Hey everyone! First of all many thanks to
@Stork,
@pastrychef and
@ModMike for all their valuable threads and contributions which helped me build and troubleshoot my build
Quick recap of other components not listed in my build signature:
- 2 x Samsung MZ-V7E500BW 970 EVO SSD, 500GB NVMe M.2 (one for Mac and one for Win10)
- Ballistix Sport LT BLS4K16G4D30BESB 64GB (16GB x4)(DDR4, 3000 MT/s, PC4-24000)
- Corsair RM750i 80 Plus Gold, 750 Watt Power Supply
- Asus Dual RX580 O8G Gaming (Radeon, PCIe 3.0, 8GB DDR5, HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI). I went for this one instead of the Saphire and it seems to work without any issues.
- be quiet! Silent Base 800 Computer ATX PC case
- HP Intel I210-T1 Gigabit Ethernet x1 E0X95AA (tried a couple of different cards which wouldn't work and finally got this one recommended by the audio interface manufacturer who it turns out are also using hackintoshs)
Following Stork's build, everything I needed worked pretty much out of the box. I didn't really look into optimizing everything until now since I have a couple of issues I'd like to solve. But, to be honest, nothing is a showstoper. I just spent 2 days reading through whatever I could find to optimize and also understand a bit more about properly configuring this hacky. My previous build was an Asus z68-Vpro, i7-2600K, build which was a pain to get running but ended up being trouble free for many years.
I tried overclocking to 5GHz without too many problems and that pushes the GeekBench score a bit over 30K. But in the end I prefer a cooler quieter system over a couple of % speed. As it is, temps are around 40°C most times and barely go up to 70°C when raytracing, priming or encoding video. I'm running Noctua CPU fans at half speed (with the power divider cable) and replaced the case fans with quieter versions. I have all the fans set to minimum speed in the BIOS.
There might be some things that are not properly working in these departments which I didn't check since I don't have any need for it to work:
- USB 3 -> I don't really use any USB devices that need USB 3 so I can't say if that is all working as it's supposed to. In System Info everything shows up as USB 3, but I read somewhere that doesn't mean it's working at full speed. Also, not bothered by any port number limits since I only have a handful of USB devices. I had some problems with my audio interface when connecting it via USB, but then I got the Ethernet card, and now the audio is running through Ethernet with zero issues.
- iMsg, Handoff, etc. -> I don't have an iPhone anymore and everyone I know uses Whatsapp or Skype. Also, I don't use iCloud anymore, not even for calendars and Contacts. So no need for that. I did however make sure that my SMBIOS is properly set up anyways by following the guides on this forum.
- WiFi/Bluetooth -> I don't really need that on this machine. But I did buy the recommended BCM943602CS card to give it a try since I might use it in the future. I just couldn't get it to work. When I had the card inserted, the motherboard wouldn't get any power anymore, and I couldn't switch the computer on anymore. Tried all the slots with the same result. So I think the card might have been dead, and I just sent it back to Amazon. Might give it another try at some point.
- Onboard audio -> I only use my external audio interface (Metric Halo LIO-8 with 3d card). So, I have no need for the bult in audio.
I haven't had any problems booting, no kernel panics, reboots, crashes or hangs in the last 4 months since i built the system.
I first did the install with MultiBeast, But, in the last couple of days, I optimized everything that I thought made sense for my build by reading through @ModMikes '
Everything works' thread,
@pastrychef '
Rog Strix build', the
Hackintool thread and various other resources about Clover, Hackintool, and whatever tech info I could find.
What I did to optimize things, after reading through all that, I:
- move all kexts to .../other/ folder and remove duplicate kexts and extensions in /Library/Extensions/ folder
- generate the PCI device list with Hackintool and integrate that into my config.plist
- got rid of a couple of misconfig's in Clover Config
- fiddled around in the BIOS to make sure everything is set up correctly
As I said, everything is working fine (including speed stepping) even for 3D, video and audio, and the hacky is super snappy and stable but I have 4 problems I would like to solve:
- Sleep doesn't work: when I try to sleep, the screens turn off but the system doesn't sleep. When I hit a key on the keyboard the screens wake up, and I get the login screen. But there is no way to sleep the system at all. Before I optimized, it would go to sleep but then immediately wake up again.
- Strange issue when taking screenshots: my screenshots are generated as transparent PNG's, This is not much of an issue most of the times. But, when I upload them to a web application i need for work, everything that's white appears as transparent, and I need to flatten and resave the screenshots in Photoshop. Screenshots made on a 'real iMac' don't have this issue. I tried with iGPU on or off, but that doesn't make any difference. In the Console I see many FAULT messages generated whenever I Preview or QuickLook an image in Finder... probably the two issues are related. I attached the log file for this.
- Gazillions of diskarbitrationd messages in Console: it seems there is something going on here that worries me a bit. I Googled this for hours without finding anything relevant. Maybe this isn't problematic. But, from what I understood, it looks like diskarbitrationd should only be running whenever a new disk is inserted. But on my system it's runnig constantly to the tune of several hundred times per minute even though I am not inserting any disk. I attached the log file for this.
- HDCP video in Amazon Prime and Netflix -> I've resorted to booting up Windows now when watching movies since the the quality is much better. Not sure what the issue is here. But I can't seem to get more than HD on the Mac side and in Amazon not even that. I use Displayport with a high quality cable and tried several cables and HDMI, but the issue remains.
Another small issue I've seen in Hackintool is that my FakeSMC and IntelMausi seem to be not the latest versions, but Hackintool doesn't download them. I have zero issues with Ethernet so don't worry about it. But I wonder if something with the newer FakeSMC could maybe help with to the no sleep issue.
I also read somewhere that Ii should have a NVRAM.plist in my EFI folder. But despite having the option selected in Clover Config, I don't have this file. Is this a problem and could this maybe also be related to the no -sleep issue ?
Maybe there are some obvious misconfigs in my EFI folder which are the source of the 4 issues I'm having. It would be cool if someone could have a look to see if that's the case. Let me know if there is anything else i should post to troubleshoot this better.
Thanks again to the community
PS: I'm still using 10.14.4 with iMac 18.3... on the Windows side everything is peachy as well and finally gaming at 60fps/2560 is a blast compared to my elderly z68 build
PS2: I was honestly expecting applications and files to open much more quickly with the M.2 disks now running at almost ten times the speed of the previous build. It seems the disk speed doesn't really translate to the OS as i thought it would. I don't see a significant speed increase when opening applications or large files. Especially mounting disk images is as slow as ever which I thought would also be much faster with such a fast processor, shed loads of RAM and almost 3K Mb/sec disks (disk speed confirmed with BMD's utility).