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Z690 Chipset Motherboards and Alder Lake CPU

@Jeson Beware of the 980 Pro (TRIM issue) and mind that on-board Maple Ridge Thunderbolt for the Aero D is still a work-in-progress.
Beside that, your builds will be a good opportunity to benchmark DDR5 against DDR4.
 
Could you do a comparison of between a) P-Cores + E-Cores enabled hyperthreading disabled vs. b) P-Cores enabled and E-Cores disabled and Hyperthreading enabled?

Really curious to see how Premire, Photoshop and After Effects behave and perform with AVX on/off and E-Cores on/off.
With just P-cores and Hyper Threads enabled, there was no change in Premiere Pro render times for HEVC and H.264, which is to be expected because only one or two CPU cores are (mildly) loaded during render, whereas GPU is handling most of the work.

For Photoshop and/or After Effects, please let me know specifically what tests to perform and datasets to use.

Update:

Running the same Premiere Pro export tests on M1 Max 14" MacBook Pro with 32GB memory and 24 GPU cores resulted in even better timings on the same 31-minute video:
  • HEVC export
    • 2 min 40 seconds (M1 Max -- 24% faster)
    • 3 min 30 seconds (Z690 Hackintosh with RX 6800 XT)
  • H.264 export
    • 2 min 36 seconds (M1 Max -- 16% faster)
    • 3 min 05 seconds (Z690 Hackintosh with RX 6800 XT)
 
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HUGE thank you to etorix, CaseySJ, vandroiy and vit9696 for all your hard work!

I updated my main system over the weekend and it appears I couldn't have had better timing now that all cores are able to be enabled/used.

Getting macOS up and running was as simple as making a couple BIOS changes, using etorix's v6 EFI, updating the config.plist with my own serial, and throwing in vandroiy's newly compiled opencore.efi and cpufriend kext.

New build (all components reused except proc/mb):
i5 12600k
ASRock Z690 Pro RS
16GB Patriot Viper Steel DDR4 4000
Sapphire Pulse 5600XT
500GB SX8200 nvme - macOS 12.1
1TB 970 nvme - Windows 11
4TB WD HDD - macOS Storage
8TB WD HDD - Windows Storage

I'm still under my first successful boot into macOS so there's definitely some more config.plist tweaking/cleaning and overclocking to be done but so far so good.

At some point in the near future I'll upgrade to 32GB RAM along and pcie 4 nvmes but otherwise plan to use it as is for the next few years.

1639418816827.png


1639418873387.png
 
HUGE thank you to etorix, CaseySJ, vandroiy and vit9696 for all your hard work!

I updated my main system over the weekend and it appears I couldn't have had better timing now that all cores are able to be enabled/used.

Getting macOS up and running was as simple as making a couple BIOS changes, using etorix's v6 EFI, updating the config.plist with my own serial, and throwing in vandroiy's newly compiled opencore.efi and cpufriend kext.

New build (all components reused except proc/mb):
i5 12600k
ASRock Z690 Pro RS
16GB Patriot Viper Steel DDR4 4000
Sapphire Pulse 5600XT
500GB SX8200 nvme - macOS 12.1
1TB 970 nvme - Windows 11
4TB WD HDD - macOS Storage
8TB WD HDD - Windows Storage

I'm still under my first successful boot into macOS so there's definitely some more config.plist tweaking/cleaning and overclocking to be done but so far so good.

At some point in the near future I'll upgrade to 32GB RAM along and pcie 4 nvmes but otherwise plan to use it as is for the next few years.
Good job!

The single core score of 1748 suggests that an E-core was given that task. If you run GeekBench again two or three times you should get some higher numbers.
 
Good job!

The single core score of 1748 suggests that an E-core was given that task. If you run GeekBench again two or three times you should get some higher numbers.

Thank you! You guys make it too easy these days.

After a bunch of runs the highest numbers I pulled were 1782 for single and 9888 for multi. I'll find some time later in the week to tweak and overclock to pull the numbers up.

I'm also curious what the differences for MacPro 7,1 vs iMacPro 1,1 are and if it's worth it jumping to 7,1 at this point.
 
EFI folder v. 0.7

What's new? Release folder is pre-set for using all cores and threads, using @vandroiy 's pre-0.7.7 OpenCore.efi and Rocket Lake frequency vector. (Debug EFI is still regular 0.7.6 DEBUG; no change from v.0.6, as this folder is just intended to drop ACPI tables, get an OpenCore log for checking options and/or map USB under Big Sur 11.2 or older.)

How to use
As with the previous release, there are two EFIs. Pick a sample.plist, fill in serial numbers, check configuration and rename to config.plist.
DEBUG is intended to drop ACPI tables and other reports (PCIInfo.txt provides the PCI paths of devices… if you know the vendor-id/device-id to look for) and for initial attempts, with verbose output. It is set with XhciPortLimit quirk, for USB mapping using Catalina or early Big Sur (11.2). It requires disabling E-cores (or hyper-threading) in BIOS!
RELEASE is a more extensive EFI, with GUI. It is set with UsbInjectAll.kext for USB mapping under Big Sur 11.3 and later. Whatever your choice, make sure to use a USB 2.0 device and/or port to boot and map USB as soon as possible, as USB 3 will likely not work without a suitable map. If you feel lucky, you may use RELEASE as first intent…

Items to configure
GPU Uncomment (delete '#') 'agdpmod=pikera' in boot-args if using a Navi GPU (RX 5000 series, RX 6800, RX 6900; RX 6600 requires 12.1, still in beta; RX 6700 is unsupported).
Network Set for Realtek 2.5 GbE, adjust if necessary. For Intel i225 enable one of the two entries under DeviceProperties by removing '#1-' or '#2-' (do not use both!). Broadcom-related kexts are present, but disabled by default.
BIOS As noted above, DEBUG requires disabling E-core or HT in BIOS. RELEASE is preconfigured to use P+HT+E with ProvideCurrentCpuInfo quirk; enable all cores and hyper-threading in BIOS.
All usual BIOS settings apply (Above 4G decoding, CFG Lock, VT-d, CSM, Fast Boot,…) though the defaults should be safe. With suitable options in BIOS, some quirks may be disabled.

Always carefully check the configuration! I update these folders without having an Alder Lake system to validate, so there could be errors. (Hopefully for me, this could be the last version before there's an official Dortania configuration guide for Alder Lake.)

Post-installation
For further refinements (wake fixups, Thunderbolt AIC… for which SSDTs and kexts are present in the Release folder, but disabled) and more detailed instructions, refer to @CaseySJ 's Golden Build Z690 Aero G thread. His configurator screnshots apply equally to these EFIs.
Also consider enabling security.
 

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Thank you! You guys make it too easy these days.
Thank you as well for reporting success with a new board!
It's nice to see these EFIs are not just downloaded, but also put to good use. :)

I'm also curious what the differences for MacPro 7,1 vs iMacPro 1,1 are and if it's worth it jumping to 7,1 at this point.
It's mostly cosmetic, especially at this point with a common (RKL) frequency vector. iMacPro1,1 is less picky with RAM configuration, does not require RestrictEvents.kext, and is the SMBIOS is one wants to try Mojave and run 32-bit applications (with spoofing to Coffee Lake instead of Comet Lake). But it seems that many prefer seeing "MacPro" in "About this Hack".
If you're happy with iMacPro, just leave as is. (@CaseySJ hopes that MacPro7,1 will get some extra support compared to the older iMacPro1,1; I expect that Apple will terminate support for all Intel Macs in one go… we'll see.)
 
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