[SUCCESS] Gigabyte Designare Z390 (Thunderbolt 3) + i7-9700K + AMD RX 580

[loghound]

Bluetooth is something that has been a pain for me -- honestly it's the only part of this experience where I felt like I'm dealing with a Hackintosh -- I've purchased both the Fenvi T919 card AND the generic card with PCIe dongle and they both seem to work about the same (well, maybe the Fenvi works a bit better)

In both cases, the wifi works great and the Bluetooth has problems -- I think I've tracked down a fair bit so I thought to capture my notes here to potentially help others.

tl;dr -- 2.4GHz wifi can screw up Bluetooth, switch wifi off or connect to 5GHz wifi.

Read below for my notes and/or if you want to do your own diagnosis.

The tough part of this is knowing how to troubleshoot if you have what appears to be intermittent Bluetooth. The easiest way is to alt-click on the Bluetooth icon in the taskbar and it will tell you signal strength -- you want to see a number that is RSSI> -70dBm or so -- the higher the better (RSSI is an old radio term that means "Received Signal Strength Indicator) and dBm is the unit of measure or 'dB relative to 1mw' -- If this number creeps below -70 you'll start having problems.

The problem can be that even with this trick when you alt-click you'll see it go up and down -- This is especially true if it's a suspect connection -- if you want to really see what's going on you need a better way.

Happily apple (through their developer tools) does give a better way. Apple has developer tools and if you get the Additional Tools Xcode for 10.2 inside you'll find a handy tool (in the Hardware folder) called "Bluetooth Explorer" -- This tool does a lot of stuff (much of which I don't know how to use) but there is one super handy tool for diagnosing problems if you have a Bluetooth speaker, airpods or Bluetooth headsets.

First: If you are having troubles with Bluetooth turn off wifi, then connect your Bluetooth audio device and under the Tools menu of Bluetooth Explorer select 'Audio Graphs' and a handy graph shows up. Now make sure that your Bluetooth audio device is connected and you'll see live updates -- we are going to want to put some data through over Bluetooth so fire your favorite video/song and you should see what lines showing data. Even without listening to audio you'll see a graph of "Raw RSSI" -- here is my system, wifi off with airpods as my Bluetooth device

This handy graph shows my RSSI between -63dBm and -65dBm, data, and retransmission -- I'm sort of surprised how high the retransmission rate is given a pretty good RSSI and the fact that the audio works great but let's ignore that and focus on a good RSSI and assume the rest will work itself out.

In order to show how the RSSI works I walked away from my office into the kitchen and back -- it's maybe 40-50 feet through a few walls and sure enough you can see the RSSI dipping as I walked away and then going back up -- What's important to note is the audio worked the entire time so even at -76dBm it was still reliably working

Ok -- now let's start figuring out what is going on -- If I turn on and connect to my home network this happens

First a word -- I use the google wifi system and overall I've been super happy -- it does all the modern wifi standards, is easy to maintain and has great range. One 'issue' is that when you set up a network it broadcasts as a single SSID for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz so you never know what kind of connection you get (and you cannot change how it works..)

What I was able to do was 'alt-click' on the wifi and confirm that yes, I'm connecting at 2.4GHz

Look at that -- the signal strength plummets and I lose functionality. If you want long enough you will see it go up and down and occasionally it will go back to -70dBm or so and start working but not for long.

I've done this experiment a lot and 100% of the time I connect to the wifi hot spot Bluetooth becomes super unreliable.

The problem, for me, is I'm unable to separate out the 5GHz and 2.4GHz SSID's and there is NO WAY to force a mac to use 5GHz only (well, no way that I found) - there are command line tools that can force a channel and even a nice GUI tool that can do it but they will not change how it attaches to the SSID.

I eventually realized that in my office I have an old Airport Extreme and with that, I was able to force it to be a '5GHz' only mode and give it a unique SSID -- when I do that and then connect to the 5GHz only SSID this is what happens.

so there you have it -- in my experience, the Bluetooth does not work well if you connect wifi to a 2.4GHz connection. Switching wifi'off' (which disables some functions of continuity) or going to a 5.8GHz connection allows the Bluetooth to work well.

 

[bartrap]

Maybe your monitor has different brightness and saturation settings for each input video port? Have you tried to modify the color or picture settings on the monitor itself after switching to its DP input?

Hi Casey; Yes I thought about that too. I cannot find any way on the monitor to get better display settings; I am going to try to borrow someone else's DP monitor to be sure....


EDIT; I have tried Everything under windows; I get a fine result on my monitor in this case; Both the RX580 and the UHD630 produce a superb picture; HDMI and DP then work on Win10; the RX580 works on the DVI port, but the DP of the RX580 is not detected though, also under windows.


Come to think of it; If I remember welll, with Multibeast; I selected the Coffee Lake Graphical option; Could that be the problem with my UHD630 DP port showing dark/matte ? I read about framebuffering but that goes beyond my knowledge.

I attach my EFI folder; my active config.plist is the one you made for use with the RX580 only and the UHD630 not being used. There is a renamed config.plist in there which is the one for use with both the RX580 DVI and the UHD630 DP.

Am starting to build up the audio studio . I just met another problem; I have a nice Projectmix I/O audio mixer, and notice the manufactor, M-Audio does not provide updated drivers anymore; latest are for El Capitan.... Guess I need to replace that board then also....

 

[CaseySJ]

Bluetooth is something that has been a pain for me -- honestly it's the only part of this experience where I felt like I'm dealing with a Hackintosh -- I've purchased both the Fenvi T919 card AND the generic card with PCIe dongle and they both seem to work about the same (well, maybe the Fenvi works a bit better)

In both cases, the wifi works great and the Bluetooth has problems -- I think I've tracked down a fair bit so I thought to capture my notes here to potentially help others.

tl;dr -- 2.4GHz wifi can screw up Bluetooth, switch wifi off or connect to 5GHz wifi.
...

Thank you! Reference to this post has been added to the build guide:

 

[CaseySJ]

• Sleep did work with just keyboard and mouse. It worked with everything plugged in apart from Bluetooth card and HS05/SS05Front Panel USB 3.1 Port 1
• Having the iPhone and iPad screens off makes no difference
• Please see attached screenshot

Let's resolve the Bluetooth-related problem first. Please run IORegistryExplorer and scroll the left side panel until you get to XHC. Do not use the search field! Under either HS11 or HS12 you will find a set of Bluetooth devices.

Are they under HS11 or HS12?

In the screenshot below from my system, you can see that a set of Bluetooth devices is attached to HS12.

 

[pianistslogic]

Hi CaseySJ,

Just wanted to re-express my gratitude for this fantastic build and its functionality, as well as for your continuous and swift assistance.

All in all, it took me about 9 months of working on a hackintosh, but this morning I came to the conclusion that I've now finally reached the point where I'm entirely satisfied. Stitched together a bunch of my folks' holiday recordings in FCPX/Compressor, rendered fine and quickly. Due to the now optimized iGPU settings (I guess?), booting is a lot faster too. Thanks to your support, my iPad (i.e., logic remote) now properly charges when connected to an (not powered) USB hub. And, due to this build's TB support, I've experienced 2+ hours of continuously productive songwriting this morning, without any pops or clicks. Really satisfied and greatly, very greatly thankful for your support, instructions, and advice.

Even though I've wasted quite some money on my previous hackintosh attempt (sold it for cheap as used gear eventually), and wasted even more on random USB audio interfaces, I'd prefer to say those were just 'learning expenses', helping me to get to the point where I am now: utterly satisfied.

In short, thanks, a lot, CaseySJ!

 

[CaseySJ]

@pianistslogic, thank you -- that is just great to hear. "Learning expenses" indeed! Hope the tuition wasn't too bad for a semester and a half...

 

[Gompy]

If one already has an APFS Mojave installation on an existing NVMe, would it be ""protected" during a Windows install to it's own GUID/NTFS SSD?

Hi, I use a clean NMVe disk in the upper NVMe port. The Mojave disk is detached from the system.

 

[WilliamHarp]

@CaseySJ cheers for that!

I'll try option 1 and see how that goes for a few days and then try option 2 after that if it doesn't go well. The only boot arg I had to add back in was agdpmod=pikera because without it, my MST (Dell UP2715K) display doesn't work.



Radeon VII is going really well. The main work-related tasks I throw at it are image deep learning (makes great use of the 16GB HBM) and GPU compute in 3D rendering.

It's stable in macOS 10.14.5, however its performance isn't as high as it should be if you're using an SMBIOS other than iMacPro1,1. Apple and AMD still have some refinement work to do, but I'd imagine it should be better when Catalina (10.15) is released this year.

I predominately use Pro Tools, which is notorious for updating for new MacOS terribly slow. Ill be stuck on Mojave for sometime. What SMBIOS do you recommend I start with for stability? Going to be building this bad boy in the next few weekends and wanna get all of my ducks in a row

 

[movolans]

There is a USB 3 hub at HS04/SS04 that is disconnecting when you insert the USB-C device in the front panel. In fact, SS03 is also disconnecting.

There is also a High Point RAID card in one of the PCIe slots.

Some suggestions:

• Is the USB 3 hub a "powered" hub? Does it have its own power supply?
  • If not, you might be over taxing the power draw from USB because of the very large number of USB devices connected to the both the external hub and the built-in hub at HS07/SS07.
• Try disconnecting the USB 3 hub and then connect the USB-C device to front panel. Do all other USB devices remain connected?
• Also try connecting the USB-C device to either of the two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the back. Do all USB devices remain connected (including USB 3 hub at HS04/SS04)?

Hi Casey - thanks for the feedback. Here's some more info.

- This happened before and after installation of the High Point Raid / SATA card install.
- The USB3 Hub is powered (with a lot of juice )
- This happens regardless of the hub being connected or not. In fact it happens if I only have one other thing connected. Inserting anything into the front USB-C disconnects all other USB.
- On my previous MoBo I had this much connected and the from port worked fine.
- The TB3 ports work as expected with no issues. As do the other 2x 3.1 type A ports on the front.

The issue is solely isolated to the USB-C on the front of the case and doesn't seem to be power related.

At this point I'm about resigned to it being the price of an otherwise great system

 

[wickett]

Let's resolve the Bluetooth-related problem first. Please run IORegistryExplorer and scroll the left side panel until you get to XHC. Do not use the search field! Under either HS11 or HS12 you will find a set of Bluetooth devices.

Are they under HS11 or HS12?

In the screenshot below from my system, you can see that a set of Bluetooth devices is attached to HS12.

View attachment 413900

They're under HS11. (As a side note I did notice some red entries earlier in the list)