neilhart
Moderator
- Joined
- May 25, 2010
- Messages
- 2,686
- Motherboard
- ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming - ITX/ac
- CPU
- i7-7700T
- Graphics
- GTX960
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
My story:
I became so frustrated with my Skylake/ASUS Z170I/El Capitan integration experience (see post # 130 above ) that I started to question the published progress of the system integration leaders. Not a healthy thing.
I noted that the best documentation was on a Gigabyte Z170-HD3 and also noted that the motherboard was a good mix of new tech and tried and true tech (Ethernet and Audio). And also to my pleasure, the motherboard is available for a reasonable price.
So I ordered one of these motherboards and set the ASUS system aside for now.
My New System Configuration -
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA Z170-HD3 (source B&H Photo)
BIOS version: F3 (starting point)
Memory: Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 2x8GB | 16GB 2666MHz (source Amazon)
CPU: Intel i5-6500 (source Fry’s)
Video: onboard Intel HD530 and Zotac GF 9600 GT (already owned… old stock)
Display 1: Dell 2007FP 20” 1600 x 1200 by DVI ( already owned )
Display 2: HANNSpree 28” HDTV 1920 x 1200 by HDMI ( already owned )
Keyboard: GearHead USB2 ( already owned )
Mouse: Microsoft Wheel Mouse USB2 ( already owned )
HDDs: 250GB WD HDD (system drive) ( already owned )
1TB Seagate Barracuda (3 partitions, 2 for sys clones and 1 for data) ( already owned )
External Audio Processing: Lepai Stereo Class T Digital Audio Amplifier to
JEC TC-716 Stereo Control Center ( already owned )
Open test stand (no case, this is the stand that I have used for several years to hold my GA EP45-DS3R system).
Board Bring Up Summary -
As I often do, I by-pass actual OS X installation and go with a clone copy of OS.
Here I made a clone of El Capitan 10.11.1 onto a 3.5 inch WD 250 GB HDD (fresh format and a single GUID partition). For this I use SuperDuper!.
While I was at it, I formatted and partitioned a 1TB Seagate HDD with three partitions, the third partition is for data. So as I had plenty of time, I cloned data from my personal workstation system to this new “Data” partition. This gives me a bank of my photos, music, videos and my historical Documents and DownLoad folders.
Then to make iterative changes to the Clover config.plist easier, I made up a UEFI boot USB flash drive. Clover v3320.
First power on - BIOS version is F3, no IOAPIC 24-119 feature, set up for booting UEFI.
Booted to the USB stick, KP’d, second try used Verbose mode and booted to the El Capitan desktop. This is with the onboard graphics. Artifacting. USB2 ports not functional, moved mouse and keyboard to USB3 ports and they worked. Note that all of my partitions show on the desktop… yea.
Audio via VoodooHDA working. Ethernet almost but not working correctly (LEDs blinking and pushed one it and got an IP address but can not connect - needs to be sorted out).
Ethernet is problematic so I installed an Intel Pro /1000 Quad Port NIC in the second PCIe 16 slot for the time being and also added the Zotac GF 9600GT GPU.
The system now is smooth and very responsive and mostly works. USB2 ports don’t work and the system won’t sleep, and the shutdown leaves the fans running. GeekBench 3 is 3777 / 12394.
So to see if the BIOS version had anything to do with the Ethernet port not working, I updated the BIOS to F6b (beta version) and found that the IOAPIC 24-119 was now present in the ChipSet portion of the BIOS setup screens. Long story short after some frustrating starts and re-starts, I flashed the BIOS back to the F3 version and intend to leave it there for the time being.
This experience has made an impression on me that the BIOS setup is critical. With the correct selection of BIOS ticks, Clover v 3320 will boot 10.11.1 with almost any config.plist file, kexts and patches (within reason). With one or two incorrect selections and almost nothing boots.
OS X Installation with USB flash built with UniBeast 6.1.1 and OS X 10.11.1 -
I followed the UniBeast guide to build the installer then used ammulder’s “[Guide] El Capitan on the Skylake H170N-WiFi to reconfigure it for my uses. I was very pleased that I was able to run the installer and complete a fresh installation.
And used the GM/Release Candidate for MultiBeast 8.0 to setup the Ethernet and Realtek ALC887/888b.
I was not able to get the HWMonitor to run with all of the sensors as at least one sensor is responsible for a Clover fault/reboot.
Again, this is not a 100 % system but is very close and I am pleased thus far.
Using the version F3 BIOS - Key settings after Save & Exit>Load Optimized Defaults:
Peripherals>XHCI Hand-Off set to [Enabled]
Peripherals>Super IO Configuration>Serial Port 1 set to [Disabled]
Peripherals>Super IO Configuration>Parallel Port set to [Disabled]
Good modding,
neil
I became so frustrated with my Skylake/ASUS Z170I/El Capitan integration experience (see post # 130 above ) that I started to question the published progress of the system integration leaders. Not a healthy thing.
I noted that the best documentation was on a Gigabyte Z170-HD3 and also noted that the motherboard was a good mix of new tech and tried and true tech (Ethernet and Audio). And also to my pleasure, the motherboard is available for a reasonable price.
So I ordered one of these motherboards and set the ASUS system aside for now.
My New System Configuration -
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA Z170-HD3 (source B&H Photo)
BIOS version: F3 (starting point)
Memory: Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 2x8GB | 16GB 2666MHz (source Amazon)
CPU: Intel i5-6500 (source Fry’s)
Video: onboard Intel HD530 and Zotac GF 9600 GT (already owned… old stock)
Display 1: Dell 2007FP 20” 1600 x 1200 by DVI ( already owned )
Display 2: HANNSpree 28” HDTV 1920 x 1200 by HDMI ( already owned )
Keyboard: GearHead USB2 ( already owned )
Mouse: Microsoft Wheel Mouse USB2 ( already owned )
HDDs: 250GB WD HDD (system drive) ( already owned )
1TB Seagate Barracuda (3 partitions, 2 for sys clones and 1 for data) ( already owned )
External Audio Processing: Lepai Stereo Class T Digital Audio Amplifier to
JEC TC-716 Stereo Control Center ( already owned )
Open test stand (no case, this is the stand that I have used for several years to hold my GA EP45-DS3R system).
Board Bring Up Summary -
As I often do, I by-pass actual OS X installation and go with a clone copy of OS.
Here I made a clone of El Capitan 10.11.1 onto a 3.5 inch WD 250 GB HDD (fresh format and a single GUID partition). For this I use SuperDuper!.
While I was at it, I formatted and partitioned a 1TB Seagate HDD with three partitions, the third partition is for data. So as I had plenty of time, I cloned data from my personal workstation system to this new “Data” partition. This gives me a bank of my photos, music, videos and my historical Documents and DownLoad folders.
Then to make iterative changes to the Clover config.plist easier, I made up a UEFI boot USB flash drive. Clover v3320.
First power on - BIOS version is F3, no IOAPIC 24-119 feature, set up for booting UEFI.
Booted to the USB stick, KP’d, second try used Verbose mode and booted to the El Capitan desktop. This is with the onboard graphics. Artifacting. USB2 ports not functional, moved mouse and keyboard to USB3 ports and they worked. Note that all of my partitions show on the desktop… yea.
Audio via VoodooHDA working. Ethernet almost but not working correctly (LEDs blinking and pushed one it and got an IP address but can not connect - needs to be sorted out).
Ethernet is problematic so I installed an Intel Pro /1000 Quad Port NIC in the second PCIe 16 slot for the time being and also added the Zotac GF 9600GT GPU.
The system now is smooth and very responsive and mostly works. USB2 ports don’t work and the system won’t sleep, and the shutdown leaves the fans running. GeekBench 3 is 3777 / 12394.
So to see if the BIOS version had anything to do with the Ethernet port not working, I updated the BIOS to F6b (beta version) and found that the IOAPIC 24-119 was now present in the ChipSet portion of the BIOS setup screens. Long story short after some frustrating starts and re-starts, I flashed the BIOS back to the F3 version and intend to leave it there for the time being.
This experience has made an impression on me that the BIOS setup is critical. With the correct selection of BIOS ticks, Clover v 3320 will boot 10.11.1 with almost any config.plist file, kexts and patches (within reason). With one or two incorrect selections and almost nothing boots.
OS X Installation with USB flash built with UniBeast 6.1.1 and OS X 10.11.1 -
I followed the UniBeast guide to build the installer then used ammulder’s “[Guide] El Capitan on the Skylake H170N-WiFi to reconfigure it for my uses. I was very pleased that I was able to run the installer and complete a fresh installation.
And used the GM/Release Candidate for MultiBeast 8.0 to setup the Ethernet and Realtek ALC887/888b.
I was not able to get the HWMonitor to run with all of the sensors as at least one sensor is responsible for a Clover fault/reboot.
Again, this is not a 100 % system but is very close and I am pleased thus far.
Using the version F3 BIOS - Key settings after Save & Exit>Load Optimized Defaults:
Peripherals>XHCI Hand-Off set to [Enabled]
Peripherals>Super IO Configuration>Serial Port 1 set to [Disabled]
Peripherals>Super IO Configuration>Parallel Port set to [Disabled]
Good modding,
neil