Test Report: MSI Z77A-GD65

[wfj]

I installed hnak's E1000 driver from April 14 and it works perfectly with no errors in my kernel.log. I tried putting my Sabertooth Z77 system to sleep for the first time after installing the driver and everything worked perfectly including on wake. I was surprised.

This is with multiple drives on the Z77 SATA ports, multiple drives on the ASMedia ASM1061 SATA ports using 3rd_Party_eSATA (I think that's what it's called), and several USB flash drives plugged in. I also had several keyboards and a couple of mice plugged in and everything came right up perfectly. Thanks for the suggestion on the April 14 version.

No problem...worked great for me too and sleep is pretty painless. I wasn't getting autosleep to work with an HD5770 but swapped it out for an HD6870 and all is well. The only issue I can't figure out is the "waiting for DSMOS" thing. It stalls there for about 1 minute during boot. I've tried a number of different versions of fakesmc, nvidia as well as radeon graphics, different memory, etc. There don't seem to be any clear answers when I search google...

 

[brycv]

No problem...worked great for me too and sleep is pretty painless. I wasn't getting autosleep to work with an HD5770 but swapped it out for an HD6870 and all is well. The only issue I can't figure out is the "waiting for DSMOS" thing. It stalls there for about 1 minute during boot. I've tried a number of different versions of fakesmc, nvidia as well as radeon graphics, different memory, etc. There don't seem to be any clear answers when I search google...

I don't believe I'm seeing that issue but I'll investigate now to be sure. I am using a DSDT however. That might be the difference. I'll see if I can track down what that's all about.

 

[Going Bald]

@going bald, it might have been due to adding it as an attachment to you.
http://bios.zmac.net/msi/E7751IMS_modified.zip
try that instead

Thanks, will try it when I get some time.
Here are the pics of what happened when I updated iTunes to 10.6.1 after updating Lion to 10.7.3 using the onboard HD3000 gfx. Might have been able to cure it by replacing the SMBIOS.plist, but I couldn't get it to boot even using rBoot or UniBeast. Always came out the same:IMG_0629.JPG

And here is what the monitor looked like:IMG_0608.JPG

Could try testing a different system definition, but installing the GT520 silent fixed the problem, so I won't bother FTM.

 

[wfj]

No problem...worked great for me too and sleep is pretty painless. I wasn't getting autosleep to work with an HD5770 but swapped it out for an HD6870 and all is well. The only issue I can't figure out is the "waiting for DSMOS" thing. It stalls there for about 1 minute during boot. I've tried a number of different versions of fakesmc, nvidia as well as radeon graphics, different memory, etc. There don't seem to be any clear answers when I search google...

I don't believe I'm seeing that issue but I'll investigate now to be sure. I am using a DSDT however. That might be the difference. I'll see if I can track down what that's all about.

I extracted a dsdt and cleaned up the code but didn't make any actual edits so it's basically vanilla. It didn't seem to make any difference but I've got a few other ideas to try out. If you come up with anything, I'm all ears

 

[wfj]

@going bald, it might have been due to adding it as an attachment to you.
http://bios.zmac.net/msi/E7751IMS_modified.zip
try that instead

Thanks, will try it when I get some time.
Here are the pics of what happened when I updated iTunes to 10.6.1 after updating Lion to 10.7.3 using the onboard HD3000 gfx. Might have been able to cure it by replacing the SMBIOS.plist, but I couldn't get it to boot even using rBoot or UniBeast. Always came out the same:IMG_0629.JPG

And here is what the monitor looked like:IMG_0608.JPG

Could try testing a different system definition, but installing the GT520 silent fixed the problem, so I won't bother FTM.

GB,

I'm going to do a fresh install and use the onboard graphics...will have to see what happens. Just to confirm, you don't get any 1 minute pause where the screen says "waiting for DSMOS" during bootup?

 

[brycv]

I extracted a dsdt and cleaned up the code but didn't make any actual edits so it's basically vanilla. It didn't seem to make any difference but I've got a few other ideas to try out. If you come up with anything, I'm all ears

From my research so far, it seems the root of the drive has to be owned by root and possibly that FakeSMC either isn't installed or not working. I imagine you already looked at those possibilities.

 

[potemkin]

GoingBald
I saw your screen shot.
I have had that on a pc and mac before.
Sometimes by changing resolution i actually got a decent screen.
Usually this was when resolution was higher than display could handle or
mac synch signal from apple display would not match card on PC.
PC on XP love to do this when you hook up to a tv and have a monitor.
The tv will be fine but monitor is messed up.

Always wondered if I logged into Mac from another machine could I reset rez.
or set machine for screen sharing and change it from another machine.

In general would this be a good troubleshooting method.
Meaning logging in from another machine.
This would save rebooting or getting in from another partition.

 

[Going Bald]

GB,

I'm going to do a fresh install and use the onboard graphics...will have to see what happens. Just to confirm, you don't get any 1 minute pause where the screen says "waiting for DSMOS" during bootup?

Definitely, there is an extremely long pause at waiting for DSMOS. I waited and waited and finally got up and fixed a pot of coffee, intending to power off and try something else and when I came back, there it was at the desktop (I always uncheck the require password box when testing to save time.) It may take as long as 3-5 minutes, so be patient.

OTOH, the long pause could be because ATM I am not using a DSDT. I did a fresh install and have been installing xcode and any testing apps I can think of. Finished up last night and tried 4 times to get a bootable clone with CCC and failed every time. Finally dld SuperDuper and cloned the drive and it booted right up with UniBeast. Loaded MultiBeast->EasyBeast and hnaks ethernet driver, so I will be all ready to run tests this weekend. Anything in particular you would like me to run while I am at it? Will already be doing ioreg dumps.

 

[wfj]

GB,

I'm going to do a fresh install and use the onboard graphics...will have to see what happens. Just to confirm, you don't get any 1 minute pause where the screen says "waiting for DSMOS" during bootup?

Definitely, there is an extremely long pause at waiting for DSMOS. I waited and waited and finally got up and fixed a pot of coffee, intending to power off and try something else and when I came back, there it was at the desktop (I always uncheck the require password box when testing to save time.) It may take as long as 3-5 minutes, so be patient.

OTOH, the long pause could be because ATM I am not using a DSDT. I did a fresh install and have been installing xcode and any testing apps I can think of. Finished up last night and tried 4 times to get a bootable clone with CCC and failed every time. Finally dld SuperDuper and cloned the drive and it booted right up with UniBeast. Loaded MultiBeast->EasyBeast and hnaks ethernet driver, so I will be all ready to run tests this weekend. Anything in particular you would like me to run while I am at it? Will already be doing ioreg dumps.

Interesting. So that is reproducible...My wait is almost exactly 1 minute for each boot and it exhibits the same behavior during os x installation routine as well.

I extracted a dsdt and cleaned up the code but didn't make any specific edits. That didn't make a difference with the boot problem. If you want sleep to work, go to hnak's thread and get the driver that was released on 4/14. Link:

I'll let you know if I can think of anything specific regarding testing.

Thanks for the reply!

PS - Were you finally able to flash the modded BIOS?

 

[moneymark]

Are there any Pros for the MSI GD65 vs the GA-Z77X-UD5H at this time? I've been eyeing the GD65 since it was announced, but the oob support for the UD5H seems to make it a no brainer. Just wondering if there are any other pluses for the GD65 over the UD5H, if we were to ignore OSX support for now.