Lestliness’s Z97m-D3H - i7 4790K - EVGA GTX 750 - OSX 10.10.2

[Lestliness]

[Success] Lestliness’s Z97m-D3H - i7 4790K - EVGA GTX 770 SC - OSX 10.10.2

[Success] Lestliness’s Z97m-D3H - i7 4790K - EVGA GTX 770 SC - OS X 10.10.2




Updated Photos. Installed EVGA 770 GTX SC & Bigger and Better Heat Sink.
New Heat Sink knocked 10 degrees off. Rendering with Cinema 4D resuts in a max 65 degrees cpu temp. Pretty damn good.




Components

Phanteks Enthoo Evolv mATX Case
Amazon Newegg

Gigabyte Z97M-D3H
Amazon Newegg

Intel i7 4790K
Amazon Newegg

be quiet! Shadow Rock Slim CPU Cooler
Newegg

be quiet! DARK ROCK PRO 3 CPU Cooler
Newegg

GIGABYTE GTX750 1 GB
Amazon
Newegg

EVGA GTX770 SC 2 GB (DIED)
EBAY

EVGA GTX 980 SC
EBAY

MUSHKIN 32 GB DDR3 1600 RAM
Amazon Newegg

SAMSUNG PRO 256GB SSD
Amazon

COOLER MASTER V650 PSU
Amazon

OSXWIFI & Bluetooth PCIe Card
OSXWIFI


Already Owned

Apple Wireless Keyboard
AMAZON

Apple Magic Trackpad
AMAZON

27” APPLE Cinema Display with MiniDisplayport

INTOUS 3 WACOM TABLET


Comments

Frustrated with Apples Lack of Hardware Options I decided to embark on my first CustoMac and a lot of fun it has been! Really.

UniBeast / MultiBeast / Chimera Route and then moved on to Clover.

I was having random freezing especially when I was online. It was recommended that I turn off turboboost in the BIOS and that seemed to have helped. I went from about 3 -4 freezes a day to 1 freeze every couple of days.

Here's my MultiBeast Setup



Not really satisfied with even an occasional freeze I moved on to Clover. I loved the fact that we can test clover on a USB before we commit. And even if we do commit we can still fix issues through Chimera. This should really be an encouragement to those who are afraid of Clover. It seems to be that it would be hard to break your install through the USB method but I could be wrong.

I have to admit, I think I got lucky with Clover, my first attempt got me booted up using this method.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/alternate-bootloaders/127134-test-drive-how-create-clover-usb.html
The Nvidia driver's weren't working so I went back into Clover Configurator and selected nvda_drv =1 in the boot section. That fixed the Nvidia drivers but I was still having some boot issues. Sometimes it would fail, but after playing around with the boot flags, I choose ncpi=0x3000, slide=0 and kext-dev-mode=1.

I still don't know if these are the best settings in clover config but they work. This system runs about as perfect as can be. I haven't had the patience to try an iMessage fix yet. I finally sat down and decided to work on iMessage by following the guide found here. I just generated a serial and used iMessage debug to generate the ROM & MLB Values. Nothing worked and then for another reason I was working on my Router and after I reset everything started working. iMessage, FaceTime, Handoff etc.

So for all intensive purposes this build is working 99.9%. The only issue I have is playing movies in iTunes.. Crashes every time. I don't really care about this because everything else works and I'll just say I'm satisfied enough. I heard the issue with movies in iTunes can be GPU related?

UPDATE: 100% Clover install.

Finally got clover installed and working perfectly. I was overdoing it on the settings. I bought a new SSD and started from scratch and now my install is 100% clover and working great. The only two boot flags that are required in the config are kext-dev-mode=1 & nvda_drv =1. That's it! Fairly simple for this build.

I also wanted to note that other than changing the bios field to "Other OS" that the bios is left at stock settings. For this board there's no reason to change anything except the OS Setting.

Clover settings.





Updated config file
View attachment config.plist



Some more SceenShots.








​

 

[vlad1966]

Nice little system - a lot of good stuff. I especially like the case. I'll probably be using one with my next build.

- How do you like the PSU? is it fairly quiet?
- What about the HSF? Fairly quiet also?
- Overclocking the CPU? Speed?
- How's the WiFi card? No issues? Considering one of these for my next build

Thanks, and enjoy your new Hack!

 

[Lestliness]

Nice little system - a lot of good stuff. I especially like the case. I'll probably be using one with my next build.

- How do you like the PSU? is it fairly quiet?
- What about the HSF? Fairly quiet also?
- Overclocking the CPU? Speed?
- How's the WiFi card? No issues? Considering one of these for my next build

Thanks, and enjoy your new Hack!

Thanks vlad1966!

PSU is quiet and the Heat sink fan is totally silent. There's some noise from the stock fans from this case but it's very reasonable.

CPU not overclocked yet. Waiting to be 100% satisfied with my Clover install and move on from there.

The wifi/blurtooth card is great, totally plug and play but I know there's some cheaper solutions out there than OSXWIFI. Ebay is starting to show some options as well. I had hand off working with the card but somehow I broke it trying to get iMessage to work. So that's kind of a bummer.

 

[si1ver2]

I really like that case as well. Is there room for a slightly bigger graphics card like the 970? (about 2 inches longer).

Edit: Found some video reviews and it looks like there is plenty of room! I'll def be getting one of them.

 

[Lestliness]

I really like that case as well. Is there room for a slightly bigger graphics card like the 970? (about 2 inches longer).

Edit: Found some video reviews and it looks like there is plenty of room! I'll def be getting one of them.

Yep, Plenty of room for a full size graphics card. In fact my GTX 750 is just a placeholder for now.

The case is great, there's two things that bug me, A. there's not a lot of room behind the PSU so if you have a modular unit you may have to decide ahead of time what you'll need before you bolt that thing down. B. I'm not a big fan of the the front USB, Audio & Mic jacks being on the side like that. In face that's most peoples Gripe and Phanteks has fixed that in their ITX version of this case which looks even more awesome than this one.

But overall the case is sweet.

 

[Dave-Z]

Hello Listliness,
I'm starting a build with the same motherboard and case.

Did you use the PWM hub on the Evolv? And if you did, did you just hook up the CPU_Fan connector to the input on the PWM Hub? (and then I presume you hooked up the other SYS_Fan connectors to the PWM hub?

Thanks for your input!

-Dave Z

 

[Lestliness]

Hello Listliness,
I'm starting a build with the same motherboard and case.

Did you use the PWM hub on the Evolv? And if you did, did you just hook up the CPU_Fan connector to the input on the PWM Hub? (and then I presume you hooked up the other SYS_Fan connectors to the PWM hub?

Thanks for your input!

-Dave Z

Yep, exactly. The case comes with two fans, a 200mm in the front and 140mm in the rear. These two fans are already hooked into the hub on delivery. I added two more 140's to the the top and also plugged that into the hub along with the heat sink fan. The hub is powered by the sys1 fan on the motherboard.

There's also a choice of powering the hub with a sata power cable. I haven't quite figured out the usefulness of this so it remains unconnected. I think there's some special use for this... I just don't know what it is and the documentations isn't quite clear to me.

The case is awesome, you will love it! Phanteks customer service is awesome too, I had one issue where my power switch wasn't working all the time... I'm not sure if it was faulty or perhaps I broke it during the build but I reached out to them and they sent me a new one at no charge.

 

[Huberer]

Great build Lestliness. I've one question. How did you get audio to work under clover?

Thanks in advance
Huberer

 

[Lestliness]

Great build Lestliness. I've one question. How did you get audio to work under clover?

Thanks in advance
Huberer

Hi Huberer, sorry for the late response I've been contemplating on whether it breaks the Forums rules or not to direct people to another website where I got the audio patch. Especially if that site is critical of methods found here at TonyMac.

Here's the patch from github. Please read the documentation and it should get you up and going.

https://codeload.github.com/toleda/audio_RealtekALC/zip/master

 

[Huberer]

Hello Lestliness,

no problem about the late response. I think there's no problem posting a link to another webside especially when this side belongs to a mod of this forum. I know this possibilty to install audio.
Anyway thanks for the info. I'm really surprised that you get audio working because you didn't make any settings in clover. Maybe I should also avoid to patch audio with clover (with clover configurator => Devices => Audio) and try like you did. With patching under clover the toleda-script can't find my audio device. I've tried a lot of possibilities with patching but none by leaving that (mean no patching).

Thanks again for the info

Huberer