[Success] Core i7-6700k - GA-Z170N-WIFI (2.0) - 32GB RAM - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB

locmer · Feb 27, 2017

* Update 2: 28 March 2017 10.12.4 Update broke Bluetooth and Wifi

Fix: (Clover update fixes Bluetooth on the first boot, a second reboot is needed to get WIFI working)

* Update 1: 4 March 2017 Broadcom Wifi/Bluetooth module arrived, added install procedure

locmer’s Power Mini Build:
Core i7-6700k - GA-Z170N-WIFI (2.0) - 32GB RAM - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB

Learning from previous Hackintosh builds (years ago) I decided to start as small as possible. Just the Bit Fenix case, insert the PSU, install the motherboard, Plug in the CPU and the Corsair H60 water cooler. Figuring out where to best put the part of the Corsair H60 radiator, as I had always gone with air coolers before. I decided to put it in the top, back Fan slot. This causes the least air flow blocking by the cables and put the lower bend stress on them. In the end installing the H60 was easier then I thought. Next put in the memory. It took a while to figure out where to best put the data drives (case has a few option). I did reverse the door of the Bit Fenix case because I need the USB ports to be on the left. This works nicely.

I did some test installs without the GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card because I wanted to get most of the Bios settings correct before complication matters with a PCIE video card. Same goes for the intel 600p M2 PCIE NVMe which I suspected was going to complicate matters.
I saw the M2 PCIE NVMe support not being Apple native so I decided to boot of a bog standard SATA drive as I think this will make it easier to survive through the regular Mac OS X updates coming from Apple. I have removed the Wifi/Bluetooth module from the mainboard and I am waiting for the arrival of the Broadcom BCM94352Z M2 module from Ebay/China.

If you are not experienced make a small as possible config work and slowly start adding components, and with proven technology as much as possible. Then with all components make a repeatable installation guide so you can build it from scratch if needed. Also with a lot of trail and error it is sometimes not easy to remember or determine *what* actually made things work.

Having said this, this guide is setup so that you can install Sierra 10.12.3 *with* all the hardware in place. The LCD monitor is connected to the Nvidia card.

The Installation

BIOS Setup: I just followed the recommended setting for Gigabyte mainboards. Photos of each screen in the AMI Bios are attached.

High level and most critical:

Load Optimized Defaults
VT-d: disable
Secure Boot Mode: disable
OS Type: Other OS
XHCI Handoff: Enabled
The On chip Core i7 HD3500 video is disabled

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Making the UniBeast USB Thumb Drive

Made the USB drive as per latest Sierra recommendations with Unibeast https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...ierra-on-any-supported-intel-based-pc.200564/

Timesaver: I make a “Tools” folder on the Sierra USB stick, I load Multibeast, Kextbeast, Caffeine, Clover Configurator, Intel Power Gadget, EFI mounter, Cinebench, Nvidia driver for 10.12.3 and a few other misc tools. And copy them to the ssd whenever I have the OS installed. This speeds the trial and error up significantly.

Installation Notes

Boot of the USB drive: Change Clover boot settings on USB drive to nv_disable=0 (was 1)
Wipe disk: Just as a safety measure use diskutil to reinitialise the data drive so a clean install happens.
Install Mac OS X sierra (10.12.3)
Auto reboot, the installer with do this for you
Once booted copy all tools that I need off theI have copied all my Copy USB tools to Documents
Unmount USB stick
Set Unibeast up with the following settings:

UEFI Boot mode
FAKESMCv621
Intelimausi 2.2.0
Increase mac port
Clover UEFI
iMac 14,1
ALC1150
100 Series Audio

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Install the Nvidia web drivers from the package you downloaded on the tools section
Reboot
Nvidia video works now (But not with effective acceleration) network works so you can access the internet.
Run the Clover configurator and set:

ACPI: FixShutdown
Boot: Darkwake=0, check nvda_drv=1
Graphics: uncheck Inject intel (This will make graphics 1/2 slower, if you forget)
Graphics: check Inject Nvidia
Make sure: Audio Inject number is set to 1

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So far this was pretty straight forward, now onto things that have cost more time to figure out.

Getting Audio to work

For unexplained reasons, sometimes the audio just works a this stage, and at times I need to do the following to get ALC 1150 audio going:

I used the procedures here to find a solution: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/audio-realtek-alc-applehda-guide.143757/

Section: II. Realtek ALC AppleHDA Scripts
Option 1 (audio_cloverALC.command.zip) and 3 work. Option 1 gives some error and warnings but does the job.

Getting Audio to work after sleep/wake cycle

Now Audio works but stops working after sleep. Fixing ALC 1150 sound after sleep/wake:

Download Codeccommander source (= here)
Compile with Xcode
Move to Desktop
Edit Info.plist (I use vi)
Search the LAST <key>Realtek ALC1150</key>
Change "Update Notes" from false to true
<key>Update Nodes</key>
<true/>
Add to /System/Library/Extentions with kextbeast
reboot

Getting the M2 Intel 600p NVMe 512G PCI E to work

I decided to use a plain 6G SSD as the boot drive to avoid upgrade problems, here is the procedure the make the NVMe M2 drive work, it is derived from the procedures here:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...h-ionvmefamily-using-class-code-spoof.210316/
https://github.com/RehabMan/patch-nvme

Generate make sure the SSDT-NVMe-Pcc.aml is in EFI/Clover/ACPI/patched (The trick is getting the device path right!)
make sure existing _DSM methods at the NVMe SSD ACPI path are renamed or deleted
make sure you use the --spoof option to generate HackrNVMeFamily*.kext
install the HackrNVMeFamily*.kext /L/E and /S/L/E

Generating a SSDT

Seems to work, but in my opinion not 100% correct see thread.

Adding Broadcom BCM94352Z M.2 NGFF 802.11AC 867Mbps BT 4.0 DW1560

Found this documented procedure and listed my steps below:

https://rossfisher.me/2016/12/how-to-bcm94352z-for-hackintosh-including-5ghz-patch-handoff-and-hotspot-macos-sierra/

Download https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-fake-pci-id/downloads/
Download https://bitbucket.org/RehabMan/os-x-brcmpatchram/downloads/
Copy BrcmFirmwareData.kext, BrcmPatchRAM2.kext, FakePCIID_Broadcom_WiFi.kext and FakePCIID.kext to your EFI partition (EFI/Clover/kexts/10.12/) — If you have not yet updated Clover boot loader (such as using UniBeast which has the old Clover install), copy to EFI/Clover/kexts/Other)
Open Clover Configurator and in the Kernel and Kext patches, add: (See screenshot below)
- Name: AirPortBrcm4360
- Find: 81F952AA00007529
- Replace: 81F952AA00006690
- Comment: Brcm4360 Sierra fvco init
Setting WIFI to locale in my case: NL (procedure: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-airport-pcie-half-mini-v2.104850/page-116) (See screenshot below)
NL = 4E 4C
- Name: AirPortBrcm4360
- Find: 4183fcff 742c48
- Replace: 66c7064e 4ceb2b
- Comment: Wifi NL patch
UPDATE 28 March 2017: For 10.12.4 make sure you use Clover_v2.3k_r3994 or newer bluetooth worked on the first boot, WIFI needed a second reboot

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Summary

Getting the Mac OS installed is pretty straight forward, following the build guides. Audio sleep/wake and getting the M2 NVMe to work a little more challenging. My objective was to have Adobe Lightroom acceleration work, have a very fast CPU and LOTS of memory and a good (doesn’t have to be a racemonster) Video card. As well as fast local storage for Video and Photo editing.

What Works

General stable and operation.
EVGA GeForce 750 Ti (using Nvidia web drivers)
Intel 600p NVMe PCI-Express using
Audio: ALC 1150 after sleep/wake (a modified Codeccommander kext)
Lightroom acceleration
Only the upper or left Network port works.

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What Does not Work

In general the performance is fine, but I do think the ssdt generating script for this motherboard and CPU is not fully correct. The CPU frequency never really gets down to 800 Mhz (That I can verify, I understand measuring also takes CPU cycles which may cause the CPU to speed up).
USB after sleep Eject message, tried a few fixes but non help so far.

Benchmarks

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Closing comments

This is just how I got it to work, not necessarily the best or 100% accurate. Feel free to comment or suggest improvement. I'll continue to update this post as I find improvements. There are so many kudos to make to a lot of people @RehabMan @Stork @toleda @tonymacx86 to name a few. Thank you!!

BLiTyvr · Mar 3, 2017

Great write-up. Glad to see someone else having success with this board. I'm wondering if you could post your config.plist (after redacting serial numbers, etc)?

I seem to be on the bleeding edge - I am building on the same board but want to use the NVMe as part of a bootable Fusion Drive... Need some reference material and your config.plist would be a good starting point.

locmer · Mar 4, 2017

BLiTyvr said:
Great write-up. Glad to see someone else having success with this board. I'm wondering if you could post your config.plist (after redacting serial numbers, etc)?

I seem to be on the bleeding edge - I am building on the same board but want to use the NVMe as part of a bootable Fusion Drive... Need some reference material and your config.plist would be a good starting point.

here you go (attached)

DaShee · Mar 5, 2017

Hi locmer, Thank you for the guide. It has been very helpful.
I am working on a build same as yours, but without a graphics card, and with a regular SSD.

I'm struggling with Audio over HDMI. In you build above, did the audio fixes you list get you audio over HDMI from the motherboard? Or are you just using stereo out?

locmer · Mar 5, 2017

DaShee said:
Hi locmer, Thank you for the guide. It has been very helpful.
I am working on a build same as yours, but without a graphics card, and with a regular SSD.

I'm struggling with Audio over HDMI. In you build above, did the audio fixes you list get you audio over HDMI from the motherboard? Or are you just using stereo out?

@DaShee I am using the stereo out so I am of no help with this. I am sure you have seen this topic https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/audio-hdmi-audio-applehda-guide.143760/

DaShee · Mar 5, 2017

locmer said:
@DaShee I am using the stereo out so I am of no help with this. I am sure you have seen this topic https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/audio-hdmi-audio-applehda-guide.143760/

I have, and am working through it now, but came short when I read this part:

OS X HDMI and/or DP audio support:

Intel only (HD3000, HD4000, HD4600+, HD6000+, HD530)
1. Note: HD3000, HD4000 and *HD5x0 require HDEF (*not native, see Realtek ALC AppleHDA/Post #1/Unsupported/Non-working Realtek ALC AppleHDA/1. 100 Series)

Got me thinking I should have seen more improvement with the Realtek ALC AppleHDA post that you used.

ill keep plugging. Thanks!

Tmpdmp · Mar 5, 2017

@locmer
Nice guide, very comprehensive. one question though, why would you do "3.Graphics: uncheck Inject intel (This will make graphics 1/2 slower, if you forget)" in clover configurator. Why will it make graphics 50% slower ?

BLiTyvr · Mar 5, 2017

locmer said:
here you go (attached)

Thanks @locmer

One quick question: Why did you choose iMac14,1 rather than iMac14,2?

kungenihyddan · Mar 5, 2017

Nice guide. I have almost the same build, and I got everything to work except the Fixing ALC 1150 sound after sleep/wake. You lost me on the Download Codeccommander source. Its hard to understand the process if you never done this before. A more specific idiot guide would helped me a lot. I downloaded the kextbeast and installed the RehabMan-codec_commander.kext but it didn't fix the problem. Don't know how to fix it.

locmer · Mar 6, 2017

kungenihyddan said:
Nice guide. I have almost the same build, and I got everything to work except the Fixing ALC 1150 sound after sleep/wake. You lost me on the Download CodecCommander source. Its hard to understand the process if you never done this before. A more specific idiot guide would helped me a lot. I downloaded the KextBeast and installed the RehabMan-codec_commander.kext but it didn't fix the problem. Don't know how to fix it.

@kungenihyddan you are almost there. You have to modify the CodecCommander Kext before moving it into place with KextBeast. I have it on the desktop then edit the Info.plist file inside the condeccommander kext package. (Use a terminal cd into it etc). Inside the Info.plist file you find the last line (there are multiple) with "<key>Realtek ALC1150</key>" then a few lines lower you'll find " <key>Update Nodes</key>". The line below has "<false/>" change it to <true/>. Save the file. *then* copy with KextBeast/ Reboot.....then voila. (Better now?)

Move to Desktop
Edit Info.plist (I use vi)
Search the LAST <key>Realtek ALC1150</key>
Change "Update Notes" from false to true
<key>Update Nodes</key>
<true/>
Add to /System/Library/Extentions with kextbeast
reboot

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[Success] Core i7-6700k - GA-Z170N-WIFI (2.0) - 32GB RAM - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2 GB

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