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[SUCCESS] 5ghz i7-8700k - Gigabyte Z370XP SLI - GTX 1070 BLACK EDITION - High Sierra - Thunderbolt

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Joined
Nov 21, 2015
Messages
8
Motherboard
Z370XP-SLI
CPU
Intel 8700k
Graphics
EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Black Edition
Mac
  1. Mac Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
underclashero92's Build:
i7-8700K - Gigabyte Z370XP SLI- Thunderbolt - GTX 1070 Black Edition


Components

GIGABYTE Z370 SLI Motherboard
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0764NX8DR/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Intel Core i7-8700K Processor (Overclocked to 5ghz)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07598VZR8/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Black Edition Graphics Card
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KVZBNY0/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

G.SKILL 32GB (2 x 16GB) Ripjaws V Series DDR4 PC4-25600 3200MHz Memory
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0171GQR0C/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Corsair RMx Series, RM750x, 750W, Fully Modular Power Supply, 80 PLUS Gold Certified
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015YEI9NQ/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

WI-FI TPLINK N900 PCIe Card
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007GMPZ0A/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Gigabyte (Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Card) Components Other GC-ALPINE RIDGE
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0722SV69N/?tag=tonymacx86com-20


Already Owned

SSD: 240GB M.2 (Windows 10), 240gb PNY SSD (Mac OS X)

HDD: (6) 4TB 7200 RPM Western Digital Black, Lacie 4tb Thunderbolt 2 drive, (2) 2TB Western Digital MyPassport Pro Thunderbolt drives

Monitors: Dual LG 27" 4k Monitors


Comments

The Build

I know I don't usually post threads (researcher mostly), but I figured that now would be a great opportunity for me to jump onto the forums as a contributor and let you know if my recent success story with my 8700k Hackintosh (yes its possible). I would like to share the list all of my hardware, installation process and some issues that may come about. I am writing this while I am away and have some down time, but I will post pictures, screenshots and videos once I get back of anything that you guys may want to see.

First and foremost, I am in no way, shape or form an expert computer builder, I simply follow other people instructions and modify the process if necessary. I have built one other custom PC before and that is pretty much from online tutorials.

My main business is video production, editing 4.5k RED and Panasonic GH5 4k 400mbps footage. Alongside that, I occasionally do photography and graphic design. My workstation before this was a 6 core trash can Mac Pro, and it could barely handle the 4k footage that I threw at it. Once I plugged a second monitor into it, it TANKED. So, I needed something that could handle my footage and be more efficient with my editing (exporting ProRes), hence the hackintosh.

I put together a list of hardware with the intent of creating a powerful PC, but after putting this list together, I realized that a majority of the components seemed compatible with creating a hackintosh. The only issue that I saw was the i7-8700K Coffee Lake not being fully supported.


Installation

BIOS Settings

  1. Save & Exit → Load Optimized Defaults
  2. M.I.T. → Advanced Memory Settings Extreme Memory Profile(X.M.P.) : Profile1
  3. BIOS → Fast Boot : Disabled
  4. BIOS → LAN PXE Boot Option ROM : Disabled
  5. BIOS → Storage Boot Option Control : UEFI
  6. Peripherals → Trusted Computing → Security Device Support : Disable
  7. Peripherals → Network Stack Configuration → Network Stack : Disabled
  8. Peripherals → USB Configuration → Legacy USB Support : Auto
  9. Peripherals → USB Configuration → XHCI Hand-off : Enabled
  10. Chipset → Vt-d : Disabled
  11. Chipset → Wake on LAN Enable : Disabled
  12. Chipset → IOAPIC 24-119 Entries : Enabled
Dedicated graphics card:
  1. Peripherals → Initial Display Output : PCIe 1 Slot
  2. Chipset → Integrated Graphics : Disabled


The first thing that I did after getting all of the hardware and installing it in the case, was turn it on, LOL. It worked and took a little while to boot. After that I configured my BIOS (following the tonymac recommendations) and then proceeded to boot into the Windows 10 installer. I installed windows on my M.2 drive and made sure that I installed all of the proper drivers, software, BIOS updates, etc, before attempting to install macOS. I also benchmarked it and fully tested all of the hardware under deep pressure.

After that was completed, I used my bootable macOS High Sierra drive (Tonymac instructions) and the installation for Mac was a success. HOWEVER, only 1 monitor worked at this point and everything on the screen was HUGE. This bothered the hell out of me, until I figured out that I needed to set the system profile to the latest 2017 iMac (18,3 I believe), along with installing the CUDA driver. This was a little bit of a pain because every time it would say that it couldn't install because it wasn't the latest version, but eventually it worked for some reason.

After this I installed the proper kexts, configure my plist and whatever other steps that TonyMac says to take, and BOOM. Everything just worked, including my Thunderbolt hard drives (formatted for Mac, but no hot swapping), sound, WiFi and both monitors. No hiccups during the installation process, and I was ready to benchmark. I also want to note that I installed the Thunderbolt card after everything was stable (it took 3 weeks in the mail).

I used Geekbench and got a multi-core score (cant remember the single as of now, I'll test when I'm back) close to 28,000, which surprised me because my PC score was around 26,000. macOS beat Windows in every benchmark, and I am not certain why.

I then proceeded to install Premiere Pro, all of my other Adobe apps and Davinci Resolve 14. All of them worked.

Still... NOTHING WRONG.

This is where I started to notice some weird issues. First, in About This Mac, it would show the processor as "3.7ghz unknown". This isn't a big concern considering that I know that the 5GHz overclock is working on all 6 cores. I monitored it during the benchmarks. Its just a little annoying to not see your processor there, I'm sure there is a workaround, but again, its not a huge deal or effecting performance in any way.

Second, sometime when booting into macOS, only 1 monitor would work or it would boot to the login screen and freeze. This has always been resolved by restarting once or twice. I think it has something to do with how it shuts down.

Worst issue so far. My Mac formatted drives work on the windows side of the PC because I purchased software to do so. The only time that I see a problem is when I boot into macOS and load some files onto the drive. When I bring that drive back into Windows, it is ALWAYS corrupt and reverts the format of the drive to RAW format. This is an annoyance because I had to also purchase software to save the files from this drive, copy them to a new disk, reformat the hard drive and then transfer the files back. I tried on multiple Mac formatted drives and ALL had the same issue. They worked fine in windows until I brought them into mac and transferred files to them. I just bought software on Mac to read Windows drives and this works a hell of a lot better (so far).

Another thing that I noticed. On the same exact drive, with the same exact project files, exporting from Premiere and Resolve on the Hackintosh were noticeably (not by a huge margin) slower than on the windows side of things.

This being said, I have not been a Windows user in over 10 years (tried Windows 7 for a month) and always tend to gravitate towards the Mac platform due to the interface and ProRes compatibility. HOWEVER, I think Windows 10 is well refined, offers most of my favorite Mac features such as expose, show desktop, create multiple desktops, etc. All I did was reconfigure my keyboard and mouse to do all of this for Windows, and I quickly fell in love with Windows 10. I am now using Windows 10 99% of the time and use the Hackintosh side only for exporting ProRes. I also still have my trashcan behind one of my monitors as a backup if need be.

So far, it has been 2 months, and I would not change a thing. All of my footage plays back as expected, export speeds are way faster, and I can use dual 4K monitors without any problems. No problems on the Windows side (yet, knock on wood), and I don't see myself using High Sierra as my daily drive anytime soon. The reason is simple, I do not feel confident putting big budget projects through a hackintosh. Even though it has been stable and everything works, I feel more confident with the Windows side of things. It is definitely more reliable (in my gut feeling), and everything just works conjunctly. In simple terms... A do not have 100% faith in a closed system, custom built computer.

I appreciate your time and hope that this post was interesting, helpful or anything else tha'ts good. I did not write this with the intent of being criticized or to glorify myself. It is strictly for educational/informational purposes only. I will post pics, screen shots or be happy to answer any questions that you may have.


Thanks Guys and Cheers
 
Last edited:
I have the same MB and CPU, but with RX580, different RAM and Kraken X62.

For the first problem just edit the "UnknownCPUKind" entry in the AppleSystemInfo.strings file. It's located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/AppleSystemInfo.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ (select then the folder related to your system language, Italian.lproj in my case). I wanted to keep original naming, so this is my edit:
Code:
UnknownCPUKind = "Intel Core i7";
Coffee Lake are natively supported but they're not listed. When macOS will be updated with official support for Coffee Lake CPUs this edit won't be necessary.

In order to display the correct frequency you must make a custom SSDT for the CPU Power Management. Now it displays the stock one.
 
Excellent, thank you for your guide - that's the exact same build I am looking to create! So happy I found somebody who has success with the motherboard!
 
Quick update, for some reason my Thunderbolt drives wouldn't work today. I will troubleshoot once I have time and get back to everyone!!!
 
UPDATE!!!! There were 2 issues that I mentioned
  1. I said that sometimes when I boot, the second monitor wouldnt connect... I am ashamed to say that it just powered off and all I had to do was hit the power button. In windows and my mac pro, it automatically turns on, so I was used to that.
  2. My thunderbolt drives ONLY connect when I have them daisy chained through my Lacie 4tb Thunderbolt drive w/ power supply. The external thunderbolt drives with no power cables dont work unless daisy chained via drive with power cable... Weird. BUT, they do power up when plugged directly into the hackintosh, they just dont appear in MAC OSX unless booted in my other dc powered drive

I have been doing a lot of prores exporting via my thunderbolt drives and everything has been going smoothly. I still edit in windows though my exFat formatted thunderbolt drives and they seem to be the most compatible cross platform.

That is all for now
 
Thanks for the write up. I'm also a video editor and photographer and would like a TB3 system.

Just so I am clear on pt. 2 above, your non-powered TB drives need to be plugged into your powered Lacie to be recognized by your Hackintosh? (I understand daisy-chaining but want to confirm the order.) Do they hot swap? Are they recognized without the Lacie involved if they are plugged in prior to booting the machine?

Also, what are the speeds you are getting with your TB drives? The same as under Windows 10?

Thanks much.
 
Awesome build. Why did you opt for Nvidia over AMD for the video card? Wouldn't ProRes export be much quicker on something like a RX580?
 
Awesome build. Why did you opt for Nvidia over AMD for the video card? Wouldn't ProRes export be much quicker on something like a RX580?

Hey, I am not sure if it would export faster (at least significantly) from AMD. I chose NVIDIA for CUDA acceleration, but I don't see much of a use in the GPU when exporting anyways (at least on Windows), it is usually the processor exporting the video.

I will have to export something using CUDA from the OS X side of my build and see if it does the same thing. I honestly get like 1% GPU usage when exporting from Media Encoder and 99-100% of CPU usage. I am not a huge computer nerd, so I could have been wrong in picking NVIDIA over AMD in the first place (mac or pc). Also the price was ridiculous with this bitcoin crap, NVIDIA seemed to be the way to go at the moment of building.

I did not have the intent of using the hackintosh as a proprietary editing workstation. It was just something as a side project for my build. I saw that all of my hardware was compatible, so I decided why not give it a shot. If it worked (which it did) I'll dual boot it and export prores for the clients that demand it. If that didn't work, my old trusty trash can is still behind my monitor.

Cheers
 
Thanks for the write up. I'm also a video editor and photographer and would like a TB3 system.

Just so I am clear on pt. 2 above, your non-powered TB drives need to be plugged into your powered Lacie to be recognized by your Hackintosh? (I understand daisy-chaining but want to confirm the order.) Do they hot swap? Are they recognized without the Lacie involved if they are plugged in prior to booting the machine?

Also, what are the speeds you are getting with your TB drives? The same as under Windows 10?

Thanks much.


Hey, I totally understand your confusion. It is not yet clear to me yet either, and it is a very wonky piece of hardware (thunderbolt hackintosh'). So let me try to explain this as clear as possible lol.

From what I have experienced from trial and error;
  • My DC powered Lacie 4tb TB2 Drive (NTFS) needs to be plugged in and powered externally via wall outlet. (Thats just how this drive works)
  • From here, the TB2 cable is connected to an apple TB2->TB3 adapter, connected to the alpine ridge TB3 expansion card
  • My non-dc powered Thunderbolt drives (MyPassport Pro Thunderbolt 2TB, ExFat) are connected (daisy chained) to my Lacie 4tb drive
None are hot swappable, and I know they weren't on my buddies build with a UD7-TH motherboard either. I am going to see if there is anything that I can do for that.

The 2tb drive is only recognized when plugged in (daisy chained) to the Lacie 4tb drive. When I plug the 2TB drive directly into the Alpine Ridge, there is power, but not recognized by macOS. It works on Windows though.

Some side notes;
  • When running a disk speed test in macOS it shows about 90Mbps (not what it should be). It also says that there are no thunderbolt drives connected in the "About this Mac", but clearly they are.
  • Running that same drive on Windows shows around 150-250Mbps (what it should be) depending on its mood.
  • My Lacie drive is not recognized because it is formatted as NTFS, but it still shows the daisy chained drives.
  • When I get back this week, I am going to try and install Tuxera NTFS for Mac and see if my Lacie Drive will be recognized and do some disk speed tests for that and the MyPassport drives again.
Hope this helps... Thunderbolt in a Hackintosh is never ideal and I know its always a pain in the @ss
 
UPDATE - Tuxera NTFS would not display any of my NTSF formatted hard drives in MAC OSX for some reason. Works on my macbook pro, so I know its not the drives.

Also, here are some long overdue screen shots
 

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