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Little Mac Pro: i5-6600K - ASUS Z170M-PLUS - R9 280 - Fusion Drive

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Hi Florian,

Thank you very much for the write up. I'm planning on doing a FCPX build on an mATX board (inside the BitFenix Phenom :) ) so this is very useful for me! Incidentally, I've also read your post about AMD card compatibility, as I'm trying to learn more about AMD cards and their importance in FCPX work.

If you have time, I'd love to hear your opinion on the following points, which currently have me slightly confused.

If possible, I'd like to work on a 4k monitor, as I'm used to the high ppi on my Macbook Pro Retina. That being said, I've read a lot of different things with regards to 4k output.

It seems that intel 6th generation processors support 4k output through their internal graphics. But, from what I have read, only display port and hdmi 2.0 can handle 4k at 60hz, and I can't find any mATX boards that have 2.0, so one of the boards I am currently looking at is the Asus Maximus VIII Gene, which has a display-port.

However, I've also read that the internal graphics from the Skylake processors are not yet supported in the hackintosh. Does this mean that I would have to do 4k output through the graphics card for the time being? Would I be able to move the cable back to the mobo displayport after 4k output from internal graphics is supported in OSX? This is quite important to me, as I'd like to use the internal graphics to power the display, and use all of the remaining power from the 280x for FCPX (please correct me if this understanding is inherently flawed).

Last but not least, I've also heard that for FCPX to work properly on a hackintosh, internal graphics sometimes have to be disabled, which would make the display port from the mobo irrelevant both now and in the future. Would it be better to go with a relatively cheaper mobo, such as the Gigabyte LGA1151 or the board that you've used in the build, which both don't have a displayports, or bite the bullet and go with the Asus Maximus VIII GENE, which may support 4k output in the near future? Would 4k be too much stress for a single GPU to handle both the monitor and FCPX effectively?

I apologize for the very long and complicated question, and thank you very much for your time.
 
@dogen: Swapping between iGPU and a discrete GPU should be easy. However no one can say for sure when full Skylake iGPU support will arrive. In its current state it's not usable at all.

I don't use FCPX personally, so I don't have any experience with it. However, I've also heard before that FCPX can have trouble finding the right GPU in multi GPU setups (including iGPU). On the other hand, you'll lose sleep/wake if you disable the iGPU when using an AMD GPU.
I don't think that the graphics output will stress the GPU "too much". In the end, that's what it was designed for. A real Mac Pro doesn't have a iGPU anyway and performs great in FCPX.

@aaron.m.fooks: Boot in verbose mode to see the actual crash reason. Most likely you missed a BIOS setting or something like that.
 
So there have been some updates in my build, I'll soon update the 1st post. In short:

  • My CPU cooler finally arrived, yay!
  • I've swapped GPUs for a few times, mainly for benchmarks, currently I'm running a GTX 780, which is roughly +20% faster than my AMD R9 card, plus it doesn't have this stupid sleep/wake issue
  • Bad news: When I swapped in the GTX 780, I slightly scratched over the mainboard with the GPUs slot bracket. I can only see a very small scratch on the PCB, but this seems to have destroyed a trace, which turned out to be responsible for the on-board ethernet controller. Neither OS X nor Win10 or the UEFI network stack can use the ethernet controller
  • This in turn means that I don't have a build-in en0 any more, which killed all security related Apple services (AppStore, iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage). Bummer! Because I didn't want to throw away my motherboard (or sent it in for repair, which will easily need a few weeks), I decided to install a PCIe ethernet card. After a bit of tweaking OS X recognizes this as fully functional, internal en0 card, enabling all services again! :)
  • Oh, and I've finally moved OS X to my old Fusion Drive. Was easy as cake, just inserted SSD and HDD, installed El Capitan over my existing partition (without deleting anything), copied over my EFI partiton and that's it! Working perfectly fine!
 
Hello, I have your same motherboard, however I am not able to get past the following error when attempting to boot from my UEFI Clover USB stick to install 10.11: OsxAptioFixDrv: Starting overrides for .IAbootFile\boot.efi
using reloc block: yes. hibernate wake: no

I am also using boot flag: -v nv_disable=1
I switched out 'VBoxHfs-64.efi' with 'HFSPlus.efi'
I used both the 'IOAPIC Fix' and 'USBInjectAll.kext' fixes including the edits to the config.plist as described in the Skylake Starter Guide.
My BIOS settings shouldn't be an issue since I am able to boot into my Clover USB stick.
Did you ever come across this issue and if so do you have any advice to help solve it?

Below are specs to my machine:

Intel G4500 | ASUS Z170M-PLUS | Carbide 88R| PNY GTX 960 4GB
CORSAIR CX750M 750W | LEPA AquaChanger 240 | LG 14x Blu-Ray | Mushkin Enhanced ECO2 512GB | HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB 7200 RPM | Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 2400MHz

Also here is a link to a copy of my config.plist
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7wh71trj48ew9o/config.plist?dl=0
 
I finally got the installer to boot... I realized what the problem was... here's a hint: AICPM. Now my final issue is that my PS/2 keyboard and mouse I'm using is not working at the Welcome screen... Last hurdle.
 
Hi Florian,

Do you have any knowledge one way or the other about the viability of using M.2 and SATA in a Fusion drive? I take it you haven't reached this stage of your build yet. I'm having trouble finding info that says this can be done (or can't be done). I saw somebody saying that there might be an issue because M.2 is PCIe and Fusion Drives are usually all SATA.

Thanks for the writeup.
 
@Caconym: I don't think it should be a problem, in the end Apple is doing the same (SSD in their proprietary PCIe Slot, HDD on SATA). Never tried that myself though, I'm using a classic Fusion Drive with a Standard 2.5" SSD.
Using a NVMe SSD might make matters more complicated though.

@Twa: During sleep the fans should usually stop Spinning. Not sure what could be wrong though...
 

Do you have the issue of sound going off after a sleep/wake? Sound works fine when rebooting.
 
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