did you ever got it to work? i have the same laptop and specs... Please advise
Hey, I actually did a LOT of work on it, but kinda abandoned it for other things. But there are some important findings you should probably know.
You have to pick either the AMD gpu or the Intel gpu are your main gpu hardware (this is done in the bios).
I would recommend using the intel igpu because you will get a WAY better experience!
If you pick intel iGPU here are the issues:
None
Mojave will work, some work in Mojave though; probably need whatevergreen
If you pick AMD here are the issues:
1) No lid close sleep/wake
2) In High Sierra there is an EDID issue (low color bandwidth, so there is gradient issues, color banding)
** I did fix the EDID issue at one point, but closing the lid (sleep disabled) caused the EDID to revert when reopened; no fix ever found. I also tried injecting the entire AMD bios of my card, but it caused weird color issues (orange screen)
3) In Mojave there is NO AMD gpu alleceration with the w5170m due to it not supporting Metal.
4) No native backlight control; the whatevergreen kext would sometimes load the screen as a backlight controlled display and it would work; 50/50.
Other issues:
There are sleep issues; iGPU sleep seemed to be okay in High Sierra though
The trackpad is not your friend; it's an ALPS v8 (I think its a v8, cant remember?). With Rehabmans default voodoops2controller.kext the trackpad will work but you will have zero gestures and no control of track speed. The track speed is a little slow for my liking :/ There are alps based custom voodoops2controller.kext floating around the web on other sites, a couple of them worked great; but most of them (may be new ones) were built when there was a sleep bug in the original voodoops2controller.kext, so they all suffer from that bug. If you close the lid or sleep the laptop on wake the trackpad will not work anymore. My solution was to disable sleep and hibernation on the system completely with terminal commands or thirdparty software.
If you need any help with it just ask me
I still have all my EFI folders saved and all the work I did saved.
If you go the iGPU route just know you will need to disable the AMD GPU in one way or another. You can make a SSDT to disable it from clover, or there is a boot UEFI shell that will disable the AMD GPU from bios; this way will remove the abililty to use the AMD GPU in other OS's though.
