- Joined
- Jun 4, 2012
- Messages
- 247
- Motherboard
- GA-Z77X-UD5H
- CPU
- i7-3770K
- Graphics
- HD4000
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
Components
Intel i7-3770K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007SZ0EOW/
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007R21JK4/
16GB (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance RAM
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006EWUO22/
240GB Corsair Force SSD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051A8TG6/
2TB Western Digital Caviar Green 7200rpm 64MB cache
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CSIG1G/
Radeon 6870 1GB GPU
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004O0OKXK/
Fractal Design - Design R3
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074V2U56/
Already owned
Apple 24" LED Cinema Display
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0013FMLXK/
Apple OS X Lion 10.7.4 via Mac Apps Store
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-lion/id444303913?mt=12
Apple Wired Keyboard
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UH4VFW/
Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TKHBDK/
Comments:
My goals were to build a Hack that was powerful and energy efficient, but also could deliver some serious speed (media conversions, video editing, After Effects), and have gobs of RAM. This is where the new Ivy Bridge CPUs come in. You may have seen my recent post here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=66104 which shows that in the Intel lineup, the i7-3770(K) provides the most power (as defined by Geekbench) per Watt of electricity (as defined by the TPD of the chips), besting even the hexa-cores. (Of course, Intel will probably have IB hexas before long).
I also had a $1,000 budget, but blew that out of the water by about 40%, sadly. I could have met this budget by dropping the SSD and the GPU though.
THE DEFINE R3
This is a gorgeous case and built like a tank. I preferred the all white model, but the black & silver model is the only one my supplier could get. Still gorgeous.
PREPARING MY SSD
Knowing that installing everything from a slow USB Disk (possibly multiple times) would basically suck, so, I opted to make a bootable Install partition on my SSD.
On My MacBook Pro, I connected the SSD via a SATA->USB connector (sadly, only 2.0, if even).
I made 2 partitions: 'Lion' @ 200GBs and 'Other' @ 40GBs.
I used Disk Utility to restore the Lion installer to the Other partition. I also ran BridgeHelper, targeting Other.
I put a number of additional items on my Other partition, while still connected to my MBP, just in case I had Ethernet issues on the Hack:
* BridgeHelper
* MultiBeast
* MSRDumper
* Interim Ivy Bridge Lion Apple HDA
* Cinebench
* Geekbench
Finally, I connected the SSD to my new machine using the SATA3 (white) port.
PREPARING BIOS
Since I don't have the 6870, I can't connect my Apple Cinema Display. However, I do have a Philips 1080p HDTV very near my desk (albeit mounted about 1 meter higher than eye-level). Since the motherboard has an HDMI connector, I connected the two, no problem.
Next, I booted my machine and used the Q-Flash option to flash my BIOS to F7, I did use my USB key for this.
On reboot, I configured BIOS and made these changes:
ENABLED: Intel Virtualization Technology (This is required for Parallels or other virtualization software)
DISABLED: The 1394 controller (I've read here that it won't work yet, if ever)
DISABLED: PCH LAN Controller (the Intel LAN interface, I'll be using the Atheros interface)
Save and Exit BIOS.
INSTALLED LION
On Boot, I selected 'Other' as my boot drive and was able to successfully install Lion to the partition 'Lion'.
After it was successfully installed, I restarted, booting into Other again. I used Terminal in the installer to copy the mach_kernel over to Lion as instructed in tonymacx86's excellent post: viewtopic.php?f=54&t=59000
Restart again, this time booting in 'Lion'. Yay! Right off the bat, I see that:
* The onboard HD4000 is working very nicely! (Albeit at a lower resolution than 1920x1080)
* Ethernet is working already!
I ran Multibeast selecting, UserDSDT, TRIM support, the Realtek 898 drivers and the Atheros LAN driver as tonymacx86 suggests in his post. I didn't install any graphics kexts, since I know that the HD4000 won't be fully supported until Mountain Lion.
Ran BridgeHelper targeting the Lion partition.
Rebooted into Lion.
At this point, these work great:
* HD4000 (no QD/OpenCL though)
* Ethernet (this is the port closest to the audio ports on the back)
* USB (I haven't tried 3.0, I do not have any devices)
* iCloud
* App Store
I followed the instructions here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=57808 to get the Audio to work. Thanks Toledo! (Before anyone asks, its working on the orange port in the back)
SYSTEM DEFINITION
I was having some trouble with the CPU performance dropping about 20% after it wakes from sleep. It wasn't really noticeable for normal things, but was apparent from Geekbench testing. Anyway, I changed the system definition to 12,2 and this seems to have fixed it!
HD4000
I was annoyed by the lost real estate on my HDTV, so, I installed my favorite text editer: Sublime Text 2 and edited /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist to include:
<key>Graphis Mode</key>
<string>1920x1080x32</string>
And now my display is working beautifully at 1920x1080 (though, it is still not configurable in Preferences, nor using QD/OpenCL, a little glitchy too)
SPEED STEPPING
I loaded the MSRDumper.kext and immediately noticed that speed stepping was NOT working. So, I re-ran MultiBeast and selected the SSDT for i7. This seems to provide at least 4 levels of speed stepping: 16 18 20 and 39. I also tried the SSDT for overclocked machines (even though mine is running at the stock 3.5 speeds). This was better providing me with the PStates: 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 39.
I decided to run RevoGirls ssdtPRGen.sh to produce a DSL file, which I then compiled into an AML file using DSDT Editor (http://olarila.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=62). I moved the resulting file to /Extra/SSDT.aml folder and rebooted. This gives me the following PStates: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 39. OK, I'll run with this, I guess. I suspect this is probably the same as the MultiBeast ssdt of i7's had I let it run long enough though.
Anyway, so, at this point, this is a pretty vanilla install with no DSDT's and minimal kexts, with everything working! (except QD/OpenCL)
I will be obtaining a 1394A/B PCI card and a compatible BlueTooth dongle at some point, I have no immediate need for these now.
PERFORMANCE
New 64-bit GeekBench score is now 14,764 (http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/828357)! I had the RAM installed in adjacent slots thinking those were the matched pairs for dual-channel. How wrong I was! RAM performance is >40% better when the RAM is installed correctly (!).GeekBench score of 13943 (http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/813901). I admit I'm a little disappointed in this, but, to cheer myself up, I searched GB for i7-3770K and found most scores were about the same, then, I spotted a couple in the 16,000's. On further inspection, these machines were running 10.8! So, perhaps next month, with the new kernel, I'll also see a nice performance boost with my Ivy Bridge system. Regardless, this system is already just shy of 4X faster than my Late 2008 MBP.
My Cinebench CPU score is 7.92. I cannot test the OpenCL portion yet, maybe next month though =) On my MBP, this was like 1.2!
My SSD is slower than I had hoped. Blackmagic says 238 MB/s writes and 211 MB/s reads. However, this is certainly fast than my MPB which 'delivers' 23 MB/s writes and 26 MB/s reads. About 10X faster is very nice and virtual machines spring into action almost instantly, which is just pure awesomeness.
RELIABILITY
So far, zero KPs, but aside from surfing the web and writing this, I haven't really done much with the box yet. The fact that the HDTV it is using is so high is the main reason. Once I get this puppy connected to my Apple Cinema Display, I'll be using it full time.
EDIT 2012-07-02 : Update GB score with RAM re-installation
EDIT 2012-07-05 : Updated initial photo, added comments about the Define R3
EDIT 2012-07-06 : Updated desktop screen shot, Geekbench URL, 12,2 System def.
