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[SUCCESS] Mountain Lion, GA-Z77X-UD5H, i7 3770 Ivy Bridge, GTX 670

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Sep 4, 2011
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Motherboard
Lenovo T440s
CPU
i5-4200u
Graphics
HD4400
[SUCCESS] Mountain Lion, GA-Z77X-UD5H, i7 3770 Ivy Bridge, GTX 670 **UPDATED WITH GUIDE**

Welcome to CoBrA2168's Build
GA-Z77X-UD5H, i7 3770 Ivy Bridge, GTX 670

Components

Subtotal as of October 8, 2012: $2,032.56


Already Own
A keyboard, mouse, monitors, speakers, and webcam so I didn't include that with the build price. The components above are just for the tower.


Comments

Preface
I built this machine with two things in mind: programming and gaming. As an iOS developer, I felt it necessary to have both OSX and Windows 7 for this build (don't worry, I use virtualization for Linux). That is why this build includes not one, but two solid state drives. Yeah, it's probably a bit overboard, but I got great deals on each. This was built to replace my aging Antec 900 machine I built back in 2006 (also a Windows 7 and OSX dual boot). My previous hardware used an NVIDIA chipset and wasn't very tonymacx86-friendly. This install, however, was pretty painless to get up and running. Tweaking it to make it near-perfect, however, did take a bit of effort. Read on if you're ready for the full guide...

Guide:
0. Make sure your motherboard BIOS is up to date, as well as the firmware for the SSDs. As of this guide, the latest motherboard BIOS is F14. I am currently running 000F on one of my M4's and 0309 on the other.

1. Install Windows 7 first, but make sure you install using MBR instead of GPT. Do this by booting from the non-UEFI version of the BD-R drive in the BIOS. Make sure the target OSX drive is not plugged in at this point.

2. Configure the BIOS settings to prepare for a Mountain Lion install. Load the "optimized default settings" (F7). (Note: If you would like to overclock, go ahead, but I never did for this build. I tried using an XMP profile for my memory, but this caused the mouse and keyboard to hang when coming back from sleep) Make the following settings:
Code:
BIOS Features
     VT-d: Disabled (only for 10.8.2 update)
Peripherals
     xHCI: Auto
     XHCI Hand-Off: Enabled
     EHCI Hand-Off: Enabled
     Init Display First: PEG (if using discrete graphics, otherwise let alone)
     Marvell SATA Controller(s): Disabled
Power Management
     High Precision Event Timer: Enabled
     Wake on LAN: Disabled

3. Now you are ready to plug in your target drive for ML (one of the Crucial M4 drives). Make sure these are each plugged into a SATA3 port provided by the Intel Controller (there are only 2). Plug the BD-R drive and the storage drive into SATA2 ports. Do not use the Marvell ports as they cause some problems with sleep mode in OSX.

4. Create a Unibeast drive with the Mac OSX 10.8 application and install ML to the target drive.

5. Download the latest Multibeast, and configure with the following settings:
Code:
UserDST or DSDT-Free Installation
(Drivers & Bootloaders)
     (Drivers)
          (Audio)
               (Realtek ALC8xx)
                    (Without DSDT)
                         ALC898
          (Network)
               hnak's AppleIntelE1000e Ethernet
               maolj's AtherosL1CEthernet
(Customization)
     (Boot Options)
          GraphicsEnabler=No

6. Restart. Boot into the ML drive we installed to, and it should boot by itself (without the Unibeast drive).

7. Open up Multibeast again. Apply this update:
Code:
(Drivers & Bootloaders)
     (Drivers)
          (Graphics)
               (NVIDIA Fermi >2GB OpenCL Patch)
                    10.8.0 OpenCL Patch

8. Restart. When back into OSX, again open up Multibeast. Apply this update:
Code:
(Drivers & Bootloaders)
     (Drivers)
          (Graphics)
               (NVIDIA GTX 670 / 680 / 690 Support)
                    10.8.0 Patched GeForceGLDriver.bundle

Note: follow the order of installation as stated above. Here is a picture with all customizations as reference:
uaTzc.png

Optimization:
9. iCloud / Mac App Store fix: Make sure "EthernetBuiltIn=Yes" is set in your boot.plist. If after a restart this doesn't fix it, go to the network preferences in settings and remove all network connections. Then go to Library/Preferences/System Configuration and move NetworkInterfaces.plist to the desktop. Restart the system. Go back into settings, and re-add your network connections, starting with ethernet.

10. Mac OSX / Windows clock sync: boot into Windows and run regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Right click on the empty space on the right to add a new key. Create a new Dword (32-bit). Rename the new key to "RealTimeIsUniversal." Double click the Dword and change it's value from 0 to 1 (in hex). Save, reboot into OSX, and set the time. It should now be correct when you go back into Windows.

11. OSX Sleep mode fixes: in settings, go to Energy Saver. Make sure to uncheck "Put hard disks to sleep when possible" and also uncheck "Wake for Wi-Fi network access." The first option will fix the BD-R drive from randomly accessing. To make auto-sleep work (sometimes), make sure you set your display to sleep BEFORE the computer does.

12. Fixing updates and sleep mode in Windows: we need to install a custom "boot0md" onto the MBR partition of our Windows drive. First, in Windows, make sure that the Windows partition is marked as "Active" in the control panel. Next, boot back into OSX. Open terminal and cd to the directory where the "boot0md" file is located. Run "diskutil list" to get a list of the disks on the system. Note the system which has Windows installed (for this example, say it's disk0). Run "sudo fdisk440 -f /path/to/boot0md -u /dev/rdisk0" (if Windows was installed on disk0). It should ask for your root password, enter it. It will prompt you to write to the MBR, answer with "y." Reboot and go to the BIOS settings. Set your boot order to boot into your Windows drive first. This will allow you to take advantage of this modified boot0 loader. Sleep and updates should now work when selecting Windows from the Chimera boot menu.

13. Customizing the boot menu: make sure in the BIOS you are booting to the hard drive which includes the Windows partition. The modified boot0md will dynamically look for Chimera on your other drive (this fixes sleep in Windows). Now go to your boot.plist file and modify the timeout to the amount of seconds you would like to choose between Windows or OSX. You can also set the "Default Partition," "Hide Partition," and "Rename Partition" attributes in this file. To find out which values to set, restart the machine and quickly hit the "tab" key when it is booting. This will show you the actual hard drive mappings as chosen by Chimera (e.g. hd(0,1)). Use these values for setting the default partition and hiding partitions. To rename a partition, use the syntax "'Partition to rename' NewName" The NewName cannot have spaces.

14. 10.8.2 update (including supplemental update): first, backup your entire Extensions folder (all the kexts). Update through the app store. Upon reboot, you will get stuck at the spinning wheel if you did not disable VT-d in the BIOS. Go disable it to get back into OSX. If you would like to re-enable VT-d, replace the System/Library/Extensions/AppleACPIPlatform.kext with the 10.8 version from the backup (or 10.8.1). After the update, audio will be disabled again. Re-run Multibeast and select the same ALC898 kext (without DSDT). Next go into the System Profiler and check if TRIM is enabled on the SSD drives (likely, it's not). To fix this, do the following:
Code:
1. Backup the original driver
     sudo cp /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage-backup
2. Modify the driver
     sudo perl -pi -e 's|(\x52\x6F\x74\x61\x74\x69\x6F\x6E\x61\x6C\x00{1,20})[^\x00]{9}(\x00{1,20}\x4D)|$1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00$2|sg' /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage
3. Run these commands to flush the cache
     sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
     sudo kextcache -system-caches
4. Restart the Mac


Observations:
After all the installing and tweaking, I must say that this is a fairly stable build. I have yet to encounter a single kernel panic. I haven't put a lot of software on this build yet, mainly just XCode. I can say that this computer is a huge improvement over my previous machine for programming with XCode. The iOS simulator is much snappier and I find myself waiting a lot less for program compilation. With that said, I will comment on the main components of the build:
  • Audio: With the ALC898 kext applied, audio works. However, as many of you know with this board, the "green" port in the back as well as the front audio output is a hit or miss. Unfortunately for me, it seems to be a miss. Like I said though, two of my back ports are working (black and orange) which works for me.
  • Video: In Mountain Lion, my GTX 670 card works out of the box. Without any modifications, dual monitors just worked. Just make sure your boot.plist includes the "GraphicsEnabler=No" option (if you followed the guide above, this is already applied) or else you will get stuck with a white boot screen. I never tested the HD4000 graphics of Ivy Bridge.
  • Networking: The Wi-Fi card I purchased works out of the box. After applying the multibeast update, both ethernet ports work great (I tested internet connectivity on each for about 5 minutes just to confirm).
  • Sleep / Shutdown / Restart: All work pretty much flawlessly. I had to apply the SATA modifications described in the guide to get a stable sleep mode. I was also required to turn off wake-on-lan in the BIOS. Auto-sleep from the Energy Saver settings seems to be a hit or miss. Most of the time this doesn't work.
  • USB Ports: All of my ports worked without any modifications. However, I'm unable to test any USB3.0 functionality as I don't own any compatible devices. I'm using two of the USB3.0 headers - one next to the RAM and the other on the bottom right. They both work with every USB2.0 device I throw at it.
  • Facetime / iCloud: Using the optimization stated above, this all works. I have a Logitech C615 webcam and it performed great on Facetime. iCloud and App Store downloads are also functional.

Geekbench Score:

Z9w07.png


Final Thoughts:
I am very happy with this build. It is a huge upgrade from my previous hackintosh. My last "to-do" is to come up with a solution so that I can access a shared iTunes library from both Windows and OSX. I have a pretty elegant idea on how to do this, so stay tuned for that!

All images used in this post, along with .txt file containing the guide, have been uploaded to this post.

Finally I would like to thank the entire tonymacx86 community for all of the documentation and guides. Without them none of this would have been possible!
 

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I was able to upload it to the first post. Like I said, I had to edit my boot plist file to turn off GraphicsEnabler. I also applied the other "fixes" described in the comments to get things working.

I've been using my Hackintosh more, and I noticed that my sleep mode might not be perfect yet. I experienced again today the problem where my machine would auto-wake itself. I notice that it will immediately wake itself the first time I sleep it. Afterwards, I can sleep it without any issues. As soon as I do a full shutdown, start it up again, and then try to sleep, it will auto wake (again only the first time). Very odd, and I don't quite know the solution to this one...

Also thanks to the moderator who fixed all of my formatting issues in the first post. I tried to follow the guide, but apparently I missed something.

I also forgot to mention in the first post that WiFi worked out of the box. I read somewhere a while ago that the card I bought was great for hackintosh machines, which is why I purchased it in the first place.
 
You're welcome. The editing was easy - change all the {} to [] and add the tags.

Enjoy your hackintosh!
 
@cobra: i got the same mb and video card but only running 3570k. do u have any problems going to bios setup? mine stays on black screen. but works after booting on OS then restart then hit DEL to go to bios setup. no problems if i remove the gigabyte 670 and use the hd4000. my mb is on the latest bios i even updated the bios of my videocard but still not working.
 
@cobra: i got the same mb and video card but only running 3570k. do u have any problems going to bios setup? mine stays on black screen. but works after booting on OS then restart then hit DEL to go to bios setup. no problems if i remove the gigabyte 670 and use the hd4000. my mb is on the latest bios i even updated the bios of my videocard but still not working.

Hmm...odd, no I haven't seen that issue. I do notice that sometimes my screen is too slow to turn on and sometimes I just miss the BIOS screen all together. I just assumed this was my screen, and not the video card / mobo. I just keep tapping DEL until the BIOS comes up. Or for now I've been tapping F12 to get to the boot menu (my windows partition is GPT, I need to reformat to MBR so I can use Chimera to select either Windows or OSX).
 
I've been using my Hackintosh more, and I noticed that my sleep mode might not be perfect yet. I experienced again today the problem where my machine would auto-wake itself. I notice that it will immediately wake itself the first time I sleep it. Afterwards, I can sleep it without any issues. As soon as I do a full shutdown, start it up again, and then try to sleep, it will auto wake (again only the first time). Very odd, and I don't quite know the solution to this one...


Try to disable both Marvel SATA Controller in Bios, this helped me with the same problem.
 
Try to disable both Marvel SATA Controller in Bios, this helped me with the same problem.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll give it a go and report back in a few days.
 
so the sleep problem was just a matter of switching ports? my z77ud5h is having problems waking up how did you fix it?
 
so the sleep problem was just a matter of switching ports? my z77ud5h is having problems waking up how did you fix it?

I never had problems waking. But to fix my sleep problems, so far I've moved all my sata connections out of the Marvell ports (the gray ones). I also disabled both Marvell controllers in the BIOS.

For fixing sleep, to try to figure out what it is, I would do what I did: start unplugging things. I simply unplugged a lot of things that I thought might be causing the issue. I started with my BD-ROM drive and extra hard drives. I then tried my USB headers and my sound card (which I ended up removing all together because it won't work in OSX). I found out after a bunch of reboots that it was infact my SATA connections in the Marvell ports.
 
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