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i7-4770K and z87x-u5dh build freezing

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I exchanged the motherboard (thanks Amazon!) for a new one.

Since the reinstall 3 days ago, not a single lockup (knock on wood). I've been running BOINC tasks on the OS X side continuously, and booted over to Win7 for a few hours worth of Black Ops 2 (I figure those are decent workouts).

Hope it's just that I got a bad board to start with. Of note, the new board came with F7 BIOS preinstalled - my first one (delivered mid-December) showed up with F5.

I'll come back and update if the thing craps the bed again, but so far so good. If it starts happening again while I'm still in my return window, I'll probably just ship it back and go find a UD3H since people seem to be having much better luck with that model.
 
Thought I'd come back and update the continuing tale of woe that is the GA-Z87-UD5H.

After installing the second UD5H, things went well for a couple of weeks - one or two complete system lockups in OS X, none in Win7.

After that, I pulled two of the DIMMs, which seemed to eliminate the lockups (as others have indicated has worked with the Z87-UD5H). Stable for a few days, and then two of the USB ports quit working.

At this point I managed to resist the impulse to rip the board out and throw it out a window, and instead exchanged it for an ASUS Z87-PRO. Formatted and modified my EFI partition to allow the ASUS BIOS to boot it (per the helpful instructions here on tonymacx86) before I did the exchange, and no problems there.

Since then I've had no issues in Win7, but two lockups in OS X. After the first I memtest'ed my memory again (clean) and swapped out the power supply (the only hardware component that hadn't been swapped). So that didn't make a difference.

At this point, I'm down to suspecting a kext somewhere. As long as the freezes don't get too frequent, I guess it's tolerable. But this second hackintosh build sure has been a crap show.
 
I've the same mb and I think the problem is lan related not ram related, I ordered a sonnet pciex lan card that is oob compatible with macosx and when It arrive I'll disable the onboard pan card and I'll see what happen..

.
 
Hey everyone, just thought I'd drop in my 2 cents. I have the same board with all RAM slots filled (32 gb Corsair Vengeance, though it does state that it is running @1333Mhz) and have never had any issue with freezing. I stumbled upon this thread and thought it might be worth noting. I bought my ud5h back in Oct '13 and it has been running seamlessly ever since. Sounds like it might be a run of bad boards through Gigabyte, perhaps.
 
Greetings Hackintosh enthusiasts,

I'm a proud owner of i7-4770K & GA-z87x-u5dh build and have (same as most of you) battled with system instability in the form of constant freezes while trying to make the Hack work with 4x8GB of RAM. I'm writing this post as my own tribute to this issue and hope you'll have some use of my experience in making your Hacks behave like they should :)

The build
My system is running Mavericks 10.9.2 which was a clean install (latest Mavericks version from AppStore at the time) on mentioned CPU&MBO combo accompanied by GeForce GTX 770 4GB (Gainward Phantom II), 4x8GB Kingston HyperX Blu 1600 MHz RAM and Samsung 840 PRO 256GB SDD. Important info to mention is that my RAM is not marked as Intel XMP-compliant and was not a part of some memory KIT - each stick was sold individually - you can find exact specs here. My MBO was flashed to the latest BIOS version - F9.

The issue
OSX install & post-install (Multibeast) was done 'by-the-book' and went without issues.
Later on I started experiencing system freezes (image was on the screen but everything else was dead) mostly under little load - e.g. during web browsing, youtube watching, etc. They would occur randomly from like 2 seconds of uptime to 12 hours of uptime - obviously no rule here and clearly not related to system load/temperatures/whatever.

Diagnosis
As I stated earlier this issue is not related to system load nor temperatures so could it be caused by the OS? Definitely NOT. How am I so sure, you ask? At one (lucky?) moment my system froze while I was in BIOS and that gave it away. Such freezes are 99% of times related to faulty/wrongly-configured RAM.

The hope
I decided to load fail-safe BIOS options and start my machine with default memory settings (1333MHz, latencies at 9-9-9-24 & voltage set to 1.5V). I've tested the system using Prime95's 'Torture' test and it finished with flying colors while showing zero errors! At that point I knew my RAM is not faulty but 'temperamental' and only needs to be 'tuned-up' properly to work at factory-declared speeds (1600MHz) as it clearly needed more 'juice' to provide my goal frequency.

The solution
Once again I've bumped-up RAM to 1600 MHz by setting up it's multiplier to 16 with XMP turned off BUT this time I've set up latencies manually to 10-10-10-27 (which was declared by the manufacturer for 1600MHz) AND bumped-up RAM voltage to 1.55V - that's +0.5 from what manufactured stated to be enough to operate at this frequency. Last but not the least you should completely TURN OFF the machine after BIOS save and give it a 30 seconds rest before switching it back on (I have initially only restarted and RAM settings remained unchanged!!!).

The confirmation
Once again I fired-up Prime95 & initiated Torture test (which particularly stresses the RAM) while having opened 10 youtube videos (lasting for 100 hours - e.g. Nyan cat :)) in multiple browsers, running RAR compression on 200GB of images and playing 2 BlueRay videos at the same time. All of that skyrocketed CPU usage to 100% and it's temperatures reached almost 100 Degs. After 4 hours of this torture everything was still running without a glitch and at that point I decided to open a beer :)
Feeling nicely refreshed and optimistic I went to sleep. Next morning the tests were still running and the system was operating flawlessly. That continued for another few hours and finally when the test was finished it results showed no errors. My system was finally cured! Weeeeeee :)
A week passed since then and I had no freeze occurrences yet.

The summary
From my experience this issue is caused by specific combination of Z87 chipset and 4 DIMMs of RAM. Specifically it looks like Z87's memory controller is simply not able to handle all that memory. In order to run the system with 4 DIMMs you'll need to MANUALLY set memory speed and latencies to manufacturer declared values, bump memory voltage by +0.5V and disable XMP. Leave all other BIOS options at fail-safe settings. If you still don't achieve system stability then try to raise memory voltage by additional +0.5V but don't go higher than that. If the issue persists then most probably you are a victim of a faulty memory stick(s).


UPDATE (2014-05-19):
Since the system freezes occurred a couple more times after updating memory settings the complete solution (besides disabling XMP, manually setting RAM speed and latencies and bumping memory voltage to 1.55 V) was to do the following:

  1. Update org.charmeleon.boot.plist's IGPEnabler to 'Yes' and run RepairPermissions from DiskUtility on system HDD after that
  2. Restart the system and go to BIOS
  3. Activate internal intel graphics in BIOS
  4. Set external graphic as primary in BIOS (Init Display First -> PCIe 1 Slot)
  5. Set CPU Base Clock to 100.1 instead of auto or 100
  6. Under "Advanced CPU Core Features" disable "C3/C6 State Support" (in some BIOS versions there are individual options for C3 and C6/C7 states)
Thorough testing and +16 days uptime confirmed these settings lead to full system stability. Finally...



Hope this helps someone as many of this Forum's posts have helped me in the past :)

Good bye & good luck!
 
Greetings Hackintosh enthusiasts,

I'm a proud owner of i7-4770K & GA-z87x-u5dh build and have (same as most of you) battled with system instability in the form of constant freezes while trying to make the Hack work with 4x8GB of RAM. I'm writing this post as my own tribute to this issue and hope you'll have some use of my experience in making your Hacks behave like they should :)

The build
My system is running Mavericks 10.9.2 which was a clean install (latest Mavericks version from AppStore at the time) on mentioned CPU&MBO combo accompanied by GeForce GTX 770 4GB (Gainward Phantom II), 4x8GB Kingston HyperX Blu 1600 MHz RAM and Samsung 840 PRO 256GB SDD. Important info to mention is that my RAM is not marked as Intel XMP-compliant and was not a part of some memory KIT - each stick was sold individually - you can find exact specs here. My MBO was flashed to the latest BIOS version - F9.

The issue
OSX install & post-install (Multibeast) was done 'by-the-book' and went without issues.
Later on I started experiencing system freezes (image was on the screen but everything else was dead) mostly under little load - e.g. during web browsing, youtube watching, etc. They would occur randomly from like 2 seconds of uptime to 12 hours of uptime - obviously no rule here and clearly not related to system load/temperatures/whatever.

Diagnosis
As I stated earlier this issue is not related to system load nor temperatures so could it be caused by the OS? Definitely NOT. How am I so sure, you ask? At one (lucky?) moment my system froze while I was in BIOS and that gave it away. Such freezes are 99% of times related to faulty/wrongly-configured RAM.

The hope
I decided to load fail-safe BIOS options and start my machine with default memory settings (1333MHz, latencies at 9-9-9-24 & voltage set to 1.5V). I've tested the system using Prime95's 'Torture' test and it finished with flying colors while showing zero errors! At that point I knew my RAM is not faulty but 'temperamental' and only needs to be 'tuned-up' properly to work at factory-declared speeds (1600MHz) as it clearly needed more 'juice' to provide my goal frequency.

The solution
Once again I've bumped-up RAM to 1600 MHz by setting up it's multiplier to 16 with XMP turned off BUT this time I've set up latencies manually to 10-10-10-27 (which was declared by the manufacturer for 1600MHz) AND bumped-up RAM voltage to 1.55V - that's +0.5 from what manufactured stated to be enough to operate at this frequency. Last but not the least you should completely TURN OFF the machine after BIOS save and give it a 30 seconds rest before switching it back on (I have initially only restarted and RAM settings remained unchanged!!!).

The confirmation
Once again I fired-up Prime95 & initiated Torture test (which particularly stresses the RAM) while having opened 10 youtube videos (lasting for 100 hours - e.g. Nyan cat :)) in multiple browsers, running RAR compression on 200GB of images and playing 2 BlueRay videos at the same time. All of that skyrocketed CPU usage to 100% and it's temperatures reached almost 100 Degs. After 4 hours of this torture everything was still running without a glitch and at that point I decided to open a beer :)
Feeling nicely refreshed and optimistic I went to sleep. Next morning the tests were still running and the system was operating flawlessly. That continued for another few hours and finally when the test was finished it results showed no errors. My system was finally cured! Weeeeeee :)
A week passed since then and I had no freeze occurrences yet.

The summary
From my experience this issue is caused by specific combination of Z87 chipset and 4 DIMMs of RAM. Specifically it looks like Z87's memory controller is simply not able to handle all that memory. In order to run the system with 4 DIMMs you'll need to MANUALLY set memory speed and latencies to manufacturer declared values, bump memory voltage by +0.5V and disable XMP. Leave all other BIOS options at fail-safe settings. If you still don't achieve system stability then try to raise memory voltage by additional +0.5V but don't go higher than that. If the issue persists then most probably you are a victim of a faulty memory stick(s).

Hope this helps someone as many of this Forum's posts have helped me in the past :)

Good bye & good luck!
Thank you for the insights.
 
The summary
From my experience this issue is caused by specific combination of Z87 chipset and 4 DIMMs of RAM. Specifically it looks like Z87's memory controller is simply not able to handle all that memory. In order to run the system with 4 DIMMs you'll need to MANUALLY set memory speed and latencies to manufacturer declared values, bump memory voltage by +0.5V and disable XMP. Leave all other BIOS options at fail-safe settings. If you still don't achieve system stability then try to raise memory voltage by additional +0.5V but don't go higher than that. If the issue persists then most probably you are a victim of a faulty memory stick(s).

Hope this helps someone as many of this Forum's posts have helped me in the past :)

Good bye & good luck!


Is you system still free from freezes, please ?

I followed your approach and my system is now :

12:15 up 15:18, 3 users, load averages: 1.99 1.96 2.06
 
Hi there!

I had a couple of freezes since I used the fix from my previous post BUT further research and testing showed that you should also do the following (along with setting manual memory latencies and memory voltage bump at 1.55 V):

  1. Update org.charmeleon.boot.plist's IGPEnabler to 'Yes' and run RepairPermissions from DiskUtility on system HDD after that
  2. Restart the system and go to BIOS
  3. Activate internal intel graphics in BIOS
  4. Set external graphic as primary in BIOS (Init Display First -> PCIe 1 Slot)
  5. Set CPU Base Clock to 100.1 instead of auto or 100
  6. Under "Advanced CPU Core Features" disable "C3/C6 State Support" (in some BIOS versions there are individual options for C3 and C6/C7 states)

Obviously you will have double GPU's after these updates but since external graphic is set as primary in BIOS everything will be the same as before - except for the freezes :)

After these updates my Hack performed flawlessly and I haven't experienced any freezes for more than 2 weeks now. System uptime is currently at 16+ days.

From my experience best way for testing system stability is using Prime95's Torture test (use Custom settings and under "Memory to use" enter your complete RAM size - mine was 32GBs). If there is any instability system will freeze after few minutes of this test. After I've set all those settings from the list my system could run this test indefinite...

I'll update my previous post shortly.

Hope this helps you out!
 
Hello, I have tested my system with uptime 2 days now without hiccups.

But after restarting it today i got this KP:

PICT0051.JPG

Any idea why the source could me ?
 
Well I don't think this has anything to do with the updated BIOS settings.
Have you installed/uninstalled some software during these 2 days of uptime?

This kernel panic looks points to software issues: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3353577

Try hard reboot (complete shutdown and then start up) and try to access Safe-Mode if this doesn't help.

Good luck!
 
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