[Solved] Asus VivoPC X A80CJ (GTX 1060) Refuses to Boot 10.12.5 via Clover

[nightalon]

View media item 188921
Hi everyone,

I thought this new, compact, nifty $800 system with GTX 1060 and Core i5 might make a great single-board, GPU-enabled hackintosh. It turns out I was wrong...so far.

Hardware Challenges:

1. Case does not simply snap open as warranty sticker would suggest; need long Philips-head screwdriver to access screws underneath rubber feet
2. Swapping Wi-Fi for a BCM94352 causes system not to boot, until BIOS 0501 is applied (Update: DW1830/BCM94360 works fine with BIOS 0401 as well as 0502, although certain boots fail to POST)
3. Upgrading RAM from 8 GB to 16 GB requires removing CPU heatsink-fan
   1. No second DDR4 slot for an addition 16 GB
4. M.2 2280 slot will not accept NVMe SSDs, only SATA; accordingly I used 850 EVO instead of 960 EVO (OK, since NVMe driver situation is annoying on MacOS right now)

OK, so now that I upgraded the system not to run glacially slow off of the default 1 TB 5400 RPM Toshiba HDD, I'm attempting to install macOS Sierra. Here's what I tried:

Install Attempts:

1. UniBeast with ESP/EFI install; no GPU selected
   1. Results in failed boot...no kernel oops or debug output. See image below.
2. Latest Clover overlay with OsxLowMemFixDrv-64
   1. Results in failed boot...no kernel oops or debug output. See image below.
3. Latest Clover overlay with OsxAptioFixDrv-64
   1. Results in failed boot...no kernel oops or debug output. See image below.
4. Latest Clover overlay with OsxAptio2FixDrv-64
   1. Results in failed boot...no kernel oops or debug output. See image below.
5. I alternated booting with and without Safe Mode
6. I alternated booting with and without NVIDIA disabler
7. My BIOS settings are as follows:
   1. Load optimized defaults
   2. Disable Secure Boot
   3. Enable XHCI Handoff
8. Also tried replacing vbox-hfs EFI driver with hfsplus.efi

Whatever shall I do to get this system to boot? Shall I get debug output from Clover saving to log somehow?

Happy that Pascal GPUs have Mac drivers now, but unhappy my compact system won't run Sierra!

Thanks for any helpful suggestions,
Until recently a NVIDIA employee, nightalon

 

[BreBo]

Please note that your Kaby Lake CPU is not natively supported in macOS.
The CPU requires a FakeCPUID (with Skylake ID) to boot.
[NEW / TESTING] Intel 7th Generation Kaby Lake CPUs + 200 Series Motherboards in macOS

 

[nightalon]

Wow, thanks for pointing that out! Completely missed that this is a 200 series chipset. It's obvious when it's in the product name of the motherboard!

 

[nightalon]

Update:

It's a Skylake H110 chipset with a Kaby Lake CPU, i5-7300HQ.
https://ark.intel.com/products/90590/Intel-H110-Chipset
https://ark.intel.com/products/97456/Intel-Core-i5-7300HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz

On the old BIOS 0401, I tried two CPUIDs:
Real: 0x0906E9
Test1: 0x0506E3
Test2: 0x0506E9

Both failed.

On the new BIOS 0502, I tried two CPUIDs:
Test1: 0x0506E3
Test2: 0x000506E3

Both failed.

Should I try a newer revision of Clover? Please see the gallery images below for screenshots of the kernel panics I now encounter.

View media item 188980View media item 188979View media item 188978View media item 188977

 

[nightalon]

And: got it working.

CPUID patch is necessary; also appropriate memory config info in the SMBIOS portion of config.plist. I think this is necessary because this device is unusually single channel and single slot.

I'm now going to try with new BIOS 0701, latest Clover, and ALC887 audio injection. The GTX 1060 is working just fine.

One other gotcha: since chipset is 100 series, there is a weird issue with the AHCI driver not seeing the install drive when you boot the installer. Rehab man has a kext fix until it can be patched in ACPI tables.