[SUCCESS] Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5-TH, i7 3770K, 32GB, 480GB SSD, 2TB HDD, GTX 670

[Vapour360]

Hi guys, hope all is well and good! Sorry dawsman im still using DVI, so i cant relate to that issue u having with your displays!! I am jealous of them though haha!! I am having another problem though, my ssd has filled up with only 8gig of space free, its a 128gig ssd, but i have done get info on it, and i only have 80gig worth installed on it? Its really strange and annoying! When i system profile it, it says 106 gig of "other", the yellow bar! Hope some one could shed some light on whats going on here!

Thanks in advance!

 

[bucket772]

Dawman,

Nice build. I've build almost the same build. Same case, board, chip. Any issues with the cooler clearing the RAM?

I was converting some tivo videos using handbreak and my temps were spiking over 90*C. Thats with the stock cooler. Obviously I need a better cooler. I think I have all but ruled out water. I will probably put more RAM in the future and I'm not looking to have to get different RAM to clearance the cooler.

Thanks for the help


Dave

 

[dawsman]

Thanks bucket

It's a bit of a tight fit, but there is 1-2mm clearance (see pic). Plenty of room on the opposite side should you wish to relocate the fan or install a second one.

Are you getting those temps at stock clock speed or overclocked? Mine is overclocked to 4.3 GHz with Turboboost to 4.7 GHz, well it's actually 4.7, 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 when using 1, 2, 3 and 4 cores, respectively. So at full load it will be running at 4.5 GHz. During a ~ 5 hour Prime95 torture test in Windows 7 the maximum temp reached was 80-82C.

 

[5thwall]

Hey Dawsman - Thanks for the great guide. I have the exact same build as you. My CPU always shows up as 3.49GHZ. I've replace the mobo and the chip just to make sure. Have you ever encountered that?

Also, was wondering if you could provide us with your settings in the BIOS for overclocking? Is there any software to be installed or Kexts that need to be modified? I've been thinking about doing this but haven't had a chance to fully research all the needed steps.

Thanks!

 

[xelanaiznac]

hi.what about dictation? does it work? if so, are you using ethernet or wi-fi?

 

[dawsman]

@zelanaiznac - Yes, dictation works, however I've only tested it briefly so I can't tell you how well it works. I'm using ethernet. I don't have a wifi card that works with OSX and I have no need for wifi anyway.


@5thwall - I've been reluctant to post the full details of my overclock because every chip is different and there will be different overclock behaviour from chip to chip. However, I've been asked several times so I will post the details for others to use at their own risk. I've read several other builds lately that include details of overclocking.

Note, I'm currently running the GA-Z77X-UP5 TH "F12e" beta bios, but I had the same overclock with the "F11" bios. No stability issues in both cases after a prime95 torture test in Windows 7 for at least 8 hours.

Note that I also have an aftermarket CPU cooler (Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo). The i7 3770K stock cooler will NOT handle the overclock described below.

In my opinion my processor overclock is fairly "aggressive" for an aftermarket air-cooled setup, so I would recommend perhaps starting with a more conservative overclock, test stability and temperatures, and work your way up to the frequencies below (and further if you're game!)


PROCESSOR OVERCLOCK

Under the "MIT" tab, "Advanced frequency settings", "Advanced CPU core features":

-Disable "Internal CPU PLL overvoltage"​

-Set turboboost to "Auto" and turbo ratios as follows:​

-Turbo ratio (1 core active): 47
-Turbo ratio (2 cores active): 47
-Turbo ratio (3 cores active): 46
-Turbo ratio (4 cores active): 45​

Under the "MIT" tab, "Advanced voltage settings", "CPU core voltage control"

-Set "CPU Vcore" to 1.270V. That's the minimum I could use for a stable overclock - this is a critical setting that will vary from chip to chip. If yours is unstable then keep increasing the voltage until it's stable but I wouldn't recommend going any higher than 1.4V. You can even try a lower voltage than mine if your chip can handle it - the lower the better.​

Note I did not change the base CPU clock ratio from the standard 35, because I'm using turboboost to achieve my overclock. An alternative method is to disable turboboost and just set the base clock ratio to whatever clock frequency you want, but that's not my preferred method.

With the above settings I get a maximum CPU temperature of 82C during an ~8 hour prime95 torture test, and idle temps of 35-40C.


MEMORY OVERCLOCK

I also overclocked my 4x8GB sticks of Vengeance memory to 1866MHz as follows:

Under the "MIT" tab, "Advanced frequency settings":

-Set "Extreme Memory Profile" to "Profile 1"
-Set "System memory multiplier" to 18.66​

Under the "MIT" tab, "Advanced voltage settings", "DRAM voltage control"

-Set "DRAM voltage" to 1.550V​

Note that I did not change the timing, i.e. I left it at the standard 9-9-9-24. There's probably room for improvement with my memory overclock but I don't have the patience or skill to mess around with the timings.

Good luck!

 

[5thwall]

Thanks for posting that! I'll try it out and let you know how it works.

How did you learn how to tweak all the settings? Is there a thread or a site with the info?

 

[nishant98]

Great build dawsman! I have decided the components for my future Hackintosh which I hope to build in June. The specifications are as follows -

i7 3770K
GA-Z77X-UD5H
MSI GTX 670 Power Edition
8GB (2x4GB) G.Skill Ripjaws 1866MHz DDR3
128GB Samsung 840 Pro
1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA III 6Gb/sec
NZXT Phantom 410

Just have a few questions.. When I do use the GTX 670, do I have to install nVidia's drivers from their website (they have drivers for Mac i believe.) or do I simply put GraphicsEnabler=No in boot options and leave it at that? How do I activate OpenGL and OpenCL? And, how are Gigabyte's 3rd Party SATA ports working for you? Lastly, will there be any problems when I dual boot Windows 7 Home Premium with ML, since I intend to give about 35GB of the 840 Pro to ML and the rest to Windows for heavy gaming! And can I also partition the 1TB HDD with about 600GB for Windows and 400GB for ML?

SORRY FOR ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS BUT I JUST TURNED 15 AND REALLY WANT TO BUILD MY FIRST COMPUTER, AND MY FIRST HACKINTOSH!

 

[dawsman]

Hi nishant98

I didn't need to install the nVidia drivers, the card just worked out of the box. However, I did install them later to see if it fixed an issue I am having with one of my cinema displays not going to sleep (it didn't). Unfortunately I didn't test OpenGL/CL when the driver wasn't installed, but I have tested it since installing the driver and it works. I believe it works out of the box with 10.8.2 but happy to be corrected if that's not the case.

I'm only using the Intel SATA ports at this stage. The 3rd party "Marvell 88SE9172" controller is for an e-SATA port on the rear panel and the GSATA on the motherboard, and I haven't tested them.

I have my Sandisk Extreme 480GB SSD partitioned for OSX (280GB) and Windows 7 (200GB), a second Crucial M4 256GB SSD running Windows 8, a Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200rpm drive partitioned for Ubuntu 12.04 (1TB) and storage (1TB), and a 2TB Western Digital Green 5400rpm drive for even more storage, and everything works and boots perfectly via the Chimera bootloader. So I don't think you will have any problems. Regarding your 1TB HDD, why not just format the whole drive as ex-FAT which is readable/writable from OSX and Windows? That's how I have my storage drive/partition formatted and it works great, and you don't have the 4GB limit associated with the standard FAT file system.

Good luck!

 

[Milesree]

Hi Dawsman!

From one Aussie to another you are a bloody godsend!! I've been having troubles re graphics acceleration and constant freezing, whereupon I found your user build which taught me how to enable my HD4000 graphics . As a hackintosh noob, I had no idea about HD 4000 having to be enabled, and it was missing on my system profiler that only displayed my Nvidia GTX 670 as my graphics/display. I suspect that that issue caused a lot of OpenGL freezes for me.

However, I have developed a confounding problem: I followed your user guide to build my own rig, especially what you said about putting in one monitor in the mobo DVI and I have my second (my main) in the GPU displayport which uses HDMI; Now I experience a conundrum:

If I leave this set up, with a UEFI set up as you suggest with Init Display First = IGPX, my boot screen loads on my mobo display, BUT now it doesn't recognise my Nvidia GPU at all in the system profiler! Nor does my main display connected to my GPU get any video signal, but bizarrely I can hear my gpu fans going about What should I do? Does it matter that my system definition is imac (12,2)? Would I gain anything by changing the definition to yours?

I've tried changing to Init display back to Auto and no difference - even if I disconnect the monitor connected to the GPU, my GPU still is not recognised in the system profiler!

I'm sorry but I'm desperate - I had my hack running mostly smoothly with the minor graphics freeze hiccup, but now I can't get a signal to my main display/lost my GPU!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

P.S If I wanted to run only a single monitor (my hdmi display), would I insert that in the GPU or mobo socket?