Robbish's 8yr old ATX IvyBridge Hackintosh GA-Z77-DS3H - i5-3570K - HD 4000 [OpenCore/macOS Big Sur]

[Robbish]

That's a sweet little IvyBridge setup you have there with Thunderbolt and 4K Graphics
Have you tried setting your 4k screen resolution in your config.plist? it's set to Max by default but you could try

• UEFI > Output > Resolution > 3840x2160

you can also stick your hertz in that resolution figure too e.g, for 90 hertz it would be: 3840x2160@90

give that a go.

 

[Robbish]

Internal Audio:
My chipset is different (VIA VT2021) - I managed to get it working with alcid=9 in bootarg (7 works aswell but it's messy). I think I screwed up the part in DeviceProperties. Can somebody help me fix this, so I can make it more permanent ? - See attachement. My chipset info :
gfxutil -f HDEF
00:1b.0 8086:1e20 /PCI0@0/HDEF@1B = PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1B,0x0)

VIA VT2020_2021 0x100100, layout 5, 7, 9, 13

Thanks for your help.

Your VIA audio looks good to me however I've uploaded my version of it for you with downloadable Plist attached

 

[wooolooo]

thanks, it's looking better now. Sometimes I plug a 23" 1080p 144hz screen instead of this one so maybe i'll switch back to Max, to make sure theres no problem... Minor thing

That's a sweet little IvyBridge setup you have there with Thunderbolt and 4K Graphics

Yes I have very good ivy bridge build ! I built it back in 2013 for pretty cheap, from second hand parts. I really wanted Thunderbolt because it was the new thing and it felt very future proof. Gave it good power with high end power supply, and good air cooling from Noctua, for future proofing again.

Over the years I made it a little better, with LG IPS 4K display, boosting it to 32GB of RAM, upgrading to an RX 580, replacing the system's SATA SSDs (500GB for Windows and 1TB for macOS), adding a pair of M-Audio monitoring speakers... And getting 36TB of Thunderbolt storage (!)
Since I'm a video maker, I'm always in war with storage space, and, when I got the chance to buy 3x 12TB Pegasus R6 for cheap, from a large production company renewing its system to 10gbe NAS, I jumped on the opportunity. For video editing in Prores, or 4K cinemaDNG raw, you need both speed and large storage space... Having access to 30TB of data in RAID5 at over 600MB/sec is bonkers even today. Tthunderbolt is indeed future proof

I'll probably upgrade to a Mac with the next gen Apple Silicone some time in 2022, but I'm not in a hurry thanks to this Big Sur upgrade ;-)

 

[Robbish]

Since i'm a video maker i'm always in war with storage space, and when I got the chance to buy 3x 12TB Pegasus R6 for cheap, from a large production company renewing its system to 10gbe NAS, I jumped on the opportunity. ..

I'll probably upgrade to a mac with the next gen apple silicone some time in 2022, but i'm not in a hurry thanks to this big sur upgrade ;-)

Wow 36TB storage I think that you need a NAS yourself. You've done well to max out your PC like that. If you have any PCIe x4 or greater left on your motherboard then you could buy a PCIe Adapter and stick a NVMe drive in there to use as your Mac boot drive (you would have to check on the forums for compatibility with a hack though). Just a thought.

Yeah Silicon Macs, I am considering jumping ship in 2022 too although I might make a final Hack instead. I still like to tinker

 

[Westsurf]

Wow 36TB storage I think that you need a NAS yourself. You've done well to max out your PC like that. If you have any PCIe x4 or greater left on your motherboard then you could buy a PCIe Adapter and stick a NVMe drive in there to use as your Mac boot drive (you would have to check on the forums for compatibility with a hack though). Just a thought.

Compatibility for NVMe may be an issue dependent on the age of the BIOS. Using my MB as an example, Z77 series as well, a modded BIOS is required for the BIOS to recognize and boot from NVMe. Again, MB dependent the PCIe slot that can used may be limited.

There’s a thread on Tonymac relating to using NVMe as boot. Some people had success with modded BIOS availed from Tweaktown. When using that my MB didn’t fully name the drive correctly. Another Tonymac user then further modded the Tweaktown BIOS to get correct drive name recognition on my MB.

In the end the efforts were worth it and for anyone using their hack for video work would appreciate the speed difference.

YMMV and flashing modded BIOS is always fraught with potential issues. Ensure you know the MB abilities regarding dual/back up BIOS if availed.

Tweaktown Modded BIOS Thread

 

[Robbish]

Hi @Westsurf, I should have done my research firstly before mentioning adding an NVMe drive. Shortly after I posted that suggestion to wooolooo, I later discovered everything you mentioned so yesterday, I modded my own BIOS so it now has the inserted NvmExpressDxe_4.ffs file in there. I'm now waiting for my PCie - Nvme adapter to arrive. I have yet to purchase a NVMe drive to test it.

I used Windows to do it with this HowTo guide written by Fernando on the Win-Raid Forum

P.S. The UEFITool for Mac available on GitHub (the LongSoft and the A58 LongSoft vit9696 version) did not allow me to insert files into my BIOS, it was only read only and extract only so I used UEFITool within the tools from here

Correction: The UEFITool for Mac available on GitHub by vit9696 does indeed work for inserting files but you need to select the 0.28.0 Release i.e, UEFITool_0.28.0_mac.zip

 

[lologh]

Hi all and thanks Robbish for your guide.

I look to your USBPorts.kext, and i've seen that you use MacMini6,2 model and in your SMBIOS you use iMac14,4.
Is your USBPorts.kext up to date?

Thanks for your answer.

 

[Robbish]

- Glad you liked the guide, cheers lologh.
- Yeh that's right, the USBPorts.kext was created whilst I was still on the macmini6,2 SMBIOS however USB port functionality has not been il-affected at all by the change of SMBIOS to 14,4

P.S. please note, that this entire guide is done in IvyBridge and not Haswell. The only aspect that applies to Haswell is just the SMBIOS and nothing else.

 

[zjb]

Just login to say thank you. I successfully set my old computer up on my first try following your excellent tutorial.

 

[Robbish]

thanks @zjb that's fantastic to hear. Enjoy your hack !