Upgrading

[N00Bster]

i was think about upgrading from a series 6 motherboard to either a 8 or 9 series motherboard what would be my best option? Also how would I go about upgrading OS X on the new motherboard?

 

[nobodynose]

i was think about upgrading from a series 6 motherboard to either a 8 or 9 series motherboard what would be my best option? Also how would I go about upgrading OS X on the new motherboard?

I just did exactly that - I upgraded from a Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 with a Core i5-2500 CPU to an MSI H97M-G43 with a Core i5-4590S CPU. I transferred the same RAM (I was luckily that my RAM was on MSI's compatibility list for my new motherboard), and my PSU just happened to be "Haswell-ready", but only because I had to replace it a few months ago.

Best option? Pick something that's listed in the Buyer's Guide so you know it has been tested by tonymacx86 & the "crew" - there are plenty of motherboards from Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, and ASRock to choose from.

As far as upgrading OS X, I didn't have to because I was already running Yosemite on my old hardware. Here are the steps I had to perform to get my existing OS X installation to boot on the new hardware, as best as I can remember:

• Set the proper settings in my new motherboard's UEFI BIOS (in my case the important ones were to disable VT-D and MSR Config Lock).
• Remove /S/L/E/GenericUSBXHCI.kext - I don't need it anymore since the USB 3.0 ports on my new motherboard are provided by the Intel H97 chipset (rather than a 3rd party chipset).
• Remove /Extra/SSDT.aml (the Haswell processor doesn't need it to "find" its P-states).
• Remove the following lines from /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist:

<key>DropSSDT</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>GenerateCStates</key>
<string>Yes</string>
<key>GeneratePStates</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Then I ran Multibeast to install the proper audio and Ethernet kexts for my new motherboard.