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Mavericks on ThinkPad E320 - Power Management/Overheating/Battery Life Woes

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Nov 3, 2015
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Motherboard
Intel D945GCL
CPU
Intel Pentium E5700
Graphics
Nvidia GeForce 8800GT
Mac
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Classic Mac
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Mobile Phone
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Hi all.
I just got into the Hackintosh scene a couple of weeks ago, and got 2 Hackintosh builds up and running from doing a lot of reading on tonymacx86, ******/r/Hackintosh,OSXLatitude, InsanelyMac
I got a Desktop configured, which was relatively easy compared to getting OSX running on my ThinkPad E320.

What’s working so far

I got almost every little frigging thing working on the ThinkPad E320 (minus the Wifi, which is a very typical Laptop woe I’ve found. I’ve resorted to a nano USB wifi adapter while a Broadcom chip ships).

  • CPU
  • GPU
  • Webcam
  • Intel HDA
  • Keyboard/Trackpad
  • Ethernet
  • USB Wi Fi
  • Bluetooth
  • Internal Display, HDMI out, VGA out

So what’s wrong?

The only problem is that the laptop overheats.
I do not know what exactly is wrong, but I think the fans are simply not spinning fast enough. I used to run Linux and Windows on this very laptop before, and the fans would spin up significantly every time the processor load would increase.
After I Hackintoshed it, the fans can barely be heard even when the CPU temp goes up to 80-90 degrees celsius! And even though my CPU is detected (with 25 P-States) the battery life is really really bad. I get roughly 2 hours on a full 100% charge on a 6 Cell Battery.
I tried patching my DSDT and a little bit, but mostly it’s the same from another DSDT I found for my motherboard and model - its the Intel HM65 Chipset. The DSDT worked well, and I had to make a slight tweak for getting the Intel HDA. I used Piker-Alpha’s ssdtgen script to create the SSDTs for my machine and everything boots up and gets detected like I said.


What I’ve tried so far / more information for diagnosis


1. Underclocking with SSDT/DSDT - Fail

I’ve tried solving the overheating/battery life issues by forcing an under clock. I entered lower values into Piker’s script to do this (the script generates SSDTs without any errors when I put in lower Base Frequency and Turbo Frequency and TDP values) but the SSDTs cause the infamous error-
P-Step Stepper Error 18 at step 35 Error.
I think the newer SSDTS should work, but I think my DSDT is referencing the old SSDT with 25 P-States or something like that, and that’s causing the P-Step error on boot (this is just my hypothesis, I’m entirely unsure). I have included my working DSDT and SSDT in the post here so the community can have a look and help patch these files to underclock my processor to 1.8 Ghz with 2.2 Turbo (think that would be easier on the overheating/battery drain).

2. Underclocking with Clover - Fail again

My second approach to under clock was to edit the CloverCPU configuration portion. I entered lower Frequency and Bus Speed and 0x00FA Latency values (according to Clover Wiki that Latency is best for Notebooks). But I saw no difference, and this experimentation failed as well. :(


Some other weird things


Looking at HWSensors app and Intel Power Gadget I can see the CPU stepping working (variation in the frequency curve) but I definitely don’t see 25 steppings (as the chart’s jumps are not that granular) which Piker’s script outputs for my current (working, stock clocked, linked in post) SSDTs. DPCI Manager shows around 6 P-States in fact.

AppleIntelCPUPowerManangementInfo.kext by Rehabmanshows around 25 P-States, but then again the kext only outputs those messages during boot. Could it be that during boot 25 P-States are detected initially and as the kernel loads it’s lost for some conflict?

HWSensors also does not have a Fan control portion either (are my fans not being detected at all?). So I can’t manually control my Fans either. :(



Please help. I would ideally like my CPU under clocked and my fans working properly. This is the only step left for my beloved HackBook. Could the USB wifi adapter be screwing things up? The laptop goes into sleep, deep sleep and wakes up fine. I spent a lot of time getting it to this far, just need help with the power management/fan control portion, so please help if possible.

I’m attaching some files so that maybe you guys could take a look and help diagnose the issue -
[1] My Clover Config
[2] DSDT/SSDT
[3] IOReg
[4] AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementInfo.kext output (I installed the kext and it only shows the output in the boot log :/ )
[5] KextStat dump

Laptop Detailed Specs
LENOVO ThinkPad Edge E320
Model - 1298CTO
Mobo - Intel Express HM65 Chipset
CPU - Core i5 2520M (Sandy) (2.5 Ghz to 3.2 Turbo)
GPU - Intel HD 3000 (650 Mhz can go upto 1.3 Ghz [not sure])
RAM - 2x 4 GB Corsair SO-DIMM 1333MHz
Storage - SanDisk 128GB SSD


Any help at all will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
 
Last edited:
I'm going to try to patch my DSDT and SSDT following the guide you've linked Rehabman. Thank you.
But it may take a while and I am not sure how successful I will be so please bear with me.

Finally, can you please confirm whether a properly corrected DSDT/SSDT will fix my overheating/fan issues though? I really would like to under clock my processor and integrated gpu if possible. Can this under clocking be done through DSDT/SSDT patching?

Please advice.

Many thanks!
 
I'm going to try to patch my DSDT and SSDT following the guide you've linked Rehabman. Thank you.
But it may take a while and I am not sure how successful I will be so please bear with me.

Finally, can you please confirm whether a properly corrected DSDT/SSDT will fix my overheating/fan issues though? I really would like to under clock my processor and integrated gpu if possible. Can this under clocking be done through DSDT/SSDT patching?

Please advice.

Many thanks!

You cannot under clock with SSDT.

Having a correctly patched DSDT is critical though.

That said, I cannot predict the future.
 
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