[Partial Success] Gigabyte H370 HD3 + i3 8100: Graphics card issues

[Jarsil]

Hi all.
This is my first post after a long while, I surely hope to not break any posting rule (i read them, I swear). I should also have a correct signature showing my present hardware.

I've been using an Hackintosh following this site's advices for a long time, but I was stuck with an old series 5 bios motherboard so I left OS X to a 10.10.5 release and didn't have the courage to do an upgrade, migrating to UEFI and High Sierra, until last week, when the motherboard just died and I had to buy a new one along with CPU and RAM.

Coming back here I read the Buyer's Guide and decided to go to the G H370 HD3 MB with a "cheap" i3 8100. I'm not interested in a superpowered build, mainly this mac is used by my wife to work with Lightroom and Office work.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to upgrade the system from 10.10.X to High Sierra because I had a lot of troubles in getting even the installer start with this motherboard until I found a guide with a good clover config.plist and the righe SMBIOS (18.1) definition. After that, I had to use a new HD and recover my data from a Timemachine backup I had. All is well a part from the fact that I was forced to use the integrated GPU of the i3 cpu, because my Geforce GTX580 couldn't complete the boot.

The system starts, but when the login screen is expected, i got a black screen with mouse pointer on. I tried to press the first letter of the username and write the password as someone suggested in a post, with no luck. I've installed the nVidia web drivers and enabled them in config.plist (not with -nvidia-drv boot option which is not working anymore), even if on my old installation that card worked flawlessly with original drivers.

Could be just a matter of changing the SMBIOS from iMac 18.1 (needed for the intel HD630 to work without flickering) to MacPro something?

I'm not interested in having both videocards working since I do not plan to use heavy multi-monitoring. I tried to disable the integrated GPU from UEFI BIOS, but it didn't change anything: still black screen with mouse pointer visible and functional.

The system is working fine with HD630, but I have this GFX and since occasionally I boot on the same machine a Windows 10 disk with some game on it, I'd like to have that card working as before on macOS, if it's possible.

I'm not looking for a bulleted list of things to do, just some head's up about where to look, because I tried lots of the suggestions i found in other threads about the black screen at login but no one applied correctly on my system. The only thing I didn't try was to change the SMBios, because I know it could cause the system to not boot anymore. Would it boot using a Unibeast key with Highsierra in that case?

Thanks all for your time.

 

[Jamesbond007]

Hi all.
This is my first post after a long while, I surely hope to not break any posting rule (i read them, I swear). I should also have a correct signature showing my present hardware.

I've been using an Hackintosh following this site's advices for a long time, but I was stuck with an old series 5 bios motherboard so I left OS X to a 10.10.5 release and didn't have the courage to do an upgrade, migrating to UEFI and High Sierra, until last week, when the motherboard just died and I had to buy a new one along with CPU and RAM.

Coming back here I read the Buyer's Guide and decided to go to the G H370 HD3 MB with a "cheap" i3 8100. I'm not interested in a superpowered build, mainly this mac is used by my wife to work with Lightroom and Office work.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to upgrade the system from 10.10.X to High Sierra because I had a lot of troubles in getting even the installer start with this motherboard until I found a guide with a good clover config.plist and the right SMBIOS (18.1) definition. After that, I had to use a new HD and recover my data from a Time Machine backup I had. All is well apart from the fact that I was forced to use the integrated GPU of the i3 cpu, because my Geforce GTX580 couldn't complete the boot.

The system starts, but when the login screen is expected, i got a black screen with mouse pointer on. I tried to press the first letter of the username and write the password as someone suggested in a post, with no luck. I've installed the nVidia web drivers and enabled them in config.plist (not with -nvidia-drv boot option which is not working anymore), even if on my old installation that card worked flawlessly with original drivers.

Could be just a matter of changing the SMBIOS from iMac 18.1 (needed for the intel HD630 to work without flickering) to MacPro something?

I'm not interested in having both video cards working since I do not plan to use heavy multi-monitoring. I tried to disable the integrated GPU from UEFI BIOS, but it didn't change anything: still black screen with mouse pointer visible and functional.

The system is working fine with HD630, but I have this GFX and since occasionally I boot on the same machine a Windows 10 disk with some game on it, I'd like to have that card working as before on macOS, if it's possible.

I'm not looking for a bulleted list of things to do, just some head's up about where to look, because I tried lots of the suggestions i found in other threads about the black screen at login but no one applied correctly on my system. The only thing I didn't try was to change the SMBios, because I know it could cause the system to not boot anymore. Would it boot using a Unibeast key with High Sierra in that case?

Thanks all for your time.

You have a GTX 580? This may not be what you want to hear, but I have heard that High Sierra may have problems with some old Nvidia cards, including some Fermi cards such as GTX 550 Ti and GTX 560. Not sure if the GTX 580 also has problems as well since I heard nothing about this. My guess is that this has something to do with the fact that the Fermi cards lack Metal support.

However, there are success stories on the internet for people using Sierra (NOT High Sierra) with Coffee Lake motherboards and CPUs (I believe these most likely require the use of FakeCPUID to fake the CPU as a Skylake or Kaby Lake so as to be compatible with Sierra 10.12.6.), and the Fermi cards should still work in Sierra using "Inject Nvidia" in Clover.

If it turns out High Sierra won't work with your GPU, will you be willing to "downgrade" to Sierra?

Edit : The following thread offers a way to let Fermi cards work with High Sierra, but it involves disabling Metal support.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/high-sierra-graphic-drivers-for-fermi-geforce-gfx-560-ti.234606/

 

[Jarsil]

You have a GTX 580? This may not be what you want to hear, but I have heard that High Sierra may have problems with some old Nvidia cards, including some Fermi cards such as GTX 550 Ti and GTX 560. Not sure if the GTX 580 also has problems as well since I heard nothing about this. My guess is that this has something to do with the fact that the Fermi cards lack Metal support.

Thanks a lot for the link and the heads-up. I didn't think about it being an old card, which indeed is. I got for free at my office when they dismissed some old workstation and since it worked for a couple of years, I was hoping to continue to use it for a while. I'll read the thread you linked and try to understand if those changes are worth the effort, otherwise I'll stay with the HD630 which works fine for everyday use and try to get a new card in the future.