mini ITX build for 5.2k GoPro Fusion video rendering and editing

[Pierre.s]

The hackintosh died this morning... I suspect fried motherboard (or faulty PSU but I doubt it)... That was fun... #rip
I believe I'm going to go with Windows 10... unless I want to keep chucking time and money at this.

EDIT: We're back! Turns out it was the expensive gold whatever $120 PSU... Now on a temperary $25 cheap PSU waiting for new (Corsair this time) PSU.

 

[Pierre.s]

A quick note regarding the BIOS setup "Smart Fan 5" on the Gigabyte Z370N as this could save others with a similar setup from making their own discoveries...

Monitor: CPU == The Corsair liquid cooling pump
Monitor: System 1 == The fan on your liquid cooling radiator (a Noctua NF-A14 in my case, I highly recommend swapping the super noisy Corsair fan of the H90. I can hardly hear the NF-A14, silent like a true mac! )
Monitor: System 2 == Nothing. Unless you have an extra fan in your case...

I've setup my power curves for CPU and System1 as follow:





The Corsair pump (== CPU) is silent so no point not having it at work early on.
My Noctua fan (== Liquid cooling radiator fan) being near silent I don't mind it kicking in early as it helps to keep the CPU cool early on (less of a chance for it warming up due to too slow of a fan speed).

 

[Pierre.s]

Since I'm making no progress with the Quicksync problem I thought I would look at another issue which is the sleep/black screen issue.

Black screen on return from sleep - SOLVED
Starting with this guide on power management... Fixed it.

iMessage - Worked right away
I was expecting it not to work but seems fine

 

[Pierre.s]

I'm quite confused by the results i get from poking around to get my quicksync to work...
At the moment (shikigva=28) I still have a sluggish UI (shaking chrome windows shows lag, FCPX is super laggy) however for the first time I see my IGPU is put to work when recording my screen with Quicktime:

- VDA returns the 12473 error
- MacX Video Converter Pro indicates no harware encoding

However:
- Intel power gadget shows activity in the IGPU
- So does iStats...
- And CPU remains around 10% for quicktime which confirms that the IGPU is indeed used...

Seeing this I decided to run FCPX and the BruceX benchmark. If everything was to work properly the result should be under 20 seconds and I got 67 seconds with either of h264 or prores 422 (plus the FCPX UI was clearly sluggish which indicates that the IGPU isn't used). However when monitoring the CPU/IGPU/GPU frequencies during the benchmarking I could clearly see that the IGPU was used (and the GPU not!) which is the opposite of the expected result.

Expected:
- IGPU used during timeline edits and overall use of FCPX
- IGPU used during render for baseline encoding (especially when codec is h.264)
- GPU used during render for video effects

What I'm getting
- IGPU used during timeline edits and overall use of FCPX - NO
- IGPU used during render for baseline encoding - YES
- GPU used during render for video effects - NO

Neither of the IGPU or GPU are used during general clicking around of FCPX, it's all for the CPU (maxing out at 5GHZ and resulting in super sluggish UI).

This made me doubt the effectiveness of the Nvidia drivers. However when running Cinebench or Luxmark I could clearly see that the GPU was put to serious work AND could work together with the IGPU (screenshots show what happens during Luxmark render on GPU+IGPU):

Perhaps an interesting point, when using lightroom the GPU never seems to be used (all for the CPU) despite being properly recognised and activated in settings...

The quest continues.......

 

[originalmagneto]

Btw regarding your sluggishness, have you tried the old nvidia drivers? 106 I think? There is a nice script floating here somewhere...

 

[Pierre.s]

For reference, here are my essential settings as of this day:

 

[Pierre.s]

Btw regarding your sluggishness, have you tried the old nvidia drivers? 106 I think? There is a nice script floating here somewhere...

yeah not a bad idea. This scrip right? https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/nvidia-update

I think my DP cable might get in this arvo. Will give this a go first (gut feel...) and then start playing with driver verions...
Edit: Dang it, let's try! Downloading drivers... Drumroll... Now on .106 Seems to be the same, no change of behaviour or improvement in FCPX (virtually the exact same 67 seconds time). Quicksinc definitely not active as the IGPU doesn't flinch when moving around the FCPX timeline. Overall sluginess of the UI comes after a while so let's wait and see.

Snap of frequencies during BruceX:

and (not shown here) GPU at 0% but loads of memory used (so just not using the GPU and only its memory).

 

[Pierre.s]

Black screen with mouse cursor on shut down - SOLVED
When I turn off / restart the hackintosh I get stuck on black screen with (active) mouse cursor... I gave it some time just in case but no it stays there. I rebooted, turn on/off etc. no luck. I tried quitting every software first, no improvement.
Starting the quest to find a fix...
- Tried the "FixShutdown" Acpi fix but no change.
- Tried older nvidia drivers (.106) just in case, no change.
- Since my mouse cursor is still active I believe this isn't the same blackscreen issue.
- Uninstalled my anti-virus software (Avira)... FIXED!

Audio quality in the front jack is poor - SOLVED
I noticed this some time ago and ignored it as back port works fine. Now looking to get this working properly too.
Symptom are a sketchy audio quality, volume ups and down, scratches, all in not usable.
- Trying Codec Commander - same, there might be more to it though as the setup isn't exactly clear.
- Seems I have the same issue as described here. Will experiment with the Devices > Audio > Inject id:
-- 1 (default): Good back output, front not good
-- 2: No back, front not good
-- 5: Back and front equally working - Fixed

Display Port graphic artefacts and intermittent black screen - SOLVED-ish (see dual screen issue below)
I usually run my display (Dell U2715H) on HDMI but having two of those I wanted to see what the DP port could do so that I could move back to my usual dual display setup. Boy I'm not disappointed Of course it doesn't work right out of the box. Tinkering galore...
So, first attempt gave me correct picture in BIOS and booted all good but as soon as I arrived in Mac OSX the display started flickering showing random artefacts and going dark every couple of seconds...
- Changed my monitor DP version from default 1.1a to 1.2, reboot -> black screen all the way. Black screen in the BIOS is to be expected (EFI only support 1.1) but should have picked it up when in the OS. I suspect I had a kernel panic which stopped me from reaching the OS (and therefore seeing anything on my screen)
- I then tried the same screen plugged both in HDMI and DP (1.2). When switching from HDMI>DVI and vice versa via the screen source menu it works! The OS basically sees it as two screens and therefor offers dual display.

Next up, try with the actual 2 monitors... It works! 7.3 million glorious pixels!

Dual screen setup, DP screen stays dark on reboot - UNSOLVED
On boot HDMI screen shows the BIOS and DP screen remains black (as expected).
Once we reach Mac OS DP screen remains black and HDMI screen is seen as secondary screen (ie. the login window is on the DP black screen...). Unplugging the DP screen brings everything back to the HDMI screen.
Going to try this to see if I can:
a) make the HDMI screen primary screen
b) get the DP screen to function as secondary screen after reboot...



Not change. The DP connected screen goes into power saving mode (doesn't receive signal).
Trying same settings with the addition of injectNvidia... Fails, black screen with mouse.
I can't seem to be getting the DP screen to work so reverting the above changes.
I'm giving up on this one, will try again when new nvidia drivers are out.

 

[Pierre.s]

Updated clover to 4111.

 

[hrvstr]

Any progress on the quicksync issue? I've been trying for days...