- Joined
- Jun 8, 2019
- Messages
- 8
- Motherboard
- AsRock Z390 Phantom Gaming ITX
- CPU
- i9-9900K
- Graphics
- MSI GTX 780 Ti TwinFrozr
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
I've successfully macOS Mojave 10.14.5 running on my Z390 motherboard. It works great! I'll list my parts and give you some help to get it running because it was such a pain for me. So, if you're struggling with a build like mine, hopefully this will help you out. If you're looking to make a new build, these parts are great and work very well with macOS, and, once you get it setup like mine, it'll be easy updates. Also, I'm using an i7-9700K although macOS says its an i9. This is not a complete install guide (or a guide at all really, just sharing a personal experience), there are many online, and I'll link them. If you want to see the build better, there's a video in my profile.
Intel Core i7-9700K
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Corsair H100i Platinum RGB
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB (4 x 8GB, 3200 Mhz)
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
XFX Radeon Vega 64 Liquid Cooled
US - Used Newegg.com
Alternative - Amazon.com
CA - ---
Alternative - Canada's Computers.ca
Corsair Obsidian 500D SE Computer Case
US - Newegg.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Fenvi FV-T919 WiFi/BT Card
US - Amazon.com
CA - Newegg.ca
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Intel 660p 1TB
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
WD Blue 1TB HDD x 2
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Corsair LL120 System Fans x 4 (Case Includes 3 already)
US - Amazon.com
CA - Amazon.ca
Corsair HX1200 PSU (1200W)
US - Newegg.com
CA - Amazon.ca
The Actual Build
I really loved building in the Corsair Obsidian 500D case. It's spacious enough for everything and also has a front Type C port for future proofing. The glass doors give you easy access in case (no pun-intended) should you need to remove things like your GPU to setup macOS which is sometimes necessary. I overclocked the processor to 5.1 GHz on all cores. This beast outperforms even the i9 iMac and iMac Pro in ST performance and also outperforms the base model iMac Pro in MT performance. All the while staying under 85 degrees Celsius and keeping things quiet.
You might be asking why I used so many Corsair parts. That's because I dual boot Windows 10. So I use iCue to control all my lighting, fan speeds, and H100i pump speeds. The case comes with a Commander Pro which saves everything to firmware so things carry over to macOS. I have a custom DSDT for my mobo (I'll link my EFI at the bottom) so it doesn't affect macOS.
I'm going to give you a big warning, USE RADIATOR FANS IN PULL!! I cannot stress this enough, the kind of dust buildup you'll be avoiding just by simply doing this is phenomenal. I used the the liquid cooled Vega 64, but, for aesthetics and a slight performance increase, I used a push/pull config. The liquid cooled version is just so much quieter, performs much cooler and has a performance increase of about 10%.
Possibly the biggest question is.... How and why in the world did I use a 970 EVO Plus? I bought it by accident not knowing it doesn't work with macOS. But I did some research and learned that Samsung released a firmware update that fixed this incompatibility issue. Simply boot windows, install Samsung Magician, then update it there. The drive works great and outperforms the 970 EVO. I've had no issues whatsoever after I did the update, before that the second part of the macOS installer would throw errors.
I used an Intel 660p for Windows 10 (and one of the HDDs for media and games I don't use much) since I didn't really care too much about drive performance on that side. I use Windows for games and anything else that requires Windows since it is the most supported desktop OS. I use macOS for some hobby visual effects and rendering, but most importantly Xcode. I mostly do Android development but since Windows doesn't support iOS development well, macOS is just a much more versatile option, plus it's a very beautiful and intuitive OS in my opinion.
Let me know if I should post benchmarks on both macOS and Windows.
Installing macOS
There are many guides on this, personally I don't need them anymore but Tonymacx86 has a great and comprehensive guide. I'll give you the rest of the rundown specific to me.
First, you'll want to flash to the latest BIOS for your motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra BIOS
Not doing this had me stuck for 4 days. I'm being serious. It might not seem like much but definitely do it. I personally had two hackintoshes before this one and didn't have to flash it so I took it with a grain of salt.
Use these BIOS settings (this layout is the usual for Gigabyte boards):
- Save & Exit
- Load Optimized Defaults
- Chipset
- Vt-d : Disabled
- Internal Graphics : Enabled
- DVMT Pre-Alloc : 96M
- Above 4G Decoding : Enabled
- Wake on LAN Enable : Disabled
- Peripherals
- USB Configuration
- Legacy USB Support : Enabled
- XHCI Hand-off : Enabled
- Network Stack Configuration
- Network Stack → Disabled
- BIOS
- Windows 8/10 Features : Other OS
- CSM Support : Disabled
- M.I.T.
- Core Voltage: Find a suitable voltage for your overclock (mine is 1.395000V)
- CPU Clock Ratio: Find a suitable clock ratio to overclock (mine is 51)
- Extreme Memory Profile (X.M.P.) : Profile 1
- Save & Exit
- Save and Exit or F10 to save BIOS settings
AptioMemoryFix-64.efi
OsxAptioFix3Drv,efi
OsxAptioFix2Drv,efi
OsxAptioFixDrv-64.efi
With this board the first one works which I believe is the standard one included with the UniBeast installer and MultiBeast post installer.
Now let's talk kexts (I'll include my EFI folder at the bottom), when you're installing it's okay to have your kexts in the "Other" folder but mind you this is not where you should place them permanently. This folder is useful when you need to install and boot for the first time since there's no way to install kexts until you've booted but after that install them to /Library/Extensions/ and delete the kexts from Clover or set it to not inject kexts. Don't install to /System/Library/Extensions/! It's not where Apple intended for third party kexts, and there's no reason to mess with your system integrity. That's why I don't recommend using Kext Utility and don't use Kextbeast, either. If you hate using the Terminal, then I recommend you get Hackintool.
Another recommendation I have is to make sure you have two EFIs. Take a copy of your EFI folder with Clover and your settings and put it in the EFI partition of your secondary hard drive. Keep that one with all the kexts and settings you need so when you update or need to get to recovery, you just simply boot your hard drive EFI and clover will inject kexts. Also use this methodology when you're editing your EFI, keep a working copy that got you booted in your Hard drive. If anything happens just boot off your hard drive and everything will be back to normal. Don't forget to then restore your EFI.
Getting the GPU to work should be relatively easy since Apple includes the drivers (you should also know by now that Nvidia isn't welcome on Mojave). I heard that a lot of people have issues with Powercolor GPUs, and that Sapphire offers the best compatibility with macOS. Personally my GPU is a founders card so there's no difference between Sapphire's version and XFX (or any of the Liquid cooled Vega 64 cards, they all use the same BIOS). You need to make sure you have your integrated graphics enabled. It has to be set to headerless mode which basically means it isn't outputting to any ports, my config.plist has this setup already. Your GPU might work without this but under intensive loads mine would shutdown until I found out about this.
Regarding Nvidia cards I have to say that I would never use one again for hackintoshes, even if Apple finally lets them release web drivers. Being able to update and have my GPU supported OOB is extremely convenient. I was running a GTX 1070 on High Sierra just because I didn't want to buy another card or switch to AMD, but I'm so relieved that I did. I no longer have to wait for Nvidia to push out drivers sometimes many weeks after an update, no longer have to go through the pain of trying to enable the drivers and booting with nv_disable=1. Everything just kind of works with this setup.
If you're in the market for WiFi/BT cards that work OOB, you cannot go wrong with the Fenvi. There's no additional setup, everything works (Airdrop, Continuity, Handoff). It's literally built for hackintoshes or older Mac Pros.
Link to my EFI - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N5QB4LKoFHKaTXVXIXhuP_0M8ixG5OXP
