Working Build Asus Z170-A Skylake

[rippingviper]

Hey guys just wanted to thank everyone who contributes to the forums. I've built a few rigs from 2005-Current in age from guides and comments hosted here on these forums. So thanks! Now down to the good stuff!!

My latest and greatest build is built off the Skylake platform.

Build Specs:

Asus Z170-A motherboard
Intel 6600k CPU
Noctua NH-D14 Cpu cooler
Corsair LPX 3200 MHZ 16 gigs
Intel 540 M.2 240gig
Samsung 850 Evo 500 gig
WD Green 3TB for storage
MSI 380 2GB (Used to have a Nvidia 660ti I pulled from my Core2duo Hackintosh but it didn't like my skyline motherboard and kept crashing so went to my 380)
Antec TruPower 850watt semi modular P/S from 2007(Has been used in about 5 different PC builds over the years and still ticking!)
Old Bitfenix Shinobi Window from back in the day, Stripped it down and painted and removed riveted drive cages for space and airflow (Waiting on new Cooltek UMX4 to ship to me end of July here will include pics of it)
Apple full-size keyboard
E-Blue Razor wireless mouse
Samsung 27" 1080p monitor. (Was gonna use apple display but they discontinued it so waiting on the new revision)

So now you know the specs. Now for how I did it!

I slapped it together pretty simply actually. Used the exact same copy of Unibeast and clover with a legal copy off my iMac of El Capitan I used for all 3 of my Hackintosh's. I had to use safe mode to boot into the installer for some reason. No matter the boot flags it just wouldn't boot up. But after safe mode the installer was done just like that. I used the iGPU to boot as I hadn't yet installed the 660ti. Found that my toolbar was half faded out even after multibeast even with the fixes in clover. So I installed my 660ti. All I thought was well until a day later my rig was chugging. The mouse would only move every 10 seconds. I for sure thought it was the ram or cpu. But alas it was the graphics card. Not to sure why it was doing it as I pulled it from a working hackintosh i've had running for months. I then begun my research on running my 380 on here. It was a long journey of reading article after article and it was so simple after that.

So after a few weeks of running just the IGPU I installed the MSI 380 2gig and it would crash as it loaded in verbose mode which pissed me off to no end and auto reboot. So finally found that setting my IGPU in my bios as primary graphics all of a sudden my system booted! Holy crap! Let the testing begin! So after running a few games for hours on end (World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Heroes of the Storm) I haven't yet had a crash! And I run everything on ULTRA with all the AA on as high as it goes and get 60 fps with V-Sync on. I've seen higher FPS in WoW and League. I know they aren't AAA titles or anything but when I had the 660ti in there it wouldn't go over high settings so this is great!

Almost everything works on the rig. For some reason the sound isn't working from the sound card but I used the HDMI 1.0 kext I found on the site here and installed it using Easykext Utility and run my sound off the output on the monitor (More useful for me as I run 2 rigs on 1 monitor. I can run multi monitor no issues at all as well with my dvi port on the 380.

iMessage wasn't working out of the box but I ran many many serials through the apple website until I found one that I could use and set up my UUID using the iMessage help on the site here and board ID , deleted all the preferences and rebuilt my permissions using the terminal since we can't do it anymore from the disk utility in El Capitan.

All in all i'm very satisfied with the build and I'll include some pics of it for you to enjoy! Thanks everyone for the help on this site! ALSO this might be in the wrong thread if an admin could move it I didn't notice the builds area.

 

[rippingviper]

Forgot to add, Sleep/Wake and everything all works! I didn't put any special info in for the 380 just ran the IGPU as primary and it boots right into Mac OS X 10.11.5 and automatically switches to the 380 with full acceleration. I don't have any monitors to the IGPU. For any reason I need to I can just run another HDMI to the port to see the boot screens etc.

 

[Gunner23]

Hey,

First off, love your rig - looks really cool!

Secondly, I'm a complete noob to Hackintoshes. My setup is similar to yours - a 6600k, ASUS Z170-A, 8GB of Corsair RAM and soon a GTX 1070 (so currently using Intel 530). I got as far as the Apple logo on my screen when booting, but then it froze. I've read about kexts and config files, but very few people seem to have Z170-As, and I've absolutely no idea where to find these things. Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[rippingviper]

Hey there. At clover boot loader scroll over to options. Press enter.go to graphics. Make sure Inject Intel is on.

Also make sure all your bios settings are proper. Make sure serial port is turned off in the I/o options . It will refuse to boot passed if that is on. I got stuck on that for an hour because of the serial port and I believe it's some handoff option as well that needs to be turned ON.

I'm not at home right now so I can't take a picture this second , but try the USB handoff on and the serial port off . Then check clover Intel graphics injection and go back to main clover screen , go to your installer and hit space and verbose mode . Let me know how far you get. If that doesn't work try the safe mode option next . Let me know.

 

[Gunner23]

Hi,
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! As it turns out, I've been having problems with the Graphics on Windows, and so Scan (the retailer I bought them from) have asked to have them back to see if they are faulty, so it doesn't look like I'll have an opportunity to try this for a week at least...

 

[jeff987]

Could you post your config file and a screen shot of your multibeast settings. So that I can compare to mine.
Could you be more specific as to how you got your gpu to work. When I try booting with the nvidia boot flag my screen turns off unless I include nv_disable=1 which gives me slow graphics performance.

 

[rippingviper]

Does your system have the 960? i'm using an AMD R9 380 card . I'm not very familiar with the way to install nvidia based cards. But from what I gather. You only need the nv_disable=1 until you download and install the current graphics drivers from nvidia. But I didn't really do much research in that respect yet.

I used the exact sound driver and the network driver for ethernet that it said in the installer comments. I just compared the spec's from my motherboard to the multibeast installer and followed the directions.

I'm downloading some updates for some games in win10 right now so I cannot post my config at this moment. I'll have to do it in a few hours. I've gotta run out for a bit.

 

[jeff987]

Yes I am using the 960 in my pc.
Which mac build did you use cuz 5,1 gave me issues.

update:
I used 16,2 system definitions and it worked!

Thanks for replying quickly to my initial post

 

[rippingviper]

Hey sorry I got caught up with work and a tornado that blew through, So haven't had the chance to even power up my machine between the power outages. Glad to hear you go it working! I used the mac pro 6,1 and it worked for me. Not sure why it didn't for you. Guess its a little different depending on your hardware!

 

[laurajuliette]

Did you do any tinkering for sleep wake? Mine starts again automatically as soon as I put it to sleep.