C-states) in the BIOS, I did a clean install using tonymac's UniBeast (THANK YOU!), upon restart I ran Multibeast 4.1.0 and selected;

System Utilities>Repair Permissions
Drivers & Bootloaders>Graphics>NVIDIA GF100 Fermi Patches>OpenCL Enabler 10.7.2
Drivers & Bootloaders>Miscellaneous>FakeSMC
Drivers & Bootloaders>Miscellaneous>NullCPUManagement
Drivers & Bootloaders>Bootloaders>Chimera v1.6.0 r1394
Customisation>Boot Options>64-bit Apple Boot Screen
Customisation>Boot Options>PCI Configuration Fix
Customisation>Boot Options>Use KernelCache
Customisation>System Definitions>iMac>iMac 12,1
OSx86 Software>Kext Utility
OSx86 Software>ShowAllFiles

After a couple rest restarts I decided to OC by just turning on XMP and changing the (turbo) multiplier to 45 and I just got a GeekBench score of 21,872!! (attached) AMAZING!

Sound is not working (going to work on that now) and I need to test ethernet...and of course power management (sleep) isn't working.

EDIT, here is my org.chameleon.Boot.plist;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>npci=0x2000 darkwake=0</string>
<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>2</string>
<key>Legacy Logo</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>UseKernelCache</key>
<string>Yes</string>
</dict>
</plist>

and my smbios.plist;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>SMfamily</key>
<string>iMac</string>
<key>SMproductname</key>
<string>iMac12,1</string>
<key>SMboardproduct</key>
<string>Mac-942B5BF58194151B</string>
<key>SMserial</key>
<string>C02F93FQQH2G</string>
<key>SMbiosversion</key>
<string>MultiBeast.tonymacx86.com</string>
</dict>
</plist>

 

[ybott]

Still going strong! I have now followed maleorderbride's method for enabling network and audio and a few cosmetic tweaks.

Since the above post have added the following to S/L/E

-AHCI_3rdParty_SATA.kext (makes SATA disks appear as internal)
-AppleHDADisabler.kext (disables any HDA)
-AppleIntelE1000e.kext (enables ethernet/network)
-PXHCD.kext (enables USB3 chipset)

I also followed the http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index. ... pic=263819 guide and used the 'VoodooLoader Installer' app (that maleorderbride shared on page 10 of this thread).

This is all working great with a GTX 285, so I'm now moving on to getting a GTX 570 to work! I'm going to try a simple solution for that first, the GTX enabler package mentioned on http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index ... 7.2#NVIDIA, http://www.mediafire.com/?92i32u5vcze4oci)

Boot times are slower now though (since adding the new kexts above). Any ideas why that is? I may boot in verbose to see but now onto the 570!

Thanks everyone.