What SMBIOS should I use for my hardware?

[mlross1]

Ever since I updated to Catalina it seems at my rx 580 doesn't max out like it did in Mojave. It seems to be running slower too. It's either I didn't complete something post install or maybe my SMBIOS isn't correct? I'm not sure and I keep looking and searching everywhere including on tonymac. I'm at a loss, maybe I'm just wrong and my system isn't correctly reading the output of the GPU? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I am attaching a copy of my EFI partition and my L/E folder. Either way I am still confused at which SMBIOS I should be using for my hardware (if it even matters). I know it seems like a noob question but I never had any issues until I switched to Catalina.

My hardware:
GA-Z77-DS3H
i5 3570k @ 4Ghz
Sapphire Rx 580 8GB
Corsair Vengeance 2x8 + 2x4 for 24GB RAM
Fenvi Wifi/BT


Media:
Samsung 850 Evo SSD 500GB
8TB Ironwolf NAS HDD
2TB Seagate Barracuda

 

[antieatingactivist]

What makes you think that its running slower? If you are just looking at clock speeds, the newer drivers might just be more efficient. Did you use LuxMark to benchmark? What are you doing to stress the card?

 

[mlross1]

I edit on Davinci Resolve and I used activity monitor to see the activity. In Mojave it would max out the gpu history. Now it only uses about 1/4. I'm not entirely sure if it's running slower or if it's reading inaccurately. Thats why I'm not sure if I'm missing something from my installation of kexts or I need to change something in my config.plist. I know it's plug and play for the rx 580 but I just want to be sure that I'm not missing something.

 

[jaymonkey]

I am still confused at which SMBIOS I should be using for my hardware (if it even matters). I know it seems like a noob question but I never had any issues until I switched to Catalina.

@mlross1,

The best matching SMBIOS for 3rd gen Sandy lake CPU's such as your i5 3570K is the iMac13,X however that was the era when Apple used crappy Nvidia mobile dGPU's in their iMac's, same goes for the iMac14,X SMBIOS.

When selecting a SMBIOS you need to consider your CPU generation and the dGPU (if installed).

As you have a AMD RX 580 dGPU I would recommend giving the iMac15,1 SMBIOS a go which supports 4th gen Haswell CPU's and AMD dGPU's. However there really was not much difference between 3rd gen and 4th gen Intel CPU's except for the IGPU and faster clocks so it should be possible to get your system working with the iMac15,1 SMBIOS with the IGPU configured as Headless.

Alternatively you could disable the IGPU and give the iMacPro1,1 SMBIOS a go, however those systems ship with a Xeon CPU so you may run into CPU power management issues, if so then you can use the CPUFreind kext to inject the proper CPU P and C states :-

GitHub - acidanthera/CPUFriend: Dynamic macOS CPU power management data injection

Dynamic macOS CPU power management data injection. Contribute to acidanthera/CPUFriend development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

BigSpur will be dropping support for some of the 2013 and 2014 iMac's so using a more long term supported SMBIOS such as iMac15,1 or iMacPro1,1 should negate future MacOS update issues ... at least for a few more years.

Cheers
Jay

 

[mlross1]

My cpu is Ivy bridge. Sandy bridge was the gen before Ivy. But thanks for the input. I'll give it a go. Right now I'm using iMac 14.2 which is the standard go to I believe. My system is up and running it just seems that it's not as stable as the Mojave set up I was running before. I just wasn't sure if my SMBIOS was causing this since I'm on an older cpu generation with a new GPU. Was hoping someone else with the same hardware could say what they're using. Until the latest generation of intel CPU's came out I had no reason to upgrade as those old Ivy Bridge cpu's are still pretty good. Handles my 4K editing and color grading just fine. Just don't know if my SMBIOS or something else might be effect optimal GPU performance? I upgraded from a GT 640 1GB while in Mojave and there was a huge difference. Just wanted to double check what I should do for a mix of hardware from other generations. I'll look into that cpu friends kext and see if I can get better results. Thanks!

 

[antieatingactivist]

I don't have a ton of experience with the rx 5xx series, but I was using a Vega card fairly early on. The drivers were atrocious. Fans spun way too high, temps way too high, and then the drivers got updated and it is quiet and cool. Performance is better as well. If you aren't noticing any real world performance drops, it's possible that your card is running more efficiently with the updated drivers, and that's why you're not seeing usage and clock speeds go as high with your workload. Either way I hope you get it figured out.

 

[mlross1]

Hmm that could be it too. Maybe I'm just paying too much attention to it lol. I can play and edit 4K BRAW videos just fine and they export at about 15-24FPS 4K (double that for 1080P) in davinci resolve. I'm just confused about it since I never see it go above 60% utilization and 39% spikes for activity in HWMonitor, for a 1080p export from BRAW to Prores HQ. I then re tried the test to 4K Prores HQ and it did use more of the card but it mostly sat pretty low but would spike to 100% for shots with noise reduction. So it seems that you could be right on the efficiency part. I just want to make sure I am getting as much as I can and it almost seems like it could be doing more with all that headroom. Maybe my cpu is just bottlenecking as the bottleneck calculator I used from my gpu and cpu are based off of gaming and not video rendering.

Maybe 14.2 isnt using the RX 580 as efficiently. I guess I'll do the trial and error method to see if it changes the speed of the gpu.

 

[jaymonkey]

My cpu is Ivy bridge. Sandy bridge was the gen before Ivy.

@mlross1,

Sorry my mistake, i meant to write Ivy bridge as i referred to your CPU as 3rd gen, in the above post.

Right now I'm using iMac 14.2 which is the standard go to I believe.

What i wrote above still stands true in that the iMac14,X SMBIOS's are all optimised for 3rd gen CPU + Nvidia mobile dGPU's. Where as iMac15,1 is optimised for 4th gen CPU + AMD dGPU so it may help to improve MacOS compatibility with your hardware.

Differences between the 3rd gen and 4th gen cpu's where minimal and where mainly to do with optimisations of the 22nm manufacturing process, updated IGPU and slightly higher clocks.

Best bet would be to clone your current build to another drive as a fallback and then change the SMBIOS to iMac15,1
(make sure to genearte new S/N, MLB, ROM ...etc) and see how it compares.

Cheers
Jay

 

[mlross1]

Alright I'm gonna give it a shot. I'll let you know how it goes. I also wonder if quicksync has anything to do with it. I exported it as h264 and it was between .5-4.5FPS which is just terrible. I'm gonna go start diggin into SMBIOS switch. Thanks!

 

[lakyman]

Hi,

Everything is working fine with the smbios 15,1 except for one thing the hardware acceleration with the intel hd4000 doesn't work ! I'm using the rx580 as a dgpu !

Thanks in advance for your futur support !