- Joined
- Dec 12, 2012
- Messages
- 10
- Motherboard
- ML 10.8.2
- CPU
- i7 3770 (no K)
- Graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 4096 MB
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
empe's Build: GA-Z77X-UD5H - i7-3770 - GTX 670 OC 4GB
Components
Apple OS X Mountain Lion @ Mac App Store
Mac App Store - OS X Mountain Lion
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-mountain-lion/id537386512?ls=1&mt=12#
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007R21JK4
Intel Core i7-3770 Quad-Core Processor
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007SZ0EHE
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 OC 4GB GDDR5 - I could not find a suitable and available 570 model, so decided to try this one.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009LTUDA8
SanDisk Extreme SSD 240 GB
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-2-5-Inch-Solid-SDSSDX-240G-G25/dp/B006EKJ8UI
SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006EKIQYM
2x Kingston HyperX Blu 16GB Kit - KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007TTEHMW
3x Enermax T.B. Silence 120mm Ultra Quiet Twister Bearing Cooling Fan, Black UCTB12
http://www.amazon.com/Enermax-Silence-Twister-Bearing-UCTB12/dp/B003IB2HYA
LG GH24NS70 Internal 24X Super-Multi DVD SATA Rewriter (Black)
http://www.amazon.com/LG-GH24NS70-Internal-Super-Multi-Rewriter/dp/B004U65R7G
Antec H2O 620 Liquid CPU Cooler System - Will never use it again. See Cabling comments below.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004LWYE4Q
Antec P280 Black ATX Mid Tower
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005X3E5BO
Corsair Professional Series 650-Watt 80 Plus - CMPSU-650HX
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LVUPZQ
Logitech HD Portable 1080p Webcam C615 with Autofocus (960-000733)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004YW7WCY
Microsoft LifeCam Studio
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-LifeCam-Studio-Webcam-Q2F-00013/dp/B0096KSBB0
deleyCON 3,5" internal USB 3.0 All in One Card Reader
[AMAZON-de]http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0085M910K[/AMAZON-de]
ORICO HD-BR525 3.5" to 5.25" Frame (metal no platic)
[AMAZON-de]http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B005OJHXI4[/AMAZON-de]
Comments
Background
The box won't be used by myself. I don't use any Apple HW or SW by myself, so it has been a funny experience for figuring out how to do all these things with a Mac (sorry, Hackintosh of course)
. This one I built for my wife and she is goning to do a lot of graphics things with it. She uses Adobe CS4 (maybe CS6 later on) and so I wanted her to have a lot of memory. As she uses a MacBook Pro (late 2009) which I upgraded already to 8GB of RAM. Her setup has 2x 24" displays (one connected to an USB GPU) plus the MacBook screen.Case
I decided not to take the Antec P180 model, cause this one seems to be a bit wider. So it was a bit more smooth to install the CPU fan without changing anything. There is a lot of space in there. Right now I have 6 free 3.5" internal slots, because I only user 2 internal 2.5" slots for the SSDs now. Would be fine, if there was a external 3.5" slot for the card reader but I could not find a better case (looking fine for me). So there is just one unused 5.25" external slot. I think this is enough.
Logitech Webcam
This works out of the box. But viewing angle was too wide and viewing was a bit flickery. So I switched it out and tryed a Microsoft one.
Microsoft LifeCam Studio
Worked out of the box too. Viewing angle seems to be a bit narrower. No flickering here. But frame rate seems a bit slow at low light conditions. That's not a big issue for Skype.
deleyCON Card Reader
Performance seems quite good. Reading 1.94 GB took 22.3 seconds, that's about 89 MByte/s with a Transcend UDMA 400x (from my DSLR).
Cabling and Attaching the Motherboard
I don't like paper, so used this link
http://www.manualowl.com/m/Gigabyte/GA-Z77X-UD5H/Manual/273242Used the F_AUDIO and F_USB1 and F_USB30_1 pins for front panel. The card read has been connected to F_USB30_2. The 240GB SSD is connected to SATA3-0 and the 240GB drive to SATA3-1. For the optical drive I used SATA3-2. I am using the LAN2 (upper one). The keyboard is connected to an USB 2.0 connector (red one) on the back. The mouse is attached directly to the keyboard. The displays are connected to the DVI ports of the NVidia card. Did not use DVI.
I removed the two case fans installed on the top side of the case, beacause they are a bit noisy and attached two Enermax fans running a bit more silent. I also replaced the CPU cooler fan with one more Enermax, cause this one of course also was a bit noisy and I hate noisy boxes
Installation
The BIOS is revision F14 - so nothing changed here.
Booted to freshly installed Mountain Lion using UniBeast. Had to use boot option -x (see later on). Installed MultiBeast.
Cause I forgot to disable Vt-D in BIOS, I had to use "-x PCIRootUID=0 GraphicsEnabler=No" all the time . This seems to be very important-otherwise I got the famous "Unknown CPU model 0x3a" message. This took me nearly a day to figure out
Now it runs without any boot option very fine.Final BIOS settings:
Boot options set to P0, P2
VT-d: Disabled
Internal Graphics: Disabled
EHCI hand-off: Enabled
XHCI hand-off: Enabled
Some screenshots for BIOS settings
The MultiBeast settings have been the following:
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | Audio | Realtek ALC8xx | Without DSDT | ALC 898
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | Disk | 3rd party SATA
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | Disk | TRIM Enabler | 10.8.1+ TRIM Patch
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | Graphics | NVIDIA Fermi | >2GB OpelnCL Patch | 10.8.0+ OpenCL Patch
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | Network | Intel - hnak's AppleIntelE1000e v2.1.7
Drivers & Bootloader | Drivers | System | Patched AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement | OS X 10.8.x
Customizations | Boot Options | GraphicsEnabler=No
Customizations | System Definitions | Mac mini | Mac mini 6,1 - think I changed this later on.
Installed the NVidia drivers (cudadriver-5.0.37-macos).
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda-mac-driver.html
Working Hardware and Software
- Sound on back and front panel. Also mutes speakers on the back panel when headphones are plugged in on the front panel.
- FireWire 400. Used for an external backup disk - TimeMachine.
- USB 3.0 on back and front panel.
- 2x DVI for two panels of same brand and model.
- NIC. Only one used here.
- WebCam with micro for Skype.
- Datacolor Spyder Elite 3 for color adjustment (often confused with calibrating-often). Also see note on calibration. I used version 3.1.5 cause we don't have a license for version 4. Also found information, that version 4 won't work as good. Here the link to download http://support.datacolor.com/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=174&nav=0,12. Also see note on calibration.
- Sleep does also works fine, but I think there won't be any use, cause machine starts very fast (takes 14s for BIOS things (how can I bring that time down?) and from than on only 7s for the log in screen).
- Optical drive (only reading tested right now).
Geekbench 32 bit is 12.861 - won't buy the 64 bit version for now.
Note on Calibration
The seems to be a big issue since July 2011 when you have connected two monitor of same brand and model: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3190334?start=45&tstart=30. I Could not find any solutions having calibrated two screens and using two independent profiles. I think display overriding (and changing only the vendor or model here, so ColorSync sees to different monitors to being able to take tow different profiles) won't work here, cause I would habe to tell OSX to use two seperate EDID's based on the display port the screen is attached to. As far as I know display overriding is based on product id of the screen and these are identical having same screens.
Conclusion
The most complicated thing for me, was installing the water cooling (did never before) because in my opinion the manual of this cooling system is a piece of scrap. My last self built PC is years ago, so I had no experienc with the 1155 socket. I think next time it is much easyier and setting up HW should be around two hours not being too optimistic.
Second time consuming part was figuring out that I have to disable virualization in the BIOS. This took me around one frustrating day. But I had enough time, as I was lying ill in the bed and could not go to the office.
The box works pretty fine and extremely fast.
Thanks to all people here posting so much information so even me could successfully build a hackintosh.
Michael
