The 4K Dell OptiMac - 9020 MT - Core i7-4790 - Radeon RX 570 - LG 4K IPS Monitor

[t33j4y]

Yes, on the home page click on "buy us a cup of coffee" https://www.tonymacx86.com/

Thanks - I bought you a thermos full since several people here deserves a cup ;-)

The primary things of importance are: Keep the Clover bootloader (and entire EFI folder) on a SATA SSD (not on the NVMe) and install the NVMe driver to the driversUEFI folder. macOS won't be able to boot directly from the NVMe. You only want the EFI folder on one SATA drive. Come to think of it, you could even keep the EFI on a small USB drive and just keep it plugged in all the time. These have 10 USB ports so it's easy to use a spare 2.0 port for it.

Sweet - would like to go the USB route but will conflict with what I have planned for dual-boot (see below). Just for my understanding - the NVMe driver is only required if I want to keep the MacOS system files on the NVMe drive. I could go on happily using it as a data drive without the NVMe driver? Or is it required even for that?

Wake from sleep is one thing that is not resolved yet. It's a problem that most hacks using an AMD card and Mojave/Catalina experience. Just leave sleep disabled for now. Haswell systems are highly energy efficient. When my i7-4790 system is at idle with the screen turned off the power draw is very minimal.

Yeah, I can perfectly live with that!

It is best to keep Windows on a separate drive and then simply disconnect the macOS drive when booting into Windows. That way the Clover bootloader doesn't get over written. It's kind of like keeping two kids that don't play well together in separate rooms so the they don't get into a fight.

Understood - in order to make it more clean to operate, I went ahead and ordered this. Then I can selectively power the MacOS drive and the Win drive on and off for boot. Will also allow me to put in a big backup drive as well and do the occasional local copy of data files to that too, without having it running all the time.

https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07MXBKGW4/?tag=tonymacx8603-21

 

[trs96]

Just for my understanding - the NVMe driver is only required if I want to keep the MacOS system files on the NVMe drive. I could go on happily using it as a data drive without the NVMe driver? Or is it required even for that?

First, thanks for supporting the community, we appreciate that. If you want to use the NVMe as a data only drive, you can certainly do that without the driver installed. Only needed if you have macOS installed to it and want to boot that.

 

[craighazan]

Just updated to 10.15.4, all is well!.

 

[t33j4y]

Just updated to 10.15.4, all is well!.View attachment 456683

By "update" you mean clean install, right?

 

[Feartech]

By "update" you mean clean install, right?

nope, just "update"

 

[t33j4y]

nope, just "update"

Using the built-in update function - wow, I was under the impression that this would screw up everything. The limitation is then - I venture - that you cannot go from e.g. Mojave to Catalina, but point upgrades within the same major version are ok?

 

[craighazan]

Using the built-in update function - wow, I was under the impression that this would screw up everything. The limitation is then - I venture - that you cannot go from e.g. Mojave to Catalina, but point upgrades within the same major version are ok?

Correct.

 

[GCPDetective]

I can also confirm that updating to 10.15.4 via Software Update seems to have gone smoothly.

Some additional info:

I would like to add that after I started the update process, I left to do something else. When I came back to my PC an hour later I noticed that it seemed to have been sleeping (I have sleep and hibernation disabled), so I tried waking it up but was greeted with a black screen. I had to force a shutdown with the power button and turned it back on and all seemed well after that. I also noticed a new Guest account that was added to my login screen.

 

[GCPDetective]

Just used MultiBeast 12 on my 9020, the HWMonitorSMC2 is a great App!. You can pull out all these widgets telling you useful information, or double click and install them in the menubar.

I have this installed too! Such a great app!

So you installed the VirtualSMC plugins to make this work with HWmonitorSMC2. Unibeast includes VirtualSMC.

VirtualSMC, both VirtualSMC plugins (SMCProcessor and SMCSuperIO) and the Intel Power Gadget application. Mind you I've never used MB before, I got these straight from the source.

 

[lofidub]

Using the built-in update function - wow, I was under the impression that this would screw up everything. The limitation is then - I venture - that you cannot go from e.g. Mojave to Catalina, but point upgrades within the same major version are ok?

Correct.

Maybe I misunderstand what you are talking about, but updating Mojave to Catalina via the builtin software update worked fine for me. (I went back to Mojave, cause Catalina sucks without iTunes, etc., but still the update was fine)