Silverstone Fortress > GA-Z97M-D3H with Yosemite?

[cygnusfear2]

Hai,

I've been lurking here for a while in order to build my own hacks. Succesfully put together several of them in the past few years, including one for a friend. Now I've purchased the following parts today for a new hack that will use this awesome Silverstone FT03 mATX casing.

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Intel Core i5-4690K
Gigabyte GA-Z97M-D3H
Corsair RM650
MSI GeForce GTX 760 GAMING
Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDD SATA
Crucial M500 240GB
TP-LINK TL-WDN4800
Crucial 16GB (8x2) DDR3-1600 CL9
Silverstone SST-FT03B

Although the Z97M board comes right out of the buyer's guide I'm seeing mixed stories about it. Does anyone have any idea about how compatible it is with Yosemite? Would it be wiser to try the Z87 (as per tony's golden mATX build, http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-builds/106748-tonymacx86s-haswell-matx-ga-z87mx-d3h-i7-4770k-hd-4600-a.html)?

Either way I'll write up something about my experiences for those interested!

Kind regards and thanks for the help,
A

 

[wfj]

Hai,

I've been lurking here for a while in order to build my own hacks. Succesfully put together several of them in the past few years, including one for a friend. Now I've purchased the following parts today for a new hack that will use this awesome Silverstone FT03 mATX casing.

View attachment 114469

​

Intel Core i5-4690K
Gigabyte GA-Z97M-D3H
Corsair RM650
MSI GeForce GTX 760 GAMING
Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDD SATA
Crucial M500 240GB
TP-LINK TL-WDN4800
Crucial 16GB (8x2) DDR3-1600 CL9
Silverstone SST-FT03B

Although the Z97M board comes right out of the buyer's guide I'm seeing mixed stories about it. Does anyone have any idea about how compatible it is with Yosemite? Would it be wiser to try the Z87 (as per tony's golden mATX build, http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-builds/106748-tonymacx86s-haswell-matx-ga-z87mx-d3h-i7-4770k-hd-4600-a.html)?

Either way I'll write up something about my experiences for those interested!

Kind regards and thanks for the help,
A

I've had zero problems with the Z97 boards I've sampled and Yosemite. Having used Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI I have to say my preference is currently Asus. I just built a system today with the Asus Z97M Plus and it was a breeze...

BTW, I have heard that heat can be an issue with that case and graphics cards that don't use the blower type setup for cooling.

 

[cygnusfear2]

Thanks for the swift reply, I've changed the card into a smaller form factor (MSI PCIe NVD N760 GAMING 2G ITX) which should hopefully also help with the airflow. It's one of the few cards that has a Mini-DisplayPort required for the Cinema display I've got; been looking at a converter+another card but due to the case construction (ports on top, below cover) I was wary of the solution. Or would you suggest another card with similar specs and ease of hack?

Was mostly worried about Sound compatibility with the Z97 from Gigabyte but I'm seeing the Asus Z97M Plus is also having issues there. I have an external card, but having sound working natively would be awesome (although the display sound will probably be fine either way).

Cheers!

A

 

[wfj]

What exactly do you mean by sound compatibility? I haven't seen any real problems personally. The only weird thing I've noticed is with the ALC1150. If I'm in windows and reboot to OSX the volume is very low but that problem goes away if you do a full shut down.

Most any of the 700 series cards should work fine with OSX. If you want something more powerful there are some great deals out there if you keep your eyes peeled. I picked up a 780ti for $330. You would just need to make sure it has the squirrel cage type of blower for cooling so all the heat is expelled out the back of the card.

 

[cygnusfear2]

I've seen people on the forums here having issues with sound on the Z97 & Yosemite due to the ALC892 chipset, but that might be a case of distinguishing between bad installs and actual problems. I'm relieved to know you have minimal issues.

I haven't dual booted for a long time. In case of gaming angst I'll put windows on a hot-swappable SSD harr..

The blower will hopefully be ok (not fully caged though). I'm not using the Mini case so a small card leaves a bit more space for airflow nor am I planning to overclock anything. In case it gives me issues in the future I'm prepared to swap it for something else.

A

 

[oker]

I've just built one config with this mobo. According to the posts this mobo doesn't need a DSDT, but for the sound to work I had to use toleda's HDAEnabler DSDT:

https://github.com/toleda/audio_ssdt_enabler/blob/master/audio_ssdt-hdae-1.zip

Installed ALC892 from MultiBeast and now sound is working.

 

[oker]

Update: sometimes the audio starts to get distorted, and after sleep it needs the alc reset workaround to get it working again. Sometimes this happens even without sleeping. I will get a cheap usb dongle to have reliable audio.