Workstation with Xeon and ECC RAM

[slashterix]

I've got the C2750 running FreeNAS to provide remote Time Machine backups and AFP shares. It's rock-solid and ZFS gives me confidence my data is intact. The Marvell SATA ports are reportedly unstable under high load so I only use those connected to Intel chipsets. The new FreeNAS beta has a very nice UI, I recommend everyone check it out.

 

[ferchizzle]

@slashterix I did some more research and it's a no go with the C2750 board and OS X. however, I am thinking about getting the GA-X150M ECC board and might have an in on a group buy for 64GB RAM (4x16GB sticks) for us. Interested in jumping in?

 

[crayonshin]

I've got the C2750 running FreeNAS to provide remote Time Machine backups and AFP shares. It's rock-solid and ZFS gives me confidence my data is intact. The Marvell SATA ports are reportedly unstable under high load so I only use those connected to Intel chipsets. The new FreeNAS beta has a very nice UI, I recommend everyone check it out.

@slashterix I did some more research and it's a no go with the C2750 board and OS X. however, I am thinking about getting the GA-X150M ECC board and might have an in on a group buy for 64GB RAM (4x16GB sticks) for us. Interested in jumping in?

@slashterix, @ferchizzle, I don't know if you guys are still wondering about ECC support but I can confirm that the Gigabyte GA-X150M-PRO ECC does indeed work well as a Hackintosh with ECC enabled. I paired mine with a Xeon E3-1230 v5 and 2 x 16GB of Crucial DDR4 2133 ECC Unbuffered RAM (part number CT16G4WFD8213). Since the Xeon E3 v5 CPU and the C232 chipset on this motherboard are both Skylake, it was as easy to setup as I would imagine a Z170 board and Core i7 Skylake would be (I never tried that combo). If you're going to take the plunge with this board, the Micro Center web store currently (1/27/2017) has them on sale for $77.99. Of course if you live near a Micro Center store, check their stock first. Good luck!



"About this Mac" actually shows the chip as a Core i7 but system profiler does indeed show that ECC is enabled. See below:

 

[tjohnson5]

@slashterix, @ferchizzle, I don't know if you guys are still wondering about ECC support but I can confirm that the Gigabyte GA-X150M-PRO ECC does indeed work well as a Hackintosh with ECC enabled. I paired mine with a Xeon E3-1230 v5 and 2 x 16GB of Crucial DDR4 2133 ECC Unbuffered RAM (part number CT16G4WFD8213). Since the Xeon E3 v5 CPU and the C232 chipset on this motherboard are both Skylake, it was as easy to setup as I would imagine a Z170 board and Core i7 Skylake would be (I never tried that combo). If you're going to take the plunge with this board, the Micro Center web store currently (1/27/2017) has them on sale for $77.99. Of course if you live near a Micro Center store, check their stock first. Good luck!



"About this Mac" actually shows the chip as a Core i7 but system profiler does indeed show that ECC is enabled. See below:
View attachment 232952 View attachment 232953

I've got one of these boards and I am thinking about putting OSX on it was there anything special you had to do?

 

[slashterix]

@slashterix, @ferchizzle, I don't know if you guys are still wondering about ECC support but I can confirm that the Gigabyte GA-X150M-PRO ECC does indeed work well as a Hackintosh with ECC enabled. I paired mine with a Xeon E3-1230 v5 and 2 x 16GB of Crucial DDR4 2133 ECC Unbuffered RAM (part number CT16G4WFD8213). Since the Xeon E3 v5 CPU and the C232 chipset on this motherboard are both Skylake, it was as easy to setup as I would imagine a Z170 board and Core i7 Skylake would be (I never tried that combo). If you're going to take the plunge with this board, the Micro Center web store currently (1/27/2017) has them on sale for $77.99. Of course if you live near a Micro Center store, check their stock first. Good luck!



"About this Mac" actually shows the chip as a Core i7 but system profiler does indeed show that ECC is enabled. See below:
View attachment 232952 View attachment 232953

You've built my dream hackintosh! Does anything not work?

Do you know if the NVMe is working? Does it even boot from NVMe?

Thanks for sharing.

 

[crayonshin]

I've got one of these boards and I am thinking about putting OSX on it was there anything special you had to do?

Not at all, everything worked great. I installed the latest version of Sierra using Unibeast. After booting into macOS, I ran MultiBeast and installed clover UEFI, Realtek 892, IntelMausiEthernet v2.2.0 and the USB Increase Max Port Limit patches. Then, I updated Clover to the latest version and installed the Nvidia web drivers for my 980 Ti. Everything works great!

 

[slashterix]

Wow that's great to hear. I'm really tempted!

 

[crayonshin]

You've built my dream hackintosh! Does anything not work?

Do you know if the NVMe is working? Does it even boot from NVMe?

Thanks for sharing.

Yes, NVMe works. I boot from a Samsung 960 EVO 500GB. It took me a while to figure it out using RehabMan's NVMe spoof method but after I did, worked perfectly.

The only other little quirk was with the BIOS. The board came with the original F1 BIOS version. The cool thing about this one was that it had working NVRAM. The downsides were 1) it kept adding boot devices to the startup list every time the system rebooted and 2) when I put the system to sleep, it would sleep...then come back on for a minute, then go to sleep properly.

Not a huge deal but a little annoying. When I updated to the F21 BIOS, the boot entry problems and the sleep problems were gone, but NVRAM no longer worked (this is the case with most Gigabyte 100 series boards I believe). I realized NVRAM had broken when the Nvidia web drivers didn't load. No biggie, I just ran the Clover installer and installed the Emu64 drivers to get "software" NVRAM. No difference in how the system runs so I'd rather have the issues fixed. After upgrading from F1 to anything higher, you can't downgrade again so make sure you want to first.

 

[tjohnson5]

Thanks, crayonshin for replying! I am going to give this a try as soon as my NVMe comes in.

 

[tjohnson5]

Wow, I pulled my old ga-b75m-d3h which is about 5 years old and my clover mac model was set to iMac 13,2. I pulled the board and installed the GA-X150M-PRO ECC with two 8gb ECC and a Xeon E3-1230 v5. I also used my old nvidia gt640 video card. I fired the unit up with the old settings and it came up running! I only had to use Crayonshin's patchs - Realtek 892, IntelMausiEthernet v2.2.0 and the USB Increase Max Port Limit patches. Everything is working well and memory show ECC enabled. I think I am running firmware F1 not sure it boots so fast I haven't been in the setup yet. I am still waiting for my NVMe drive but my old sumsung 850 SSD is still running pretty damn good.