How to build your own iMac Pro [Successful Build/Extended Guide]

[ImaPirate]

Beastie Post-Traumata Curement and Reanimation

View attachment 293507


Apparently the beast survived the ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe collapse without damage and returned back home last Friday

To cure any likely yet persistent CPU post-traumata, I welcomed the beast with a brand new cage and cooling

Thermaltake Core X71 Tempered Glass Edition Full Tower Chassis

1x EK-CoolStream CE 280 - 280mm/44mm (dual, front)
1x EK-CoolStream PE 360 - 360mm/39mm (tripple, roof)
2x EK-CoolStream XE 360 - 360mm/60mm (cellar)
20 Fans will now heat my entire flat this winter

To squeeze the two tripple 360/60mm radiators and 12 Fans into the big tower's cellar, real Swiss clock precision and 20 hours of totally crazy fumbling were unavoidable..

View attachment 293509

After plugging the last whole in the water cooling circuit by mounting a yet missing temperature sensor (and monitor unit) in one of the t-pieces, the water cooling circuit shall be filled and the beast awaken

Below a few snap-shots of the new beastie environment for @ALL..

Thanks to @DSM2 for his inspiring ideas and suggestions!

View attachment 293512

View attachment 293518

View attachment 293519

View attachment 293520

Very nice build! Looks like you have 4 radiators.

I'm now trying to learn how to back up my M2 SSD to my SATA SSD. Not easy for me as I'm a builder not a technical installer. But I'm trying to do it now. Hey KGP, where on your post here do have a section where you show how to back up your SSD. So far I CCC'd my SATA SSD now I need to use clover to put the EFI folder in the right place and don't know the procedure. Any help would be great so I have a bootable backup drive. I'm asking because my install guy is no where in sight for the last week. Thanks for whatever you can provide. Again, great job on your build!

 

[ppffffpp]

Just wanted to add my results here. I successfully followed KGP's guide and am running a 7940x and it is working absolutely amazing. I get Geekbench/Cinebench scores on OS X that are identical to my Windows partition.

Also I just wanted to add a couple things that might help some people:

Thunderbolt - KGP appears to only have been able to test it with a device capable of ~150MB/s - I have tested it with my Thunderbolt RAID array and have confirmed transfers at full speed of ~500MB/s. This is the max bandwidth that the hard drives are capable of so it appears Thunderbolt will work at full speed although I have not tested beyond this level.

USB 3.0 - Again KGB only has tested with a device capable of ~150MB/s. I have tested it with a SSD in a USB3.0 case and was able to get 350-400MB/s. Therefore again it will operate all the way up to max speed.

Thanks so much KGP. Your hard work and dedication to this build is beyond admirable. I literally was able to do the build first try without any issues following your detailed guide. AMAZING!

 

[srmusico]

Hello guys!
First of all thanks to KGP and all the users that have tried this new X299
I have a new project for a friend, and we are considering to get the same components:

- i9-7980XE
- Asus Prime X299 Deluxe . (initially we were interested in the Gigabyte X299 UD4, but seems to be easier with the Asus, that have been tested from 0 to 100 by KGP xD)
- MSI GTX 1080Ti Gaming X 11GB GDDR5X
- Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD PCI-e 500GB
- 4x 16GB (64GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V Red DDR4 2400 CL15


this will be an amazing project jajaja

I would want to try a cool water cooling system , but at this time i only use pre-charged water cooling systems xDDDD

One stupid question, I came from a Z170X system.
How i have to insert the NVM in this ASUS/Gigabyte MOBOS?
Do I need an adapter to insert it into a PCIe module?

i have been looking at the pictures, and i don't find the classic slot in the MoBo jaja.

Also one last question ,
i usually use a TP-LINK TL-WN881ND 300Mbs 11n Wireless PCI Express Card for WiFi.
Works fine in my z170X with Sierra 12.6 (with a kext named "IO80211Family.kext" in S/L/E)
What do i have to get it working in High Sierra? Are there other new kext or could i activate it natively with Clover?

Thanks you so so much for this amazing project!!!!

 

[ppffffpp]

Also @kgp, I have a theory regarding your Sync All Cores stability issues. I was experiencing some as well whenever I would load up Adobe Lightroom when Sync All Cores was enabled. I know Lightroom is a big user of the AVX instruction set on the CPU and I also know SiliconLottery (the CPU binning/delidding service) will always put its AVX offset figure on its recommended overclocks. Since Sync All Cores is essentially an overclock on all non-turbo boosted cores, it's likely that the stability issues comes in whenever a piece of AVX code is run. Silicon Lottery uses a AVX offset of 3 and AVX512 offset of 5. Since I started using those offsets in the BIOS, Sync All Cores is 100% stable for me (we are an hour in here - but previously I could barely make 1 minute while using Adobe Lightroom). Please try and let me know.

 

[kgp]

Very nice build! Looks like you have 4 radiators.

I'm now trying to learn how to back up my M2 SSD to my SATA SSD. Not easy for me as I'm a builder not a technical installer. But I'm trying to do it now. Hey KGP, where on your post here do have a section where you show how to back up your SSD. So far I CCC'd my SATA SSD now I need to use clover to put the EFI folder in the right place and don't know the procedure. Any help would be great so I have a bootable backup drive. I'm asking because my install guy is no where in sight for the last week. Thanks for whatever you can provide. Again, great job on your build!

Well the entire backup procedure is really anything than difficult.

1.) At first place it is important to format primer to the CCC procedure your clone drive as described in C.11.b), which will create a single HSF+ partition and an EFI partition on your clone drive.

2.) After cloning your system disk with CCC to the freshly formatted clone drive, you have to mount and open the EFI-partitions on your system disk and clone drive with e.g. Clover Configurator, respectively, and indeed just copy the EFI-Folder in the EFI-partition of your System disk to the yet empty partition of your clone drive, using Apple's Finder Windows. And voila, you have a bootable clone drive. How to mount/unmount EFI partitions with clover configurator and copy/paste their content via Apple's Finder Windows is described in D1.4.a)

Good luck! Let me know if you have additional questions...

 

[kgp]

Also @kgp, I have a theory regarding your Sync All Cores stability issues. I was experiencing some as well whenever I would load up Adobe Lightroom when Sync All Cores was enabled. I know Lightroom is a big user of the AVX instruction set on the CPU and I also know SiliconLottery (the CPU binning/delidding service) will always put its AVX offset figure on its recommended overclocks. Since Sync All Cores is essentially an overclock on all non-turbo boosted cores, it's likely that the stability issues comes in whenever a piece of AVX code is run. Silicon Lottery uses a AVX offset of 3 and AVX512 offset of 5. Since I started using those offsets in the BIOS, Sync All Cores is 100% stable for me (we are an hour in here - but previously I could barely make 1 minute while using Adobe Lightroom). Please try and let me know.

That's indeed a brilliant advice. I will give it a try as soon my system is on go

Thanks, man!

 

[kgp]

Hello guys!
First of all thanks to KGP and all the users that have tried this new X299
I have a new project for a friend, and we are considering to get the same components:

- i9-7980XE
- Asus Prime X299 Deluxe . (initially we were interested in the Gigabyte X299 UD4, but seems to be easier with the Asus, that have been tested from 0 to 100 by KGP xD)
- MSI GTX 1080Ti Gaming X 11GB GDDR5X
- Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD PCI-e 500GB
- 4x 16GB (64GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V Red DDR4 2400 CL15


this will be an amazing project jajaja

I would want to try a cool water cooling system , but at this time i only use pre-charged water cooling systems xDDDD

One stupid question, I came from a Z170X system.
How i have to insert the NVM in this ASUS/Gigabyte MOBOS?
Do I need an adapter to insert it into a PCIe module?

i have been looking at the pictures, and i don't find the classic slot in the MoBo jaja.

Also one last question ,
i usually use a TP-LINK TL-WN881ND 300Mbs 11n Wireless PCI Express Card for WiFi.
Works fine in my z170X with Sierra 12.6 (with a kext named "IO80211Family.kext" in S/L/E)
What do i have to get it working in High Sierra? Are there other new kext or could i activate it natively with Clover?

Thanks you so so much for this amazing project!!!!

1.) Well I guess at first place you will have to decide with which approach you go (see your post #148)...

2.) At least on the ASUS Prime X299 Deluxe but also on the Gigabyte mobos you have at least two NVMe onboard connectors.

3.) I don't know anything about the TP-LINK TL-WN881ND 300Mbs 11n Wireless PCI Express Card, but I guess at least it won't support hands-off and continuity. Airdrop might also work with this card, however I am not sure. I use the OSXWIFI PCIe Adapter which just works flawless and also provides BIOS and Clover keyboard support in addition.

 

[paulotex]

So far I CCC'd my SATA SSD now I need to use clover to put the EFI folder in the right place and don't know the procedure.

I am not sure I understand 100% what you are asking, but here goes:
When you partition a disk using GPT, you have a hidden partition, usually called ESP or EFI, where Clover puts its files. That partition is formated as FAT32 (or VFAT). So if you copy the whole EFI folder from your boot disk to that partition in your backup disk, you are ready to go. For example, in my case:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                         250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI ESP_NVME                536.9 MB   disk0s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data Win10                   93.5 GB    disk0s2
   3:           Windows Recovery                         889.2 MB   disk0s3
   4:                 Apple_APFS Container disk2         104.9 GB   disk0s4
   5:           Linux Filesystem                         50.3 GB    disk0s5

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.1 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI ESP_SSD                 536.9 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Local                   996.1 GB   disk1s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data Data                    53.5 GB    disk1s3

/dev/disk2 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +104.9 GB   disk2
                                 Physical Store disk0s4
   1:                APFS Volume macOS                   30.7 GB    disk2s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 21.3 MB    disk2s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                520.8 MB   disk2s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk2s4

I have 2 disks, disk0 and disk1. In addition, you'll see disk2 (synthesized), which is the virtual disk from the APFS partiton in disk0s4.

Both disk0 and disk1 have a "GUID_partition_scheme" in partition 0. This is where Clover is installed. So if I want to copy the complete EFI from disk0s1 to disk1s1 I do:

$ diskutil mount disk0s1
Volume ESP_NVME on disk0s1 mounted
$ diskutil mount disk1s1
Volume ESP_SSD on disk1s1 mounted

Now I can just copy all the contents from ESP_NVME to ESP_SSD. Note that you should copy also the EFI folder, not just the CLOVER folder.

Finally, just a warning: usually the partition is called ESP or EFI, which might get a bit confusing if you have 2 of them mounted and if there is a folder called EFI inside a partition called EFI. Make sure you check what you are copying from and to ;-)

Also note that if your backup disk is in your system while you boot, Clover will show it as bootable too. Things can get a bit confusing ;-)

PS: Oops, I just saw that KGP has also answered. I am assuming your disk is already partitioned, while KGP also explains how to partition.

 

[izo1]

@kgp wow this is a beast of a system.

How's the stability?

I'm looking to swap my mobo and CPU with what you have now in a few months.

 

[xrb936]

Hi @kgp
I have already installed the installer from my usb to my SSD. However when I tried to get into the installer on my SSD, it was stuck at here:

Could you please help me with this? Thank you so much!

UPDATED:
I waited for about 20 mins, now it's stuck at here:

And I tried several times, sometimes it can show an apple logo, and then simply reboot...

Don't know anything wrong, could you please help me out? Thanks.
By the way, I have Asus ROG Rampage VI Extreme, 7980XE and 1080Ti.