R9-290x woes - Spinning beach ball before login screen appears

[rkelleyrtp]

Greetings all,

I am trying to get my new hackintosh working with the R9-290x cards and am having a difficult time. I built a new system using a Supermicro X9DAi board, two 6-core CPUs, 64G RAM, and an older ATI Radeon 3690 video card. The install went well (both Yosemite and Mavericks) - nothing to note. Initially, I used Unibeast/Multibeast for the install but switched over to Clover due to the 290x/EFI boot compatibility issues.

If I use an R9-290x card, I continually get the spinning beach ball before the login screen appears. I started with a PowerColor 290x card and returned it for an MSI 290x card thinking I had a bad card. However, the MSI card exhibits the same problem. I occasionally get the login screen (about 1 out of 4-5 times), but most of the time I get a white screen (with mouse pointer) and spinning ball (no login screen). Since I don't have another motherboard to test, I can't rule out the 290x compatibility or combination of 290x and the motherboard with Yosemite.

Are other R9-290x owners having the same problem? If so, how did you fix it? How can I debug this problem?

Thanks for any pointers!

 

[RedEnzo]

Greetings all,

I am trying to get my new hackintosh working with the R9-290x cards and am having a difficult time. I built a new system using a Supermicro X9DAi board, two 6-core CPUs, 64G RAM, and an older ATI Radeon 3690 video card. The install went well (both Yosemite and Mavericks) - nothing to note. Initially, I used Unibeast/Multibeast for the install but switched over to Clover due to the 290x/EFI boot compatibility issues.

If I use an R9-290x card, I continually get the spinning beach ball before the login screen appears. I started with a PowerColor 290x card and returned it for an MSI 290x card thinking I had a bad card. However, the MSI card exhibits the same problem. I occasionally get the login screen (about 1 out of 4-5 times), but most of the time I get a white screen (with mouse pointer) and spinning ball (no login screen). Since I don't have another motherboard to test, I can't rule out the 290x compatibility or combination of 290x and the motherboard with Yosemite.

Are other R9-290x owners having the same problem? If so, how did you fix it? How can I debug this problem?

Thanks for any pointers!

One question How much did you pay for all that?

And What where you doing when you finally get on?

• Was it gaming or Anything Graphical beacuse The Gpu might be failing or have PSU Issues

What is the amount of watts on that PSU?

 

[rkelleyrtp]

Paid too much

As for the PSU, I just purchased a brand new EVGA 1000W PSU. And, everything works fine in Win7...

 

[RedEnzo]

Well of course on windows! But maybe the graphics cards are not compatible. Because if you update graphics drivers something could go wrong on the mac side because the graphics cards are manly for windows

 

[rkelleyrtp]

Thanks, but there are other people who have them working properly in Yosemite.

Do you happen to have those cards running in Yosemite?

 

[RedEnzo]

No I don't But In windows if you update the drivers the windows code for the drivers can mess somethings up, with the info you wrote it looks like a driver problem.

But the CPU can also be apart of this because of a driver update it might not be reading the card right.


One time I had this graphics card on my old PC and I found out later that the CPU was messing up the Graphics display

 

[ohjamus]

@rkellyrtp I have the same problem as you with the Sapphire R9 290x.
I have tried this on the Gigabyte GA-7pesh3. This is also a dual socket setup with 6 cores per CPU.

I'm using a 1300 Watt power supply so I do not believe that is the issue. However, I do have a Supermicro x9sra (single socket) motherboard. I will try to boot the card from different PCI slots and then the Supermicro board to see if there is any difference.

 

[rkelleyrtp]

In the end, I just went back to Mavericks due to all the graphics issues. I needed a 100% working system, and (in my opinion) Yosemite is just to immature to work reliably with the 290x cards. Mavericks is working great with 2x 290x cards - very fast and very stable.

 

[ohjamus]

Oh really?!!! What method/bootloader did you use to get them working?
Also what kext and boot flags?

You may have just made my day!!

 

[rkelleyrtp]

Used Clover with UEFI support. That is the only way to get the 290x cards to properly boot.

The kernel string was "npci=0x2000 kext-dev-mode=1 -v"

By far, the easiest way to get everything working properly is to use another Mac running Mavericks. I spent days wrestling with the installer and decided to use my Macbook Pro and an external USB drive to create the initial install. Once the install was done, I rebooted to new USB drive, updated the OS, and installed Clover to the UEFI partition. Next, I moved the USB drive to my hackintosh and booted via the Clover menu. Voila! Mavericks running on my hack.

If you are already running Mavericks on another Mac, simply download SuperDuper! and backup your system to an external USB drive. Reboot from this drive, install Clover, and then move this drive over to your hack.

I ran into 2 issues though: (a) the onboard NIC did not work so I added an Intel PCIe card, and (b) the onboard audio did not work so I used my USB headset.

Hope this helps...