- Joined
- Aug 17, 2012
- Messages
- 23
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
Story:
I recently had to move to a new pad which had a dedicated home office room and while my current CustoMac was set up to the TV which is now in the living room I needed a new CustoMac for the office. Requirements were basicly for it to be cheap but fast. Optimize price/value while keeping the price low.
Parts:
I was inspired by this thread on how cheap you could actually go on a CustoMac http://www.tonymacx86.com/buying-advice/118150-building-budget-haswell-build-how-low-can-you-go.html. I then went to choose the following parts
Gigabyte GA-H81M-HD3 Mainboard (~ 56 Euro)
Core i3-4330 Processor (~ 105 Euro)
8 GB DDR3-1600 Kingston ValueRAM (~ 60 Euro)
System Power 7 300W BeQuiet PSU (~ 31 Euro)
Coolcube Maxi Casing (~ 61 Euro, this could have been cheaper but this looks good and fits into an IKEA Expedit shelf)
Optional or could even be switched to cheaper options:
250GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD (~ 118 Euro, non-SSD was not an option. Spend this money, you will not regret it!)
Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev. B CPU Cooler + Scythe S-Flex 800 RPM fan running on 7V (~ 40 Euro, this is expensive but will bring absolute silence while keeping the processor under 70°C in multi hour stress situations (prime95 tested))
TP-Link TL-WN881ND PCI-e WIFI card (~ 10 Euro
)
All together I spent around 481 Euro in parts. If you excluded the the optional cooler and went with the intel stock one and got a smaller or (not recommended) non SSD you would actually end up at under 400 Euro which is really a steal. I also added an old 320 GB laptop drive for 1:1 system backups (recommendation!!) and 70 GB of Time Machine space, but this is very optional.
Installation:
On first boot in BIOS:
- Load Optimized Defaults
- Make Graphics Adapter IGFX first
- Disable Serial and Parallel Ports in SuperIO (seems optional, but who needs these...)
Follow the Guide here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/374-unibeast-install-os-x-mavericks-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html
When booting from USB to enter setup make sure that you only have one screen attached (I used the HDMI port). And do not plug anything into the USB 3 ports. I only plugged in the keyboard and the boot stick and once the setup got up, I inserted the mouse into one USB 3 port. Might be optional but I could not boot later on with something in the USB 3 ports (this solves after MultiBeast).
That's it. Remember to boot from your USB stick into your new system once the setup has completed. I attached a MultiBeast file you can load, which I used.
Post Installation:
Basically you want to install drivers for the ALC892 audio, 3rd Party SATA (along with TRIM if you use an SSD with TRIM support), USB 3.0 drivers, Drivers for the Realtek 8111F network device. I chose AppleRTL8169Ethernet and everything that comes with QuickStart DSDT free. Again, all this is preselected in the mb file I attached.
Also, if you use this extremely cheap WIFI card you will need a kext to inject its device id, so that it gets recognized as AirPort card. Use the guide in the second post here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/network/65240-perfect-cheap-wlan-solution-ml.html - use DCPIManager to get your device ID. Make sure you install this kext right after or before MutiBeast but before you reboot!
If you want to use iMessage and/or FaceTime I suggest you follow this guide here which basically needs you to copy one small file: http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-help/110471-how-fix-imessage.html - Do this before you reboot.
In the end, I went to repair permissions using the Disk Utility and then rebooted from the system drive.
In my case, audio was gone after sleep, which I could solve using the drivers from MultiBeast 6.1. You might want to try this as well.
Findings:
First of all, everything seems to work quite stable. That means:
- Sound
- Ethernet
- Wifi
- iMessage
- App Store
- Sleep/Wake
What is not 100% satisfactory at the moment:
After sleep, my sound is gone. I don't care at the moment since I do not use the internal sound, really. There are a few threads around the forum of people having the same problem suggesting a driver problem with 10.9.2. I guess this might just be fixed with a future version of MultiBeast.
#edit: Solved by using MultiBeast 6.1 drivers as suggested in other threads.
Ethernet is not so stable *if* not connected at boot time. At first I did connect my ethernet cable while already having booted and could not get a connection. However, everything seems fine when the cable is still plugged in while you boot. It also will come back after sleep, so nothing really to worry about unless you like to pull the cable on and off all the time. This might also solve with newer drivers, maybe someone else can contribute.
System sometimes freezes on plugging (in or out) USB devices. This only happened on occasion to me but there are several threads around the forums about this problem. If this will happen more often I will do more research regarding this. For now I'm fine with it.
Some other notes and troubleshooting:
When I wanted to boot with two screens (one on HDMI and one on DVI-D) I could not get past the gray screen with the Apple logo and a movable mouse. When I booted with -v to see what is going on the system booted fine with two screens. I am not sure why that is, I guess it might be a problem with timeouts on display initialization. There is a thread here that covers the problem: http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/...-hd-graphics-4600-grey-screen-after-boot.html - I also contributed the following solution: Switch the IGPlatformID to 0A160000 by booting with IGPlatformID=0A160000 - if that helps, set this boot option permanently to your Chimera boot file in /Extra. It does for me currently but this problem might also be solved in future versions of MultiBeast and MacOS since 10.9.3 seems to include newer drivers for intel graphics. For reference the default IGPlatformID is 0D220003 for the HD4600 onboard graphics.
Some other troubleshooting:
I bought a 8 RAM module and ran into some 0xdeadbeefdeadbeef allocation errors. In the end they were gone but if you do, too, you might want to try to boot with:
maxmem=4096 usekernelcache=no
or even add -x for safe mode.
Wrap up:
I hope this helps get you up and running with a very cheap Mac OS machine that - for me - runs very stable, is dead silent and very fast.
Side Story on three (3) independent screens:
On my old CustoMac I actually had a GTX 660 which ran not three but four independent screens (3 21'' LCDs and my TV). I wanted to keep the three screens and actually went for the GA-Z87MX-D3H first, but I could not get the DisplayPort to work (see here http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...ays-supported-hd4600-graphics.html#post746543). Others seem to have gotten it to work and might have been a problem with cable or adapter but in the end I settled for two screens and this budget board which costs about half of the Z87MX-D3H.
I recently had to move to a new pad which had a dedicated home office room and while my current CustoMac was set up to the TV which is now in the living room I needed a new CustoMac for the office. Requirements were basicly for it to be cheap but fast. Optimize price/value while keeping the price low.
Parts:
I was inspired by this thread on how cheap you could actually go on a CustoMac http://www.tonymacx86.com/buying-advice/118150-building-budget-haswell-build-how-low-can-you-go.html. I then went to choose the following parts
Gigabyte GA-H81M-HD3 Mainboard (~ 56 Euro)
Core i3-4330 Processor (~ 105 Euro)
8 GB DDR3-1600 Kingston ValueRAM (~ 60 Euro)
System Power 7 300W BeQuiet PSU (~ 31 Euro)
Coolcube Maxi Casing (~ 61 Euro, this could have been cheaper but this looks good and fits into an IKEA Expedit shelf)
Optional or could even be switched to cheaper options:
250GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD (~ 118 Euro, non-SSD was not an option. Spend this money, you will not regret it!)
Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev. B CPU Cooler + Scythe S-Flex 800 RPM fan running on 7V (~ 40 Euro, this is expensive but will bring absolute silence while keeping the processor under 70°C in multi hour stress situations (prime95 tested))
TP-Link TL-WN881ND PCI-e WIFI card (~ 10 Euro
)All together I spent around 481 Euro in parts. If you excluded the the optional cooler and went with the intel stock one and got a smaller or (not recommended) non SSD you would actually end up at under 400 Euro which is really a steal. I also added an old 320 GB laptop drive for 1:1 system backups (recommendation!!) and 70 GB of Time Machine space, but this is very optional.
Installation:
On first boot in BIOS:
- Load Optimized Defaults
- Make Graphics Adapter IGFX first
- Disable Serial and Parallel Ports in SuperIO (seems optional, but who needs these...)
Follow the Guide here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/374-unibeast-install-os-x-mavericks-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html
When booting from USB to enter setup make sure that you only have one screen attached (I used the HDMI port). And do not plug anything into the USB 3 ports. I only plugged in the keyboard and the boot stick and once the setup got up, I inserted the mouse into one USB 3 port. Might be optional but I could not boot later on with something in the USB 3 ports (this solves after MultiBeast).
That's it. Remember to boot from your USB stick into your new system once the setup has completed. I attached a MultiBeast file you can load, which I used.
Post Installation:
Basically you want to install drivers for the ALC892 audio, 3rd Party SATA (along with TRIM if you use an SSD with TRIM support), USB 3.0 drivers, Drivers for the Realtek 8111F network device. I chose AppleRTL8169Ethernet and everything that comes with QuickStart DSDT free. Again, all this is preselected in the mb file I attached.
Also, if you use this extremely cheap WIFI card you will need a kext to inject its device id, so that it gets recognized as AirPort card. Use the guide in the second post here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/network/65240-perfect-cheap-wlan-solution-ml.html - use DCPIManager to get your device ID. Make sure you install this kext right after or before MutiBeast but before you reboot!
If you want to use iMessage and/or FaceTime I suggest you follow this guide here which basically needs you to copy one small file: http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-help/110471-how-fix-imessage.html - Do this before you reboot.
In the end, I went to repair permissions using the Disk Utility and then rebooted from the system drive.
In my case, audio was gone after sleep, which I could solve using the drivers from MultiBeast 6.1. You might want to try this as well.
Findings:
First of all, everything seems to work quite stable. That means:
- Sound
- Ethernet
- Wifi
- iMessage
- App Store
- Sleep/Wake
What is not 100% satisfactory at the moment:
After sleep, my sound is gone. I don't care at the moment since I do not use the internal sound, really. There are a few threads around the forum of people having the same problem suggesting a driver problem with 10.9.2. I guess this might just be fixed with a future version of MultiBeast.
#edit: Solved by using MultiBeast 6.1 drivers as suggested in other threads.
Ethernet is not so stable *if* not connected at boot time. At first I did connect my ethernet cable while already having booted and could not get a connection. However, everything seems fine when the cable is still plugged in while you boot. It also will come back after sleep, so nothing really to worry about unless you like to pull the cable on and off all the time. This might also solve with newer drivers, maybe someone else can contribute.
System sometimes freezes on plugging (in or out) USB devices. This only happened on occasion to me but there are several threads around the forums about this problem. If this will happen more often I will do more research regarding this. For now I'm fine with it.
Some other notes and troubleshooting:
When I wanted to boot with two screens (one on HDMI and one on DVI-D) I could not get past the gray screen with the Apple logo and a movable mouse. When I booted with -v to see what is going on the system booted fine with two screens. I am not sure why that is, I guess it might be a problem with timeouts on display initialization. There is a thread here that covers the problem: http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/...-hd-graphics-4600-grey-screen-after-boot.html - I also contributed the following solution: Switch the IGPlatformID to 0A160000 by booting with IGPlatformID=0A160000 - if that helps, set this boot option permanently to your Chimera boot file in /Extra. It does for me currently but this problem might also be solved in future versions of MultiBeast and MacOS since 10.9.3 seems to include newer drivers for intel graphics. For reference the default IGPlatformID is 0D220003 for the HD4600 onboard graphics.
Some other troubleshooting:
I bought a 8 RAM module and ran into some 0xdeadbeefdeadbeef allocation errors. In the end they were gone but if you do, too, you might want to try to boot with:
maxmem=4096 usekernelcache=no
or even add -x for safe mode.
Wrap up:
I hope this helps get you up and running with a very cheap Mac OS machine that - for me - runs very stable, is dead silent and very fast.
Side Story on three (3) independent screens:
On my old CustoMac I actually had a GTX 660 which ran not three but four independent screens (3 21'' LCDs and my TV). I wanted to keep the three screens and actually went for the GA-Z87MX-D3H first, but I could not get the DisplayPort to work (see here http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-h...ays-supported-hd4600-graphics.html#post746543). Others seem to have gotten it to work and might have been a problem with cable or adapter but in the end I settled for two screens and this budget board which costs about half of the Z87MX-D3H.
