So, finally El Capitan arrived on my desktop pc !
A mountain lion was installed and I needed new Xcode so I had to spend time on a rebuild. My hardware is still fine, and practically there is no reason to upgrade. Here is how I did it.
First the hardware:
- Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 board
- Intel core i7- 2600 @3.4 Ghz i think this is sandy bridge
- 2 times a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2048 MB
- 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
- 3 times a Dell DELL U2713HM Display. More is better here
Before starting the whole process, make sure you have time and buy a new hard disk to do a new fresh installation. That way you can roll back.
First I had to upgrade my BIOS to UEFI, mostly because I had to turn off some settings. I was lucky gigabyte provided an uefi bios for my board: UA9(UEFI BIOS). so download it, spend time on creating an ms dos formatted usb stick, put the bios on it via dd, and boot from that usb, It took me some time to get that right. Where is the old time we just had floppies.
I had to make the following settings to the bios:
- enable AHCI
- put it to boot via UEFI only. I tried booting in dual mode, that failed because of different reasons, so not sure if this is really required, but it does the trick after all.
- Disable CPU EIST (Intel Speedstep Technology), that was needed during install, not sure if it can be enabled now
- Disable VT-d, that was needed during install (due to: p state stepper error 18 at step 2), not sure if it can be enabled now
run Unibeast 6.0.1 and prep a usb hard disk. I had to format it to 20 GB, because the full disk was not accepted somehow.
Select el capitan and UEFI, nothing else is needed.
Than I removed my second NVIDIA 660 card, not sure if that is needed now, but I remembered I had to do that on my previous build.
Take the time to install it via USB, select that in BIOS or at boot. Make sure to run it in verbose mode (press space when booting), so you can follow whats happening. Also I had to set a boot option nv_disable=1, don't forget that.
All fine, make sure it reboots via usb and run post-installation tools to make it bootable via UEFI. After that download the clover-configurator. Mount the EFI portion via that tool, and open the master config file, located in EFI/clover/config.plist After that go to the SMBIOS section and choose MacPro3,1 via the magic wand icon. In RT Variables I set BooterConfig to 0x28 and CsrActiveConfig to 0x67. This makes your whole system hackable, but also enables future changes to kexts yourself. I needed to this in order to install Audio via Toleda tools. Now you should be able to boot without USB and directly from your hard disk.
When all is done and working fine and seeing two displays working you can insert the second graphics card and your third or fourth display should come alive.
Now I am trying to get audio working. For that I downloaded
https://github.com/toleda/audio_CloverALC and installed ALC889 on port 1. In system sound settings enable audio via Line Out, and I can see that the volume bar is enabled, but still no sound. Going to play a bit with Device settings in the Clover Configurator.
Ill let you know if this succeeds. I had it working on my mountain lion but with old kexts, so it was possible.
edit: 30 mins later
Working Audio, pretty simple, RTFM
reinstalled alc 889 audio on port 2 via audio_clover and select internal speakers in the sound configuration of OS X settings to have sound from mono on the green port.
Pieter
