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Official CustoMac Mini 2012 Guide and Notes (in progress)

Ok - i have read through the forums and i have 4 CustoMac Minis Deluxes built and working great. Some wiht 660ti, 670 and 2 680s. However, i have one machine that is giving me a few issues.


1.) Upon unibeast install i boot off the pen and it fires right up no problems. HD4000 support in full, Ethernet and sound. I run the DSDT and restart boot off the pen again. Everything still groovy. I update 10.8.2, iphoto, imovie, etc and restart. boot off pen just to make sure - everything is great. shut down. remove pen and boot to drive. drive starts up SSD running nicely boots up fast. NO ethernet ports. both are showing connectivity lights in the back of the machine but System Prefs reading "cable unplugged"...also no audio

2.) everything above happens as stated but if i don't run the DSDT like the website suggests on the customac mini site "z77N-wifi fully supported without a DSDT" then when it restarts i get the boot: error posting. The minute i boot off the pen and install the DSDT thats gone. So at least that is an easy fix, but i would like to understand why that is happening.


Quick solve all question: will following TonyMac's first post here and do DSDT with the kext posted in the picture fix all my issues



Thanks


Greg
 
The Mini Half Height PCI e card supplied is an Intel Centrino 630, (which is an integrated BT 4.0 and b,g,n Wifi) and it's not supported by OS X. If you don't mind resorting to a dongle for bluetooth, because bizarrely this card's bluetooth works out of the box on OS X, you can replace the installed Mini PCI e with a Atheros AR9280 / AR5BHB92 (Same card, just different names) which supports Wifi, Airdrop, Airplay and Dual Band b,g & n without any messing. It even works straight away using the installer for Mountain lion to download updates before your OS is installed.

I think it's bad advice on this build to get a PCIE card, because the Mini PCI e slot on the board will take the AR9280 without any modifications, you just lose the onboard BT. I've got an Asus 660Ti in the only PCI e slot, and the Atheros replacing the centrino card that was in there.

Great thing about the centrino cards is they are worth about 3x what the atheros is, so you can easily sell it to someone with a windows laptop that wants an upgrade.

The only issue I had with this was that I ordered my card after I'd already installed my build, and after I tooik the old card out and rebooted with the new card installed, I couldn't get rid of the Bluetooth icon in the finder, and it won't go away no matter what I try. If you create a new user afterwards, it's not an issue, so I could just create a new user, copy my files back over, delete my old account, then create a new account with the same name and copy the files over again. I might do someday but for the moment I can live with a greyed out BT icon.

Funny thing is, after I booted up Windows 7, with the same change in cards, it bluescreened everytime unless I booted in safe mode. Then I couldn't delete the original intel driver, even trying the commandline to delete all trace of it. It's scary when a Hackintosh is more forgiving than Windows.

Sage words Hazzardus. Preciate the insight on the card. BT dongle is easy - you are either going to use a BT dongle or a Wifi PCIe graphics card...
 
USB3 ports don't seem to work properly. When I connect my Lexar USB3 card reader the reader is detected but the OS complains about corrupted disk (and System Information doesn't show anything beyond the reader). The card is detected just fine on a USB2 port.
Ok, I checked in Tony's post about EUFI settings for GA x77 motherboards and noticed that the EHCI handoff was disabled in my BIOS for some reason. Enabled it, booted, and tried to use the front (USB3) ports again.
At first the USB2 devices weren't working in them (or the rear ports). But the USB3 devices were! And then I tried using a USB3 hub. And both the USB3 and USB2 devices work! And each getting their appropriate speed, too (I can see the separate "High-Speed" and "SuperSpeed" busses in System Information). I have two USB3 hubs (different brands: cheap eBay jobs) and I get the same behaviour with each.
The USB3 ports are handling USB3 devices fine, USB2 devices only if through a USB3 hub. A USB2 hub doesn't cut it.

However, I'm now having another issue: something may have changed on the USB2 bus. I have a Pinnacle TV tuner connected (feeding into EyeTV) and before I made this change I could play 1080i TV no problem. Now even the 720x576 stations (<6 Mbps) are stuttering. There's nothing weird going on with disk i/o or CPU usage, and I know it's not the video because the same thing happens when playing over the LAN to an iPad. Thus I think something hinky is going on with USB2 (and this is still using the USB2 ports).

My 1600 MHz RAM is currently detected as 1333 MHz: have to look into that next.

That was a simple task last night of changing the default 1333 MHz timing in the BIOS to 1600 (it's 1600 MHz CL9 RAM).
 
With DSDT for HDMI audio - no change

The discussion for the tweaked DSDT that enables HDMI audio for the H77N or Z77N build Customac seems to be scattered all over the place, so forgive me for probably repeating a question, but as yet, I can't find an answer.

My build is Gigabyte H77N, Intel Sandy Bridge i3-3225 (HD 4000), 8gb RAM, Agility 3 SDD

All is working fine. Following tonymacx settings for "With DSDT", I ran Multibeast 5.1.3 with the downloaded DSDT (renamed as dsdt.aml and placed in same folder as Multibeast) , but can't see any difference at all after reboot.

No HDMI option in the Audio System Preferences.

Also, nothing listed as dsdt.aml in the Extra folder.

Anyone else get this? Did I run things correctly?
 
The USB3 ports are handling USB3 devices fine, USB2 devices only if through a USB3 hub.
Thanks for the tip !
I have to find a USB3 HUB, to see if working also on my GA-B75M.

Did you actually tested the "real" speed with a file transfer?
Or we can just trust the info from the system?
 
I built the CustoMac Mini from the suggested parts (H77N/3225). Initially I tried the HDMI audio. While it worked, no other audio ports were active. I deleted /Extras (HDAenabler.kext was not installed) and restarted. Worked just like fresh install, so I attempted the DSDT-free install. This worked great, but I really wanted to get HDMI audio, so I deleted /Extras and HDAenabler.kext for one more go. On restart, I am now hanging on gray Apple screen, even booting from the USB recovery. let it sit overnight without any luck.

Is there anything else I can delete from the terminal (booting into the installer) that may have been installed from Multibeast?


P.S. For those with the H77N/3225 setup that have had problems with onboard Bluetooth: try installing the external antennas that come with the board. BT was active, but unable to pair until I added the antennas.
 
Did you actually tested the "real" speed with a file transfer?
Or we can just trust the info from the system?
Sorry, I didn't have fast media on-hand, and right now the system is down (think I need to un-do a BIOS settings and/or restore from backup :|).
 
Through the USB3 hub on the USB3 port I got:
80+ MB/s with a Seagate GoFlex USB3 drive, and 24+ MB/s with a Lexar CF card in a Kingston USB2 reader.
No complaints there: everything's in the right ballpark.

This is booting off my backup drive. I still need to fix the effects of my last MultiBeast experiment on the usual boot drive but at least I got the BIOS settings back to a reasonable state. :)
 
P.S. For those with the H77N/3225 setup that have had problems with onboard Bluetooth: try installing the external antennas that come with the board. BT was active, but unable to pair until I added the antennas.

Further testing reveals bluetooth on the H77N-WIFI is on the left antenna port when looking at the rear of the motherboard. Disconnecting the antenna causes keyboard/trackpad disconnects or tracking problems.
 
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