After having botched upgrading to VirtualSMC once before a few weeks back, I decided to give it another go to see if there were any meaningful differences between it and the FakeSMC solution.
As it turns out, there are!
This mostly relates to iStat Menus, which I use, but it might translate to other monitoring applications as well.
Specifically:
- I now have properly working Voltage and Wattage monitoring (whereas previously FakeSMC would only report bogus Wattage numbers and no voltages at all) (also, dear lord, my 9900K pulls 230W under full load, so much for the TDP specs)
- Fans are detected and even fan speed is properly sensed (only works for fans directly connected to the motherboard, of course). It even detects my Kraken's pump and reads out its speed properly!
- A thing that had been bugging me for a while got fixed: With FakeSMC in place, iStat menus would properly monitor CPU usage statistics, however, opening the detailed menu by clicking on the menu bar item was very laggy (it took several seconds to open). This lag between the initial click and actually opening the menu is now completely gone and everything runs smooth as silk now.
One thing regarding the guide though: If you are on a version of Clover above 4988, the VirtualSMC.efi file must be put under drivers/UEFI instead of drivers64UEFI.
