Z690 Chipset Motherboards and Alder Lake CPU

[CaseySJ]

I'm going to let you folks do all the hard work and take all the risks -- and reap all the rewards if it works. The joys of being an armchair quarterback!

 

[root2]

Another DDR5 issue is, they are only good when buying rather fast memory >= 5400 MHz. I guess benchmarks will sooner or later confirm this too.

DDR4-3200 outperformed DDR5-4800 by up to 24% in the read test and up to 20% in the write test. However, the latter delivered 5% higher performance in the mixed test.

Currently, there are only 4800 or 5200 MHz modules available here in Germany. So no incentive to buy a Z690 DDR5 board yet.

 

[etorix]

As usual, higher clocks come with higher latency, so clock has to be even higher to eventually match, and then exceed, the performance of the earlier technology.
Note that the MacBook Pro use LPDDR5, not DDR5 and that there's no direct comparison.

Do you have any suggestions?

Please post the SysReport folder dumped by OpenCore so we can have a look at how Alder Lake presents itself.

 

[dehjomz]

I’m rooting for you guys. I hope it works out. And you all have hotplug, sleep/wake, pcie4.0 or 5.0, stability, and amazing performance uplifts. This is going to be a very interesting thread.

But I’m gonna wait for either Raptor Lake or meteor lake (or Zen4 /Zen5) and build my first mini-itx build. I’ve built several atx builds.

Good luck!

 

[etorix]

Mini-ITX ? Er… With its "infinite Tau", this first batch of Alder Lake CPU essentially have a TDP of 241 W (now called MTP). I wouldn't put that in a small case. And, at that pace, the next "lakes" should rather be named after the hot ones found atop of Mount Nyiragongo or Mount Erebus.

Realistically, we cannot expect Alder Lake to work any better than Rocket Lake as a hackintosh:
No iGPU (it's the same as Rocket Lake) is already a given.
Quirky Thunderbolt 4, if any.
Quirky overall (Z590 Vision D build: DMAC, DMAR, GPTW, HPET, USBW+kext… what's with all these SSDTs? Gigabyte used to be the easy hackintoshing choice and the Z490 predecessors are Golden Builds… what happened?)

As for performance uplifts, I'm dubious. If Gracemont cores have to be disabled, then there will be no uplift in core count over Rocket Lake—two down over Comet Lake —, only IPC improvements—and not even the excuse of AVX512 to reach those 241 W. If Gracemont can stay on (these cores, and the cache that is attached to them, were paid for after all…), multicore performance will increase, but, without an appropriate scheduler, aware that there are two types of cores and that Gracemont cores come in clusters of four which share their L2 cache, this performance will be irregular.

And let's not forget there's no certainty it will work at all!

But this thread will be very, very interesting to watch in the coming days—or weeks.

Update The monthly message from Acidanthera comes with useful warnings. And I love the understated language (my emphasis).

This is all for the highlights, we hope you enjoy macOS 12 on your non-production systems. Besides that, while we are moderately excited about the imminent release of Intel Alder Lake, we use this message as a reminder that this platform is not supported and may actually have architectural incompatibilities with macOS.

 

[ori69]

Mini-ITX ? Er… With its "infinite Tau", this first batch of Alder Lake CPU essentially have a TDP of 241 W (now called MTP). I wouldn't put that in a small case. And, at that pace, the next "lakes" should rather be named after the hot ones found atop of Mount Nyiragongo or Mount Erebus.

Realistically, we cannot expect Alder Lake to work any better than Rocket Lake as a hackintosh:
No iGPU (it's the same as Rocket Lake) is already a given.
Quirky Thunderbolt 4, if any.
Quirky overall (Z590 Vision D build: DMAC, DMAR, GPTW, HPET, USBW+kext… what's with all these SSDTs? Gigabyte used to be the easy hackintoshing choice and the Z490 predecessors are Golden Builds… what happened?)

As for performance uplifts, I'm dubious. If Gracemont cores have to be disabled, then there will be no uplift in core count over Rocket Lake—two down over Comet Lake —, only IPC improvements—and not even the excuse of AVX512 to reach those 241 W. If Gracemont can stay on (these cores, and the cache that is attached to them, were paid for after all…), multicore performance will increase, but, without an appropriate scheduler, aware that there are two types of cores and that Gracemont cores come in clusters of four which share their L2 cache, this performance will be irregular.

And let's not forget there's no certainty it will work at all!

But this thread will be very, very interesting to watch in the coming days—or weeks.

Update The monthly message from Acidanthera comes with useful warnings. And I love the understated language (my emphasis).

I use MINI ITX Z590i Vision D and actually the best of I9 11900 65W. IGPU actually need to turn off because it is not supported. But so far I have not had problems with this. With several people from this forum (@Elias64Fr, @CaseySJ, @dehjomz ,@joevt), we led to the full action of Thunderbolt 4, even though Kexty did not load before.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/z490-z590.308084/page-74#post-2280025

DSDT and SSDT become necessary because Apple becomes more and morely depleted a list of supported devices.

Indeed, we are not sure that it will work.

But I prefer to try it than to look at how the corporation takes over the whole market.
I appreciate the inventions and achievements of Apple, but I hate their policies.

 

[CaseySJ]

I’m rooting for you guys. I hope it works out. And you all have hotplug, sleep/wake, pcie4.0 or 5.0, stability, and amazing performance uplifts. This is going to be a very interesting thread.

But I’m gonna wait for either Raptor Lake or meteor lake (or Zen4 /Zen5) and build my first mini-itx build. I’ve built several atx builds.

Good luck!

I was thinking the same thing, namely:

• Wait for Raptor Lake in order to avoid early-adopter struggles with new technology.
• First generation DDR5 modules, like first generation PCIe 4.0 NVMe controllers, are expected to have lower performance than next year’s models.
• Allow more time for operating systems and drivers to adapt.

I’m also leaning towards a mini-ITX system. This is a form factor I’ve never worked with before. Not concerned about thermals because well-ventilated “meshilicious” cases are abundant, and there will be plenty of CPU cooling solutions.

Having recently ordered my first Apple Silicon Mac (delivery delayed to tomorrow), I’m not in any rush. But I have an enthusiast’s interest in watching what happens both on the Intel and AMD sides of the aisle.

If the wizards at Acidanthera can make lemonade out of a bunch of lemony-looking components, then the thrill and satisfaction of Hackintoshing might continue for a little while longer.

 

[CaseySJ]

The embargo has expired. Lots of glowing Alder Lake reviews out there now!

 

[trs96]

The embargo has been lifted. Lots of glowing Alder Lake reviews out there now!

Once you pay for the 12900K and the DDR5 ram kit you're already at the price of a new M1 Pro MBP ! Then add 300+ for a Z690 board and it makes going Apple Silicon look very enticing. Don't forget the new CPU cooler that fits the LGA1700 socket either. I'll pass on Alder Lake for now. The 8 efficiency cores aren't doing much to make these new CPUs more energy efficient when running Windows and they must be disabled when running macOS 12.

 

[dehjomz]

The embargo has been lifted. Lots of glowing Alder Lake reviews out there now!

Intel is back. But Alder Lake is a power hog. Also, DDR5 seems to be a joke below DDR5-6000 speeds... DDR4-3200 with tight timings is faster than the lower clocked DDR5 modules. A waste of money. Unfortunately, the higher end Z690 motherboards like the Asus ROG, Top-end Aorus, MSI MEG series are exclusively DDR5. What a shame.

But the 12700K seems very impressive according to reviews. Very close to the 12900K in gaming performance, especially when overclocked to 5.0 GHz. MSRP is only $420 which is much cheaper than the Ryzen 5900x. The 12700K topples the 5900x in gaming, and beats it in many (but not all) multi-threaded tasks. The 12700K's single threaded performance is thru the roof. But the downside is that it's a power consumption beast, consuming even more power than power-hungry Rocket Lake when overclocked. But I should caveat this that the 12700K's power consumption is much less when not overclocked...

A change in the kernel thread scheduler seems to be necessary to be able to take full advantage of the hybrid architecture and properly assign threads to the Gracemont and Golden Cove cores. For example, in some instances in Cinebench, etc., Win 11's multi-threaded performance vs Win 10 is 15+%. If macOS can boot on Alder Lake, I wonder how its x86 thread scheduler will interact with the Gracemont cores? macOS does have scheduler code to deal with hybrid architectures, as M1 has big and little cores. But that is ARM... I don't know how or if the macOS kernel thread scheduler scales on x86.

I'm going to scour the various reviews, as I've been waiting for this day since Janurary! But based on what I've read thus far, while Alder Lake is impressive, it's a power hog (especially the 12900K). The major downside is that DDR5 isn't very impressive; it's expensive. It seems best to wait for DDR5 prices to drop to the corresponding DDR4 prices, especially the DDR5-6000+ modules. Don't waste money on anything less, like DDR5-5200.

I'm looking forward to people's experience with Alder Lake + Z690 + macOS. Good to see competition come back to x86!!

Finally, I'm interested in people's experience with z690, hopefully the BIOSes are stable, and not buggy like early Z590 BIOSes. I also wonder about overclocking, and what the highest stable all-core overclock is for the 12900K, 12700K, 12600K. Also, I wonder about power consumption and temps as well.