Z790 Chipset & Raptor Lake

[zipb]

Of course. This is a very new motherboard, and few look at the corporate/server/workstation Qx70/C2x2/C2x6/Wx80 chipsets ('x' being the generation counter) for buying motherboards—although there's a sizeable community of happy users of 'Q' chipsets in Dell Optiplex and similar pre-builds.
W680 is Z690 with support for ECC memory and Intel vPro for remote management, but without overclocking features. Or Q670 with ECC support.
The motherboard design is obviously a variation on the Z690 and Z790 ProArt. I suspect that the three siblings also share most of their BIOS code. And I suspect that the WS W680-ACE is a relatively easy hack: Take the latest EFI for the Z690 ProArt by @CaseySJ, remove the parts which deal with Thunderbolt, WiFi/BT and AQC113, remove the USB map and make your own (the back panel is different so there's no escaping this), and check the native DMAR. Should be done…

I cannot guarantee that it will indeed be as straightforward as outlined, but nothing else comes closer to your extensive list of requirements.

Thanks for the advice. Appreciated.

I know my requirements are different from most people's. A MacPro 7,1 is sort of of ideal, but far above my budget. Plus, single core performance is not great.

I once bought a Z68XP board that was nearly the same as a more popular Z68 board for Hackintoshing. The difference was small, but still it never worked well enough to be really usable. The devil can be in the details.
So I am not exactly eager to try an unproven W680 board.

From what I read ECC is the only difference between W680 and a 'normal' Z board. I have no need for ECC. It's just that most Z690-Z790 mobo manufacturers implement lots of NVME slots, not enough PCIe, and mediocre ethernet.

 

[etorix]

I know my requirements are different from most people's. A MacPro 7,1 is sort of of ideal, but far above my budget. Plus, single core performance is not great.

So a MacPro is not even ideal. You actually want lots of I/O and high single thread performance (consumer/gamer-kind CPU).

From what I read ECC is the only difference between W680 and a 'normal' Z board. I have no need for ECC. It's just that most Z690-Z790 mobo manufacturers implement lots of NVME slots, not enough PCIe, and mediocre ethernet.

Correct. Server/workstation chipsets of the C200 (for Xeon E-2000) and W (initially for Xeon W-1000) series correspond to 'Z' with ECC support (still works with non-ECC UDIMM, but ECC never hurts) and Intel vPro (irrelevant if you're not a corporation with a dedicated IT department to remotely administer your fleet of PCs) but without overclocking. In my, admittedly limited experience (one Asus C236 and two Gigabyte C246 boards), these work just fine as Hackintoshes.

I don't want to push you to W680—nor even to push you "over the edge" with a Rocket Lake build—but I happened to find this LGA1700 board which, compared with the Z690 ProArt ancestor, trades on-board Maple Ridge and AQC113 for two extra PCIe slots (x4 and x1) and a second i225—and thus fully and exactly matches your extensive wish list. It also happens that the board uses W680 rather than Z690/Z790…
And, with the way the consumer market is moving to exposing PCIe lanes as many M.2 slots but fewer PCIe slots, I'm afraid you'll have to either take a less-travelled path or compromise on features if you want to go for Rocket Lake.

 

[zipb]

So a MacPro is not even ideal. You actually want lots of I/O and high single thread performance (consumer/gamer-kind CPU).

DAW's nearly always have a single real-time thread that is loaded on 1 core. It services all stuff that needs to run with very little latency. This core is easily maxed out, while the other cores are not doing very much.

So, a gamer CPU with a high single thread performance is ideal, but I also need a bunch of PCIe slots for DSP cards, 10GbE, Thunderbolt, WIFI/BT etc. Gamers often only need one slot for a decent GPU.

Correct. Server/workstation chipsets of the C200 (for Xeon E-2000) and W (initially for Xeon W-1000) series correspond to 'Z' with ECC support (still works with non-ECC UDIMM, but ECC never hurts) and Intel vPro (irrelevant if you're not a corporation with a dedicated IT department to remotely administer your fleet of PCs) but without overclocking. In my, admittedly limited experience (one Asus C236 and two Gigabyte C246 boards), these work just fine as Hackintoshes.

I don't want to push you to W680—nor even to push you "over the edge" with a Rocket Lake build—but I happened to find this LGA1700 board which, compared with the Z690 ProArt ancestor, trades on-board Maple Ridge and AQC113 for two extra PCIe slots (x4 and x1) and a second i225—and thus fully and exactly matches your extensive wish list. It also happens that the board uses W680 rather than Z690/Z790…
And, with the way the consumer market is moving to exposing PCIe lanes as many M.2 slots but fewer PCIe slots, I'm afraid you'll have to either take a less-travelled path or compromise on features if you want to go for Rocket Lake.

Right. Good find, thanks.

Still thinking about this. My Z390 works quite well. It would be perfect if the single thread(GB5 1250) performance was 50% better.

 

[helmutschneider]

@ramazarusx I spent quite some time debugging the ethernet issues over the past two weeks. To understand what was going on I started writing my own ethernet driver (a port from OpenBSD) but quickly got into issues with interrupt handling. MacOS would simply report incorrect interrupt vectors and/or allocate them in the wrong memory location.

As it turns out, Apple's new DriverKit framework is really buggy. It's so bad that they built escape hatches for themselves. I decompiled their own e1000 driver and discovered a new boot argument called 'e1000.fi0' that controls which ethernet card the driver should assume. The driver then jumps around to various procedures using this value and sets up a bunch of interrupt behaviors. When I set the boot arg to something relatively recent like 0x15f3 (i225-V) my NIC started working. You can find more device ids in the linked header file.

By the way, Apple's e1000 driver looks like a pile of garbage to me. It's an amalgamation of at least three linux drivers (e1000, e1000e and igc), where e1000 stems from the early 2000s. I'm sure they had fun porting this ancient code into a dext.

---

TLDR; boot argument e1000.fi0=0x15f3 in your OC config.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/igc/igc_hw.h

 

[calcentrate]

Definitely the 10Gb port, it just happened twice in a row.

Is there a solution to this 10Gb port sleep issue? I have this problem. I turned off Wake from Lan in Mac OS and in BIOS, and that doesn't help.

 

[Sabzz]

Is there a solution to this 10Gb port sleep issue? I have this problem. I turned off Wake from Lan in Mac OS and in BIOS, and that doesn't help.

I haven't looked into it lately. Problem still persists on my machine too.
What BIOS version & MacOS version you running?

 

[calcentrate]

BIOS: 0816
Mac OS: 13.2.1
I read in the z690 creator golden build thread that this is a known problem and there isn’t a solution.
I will be using the Intel Ethernet port for the time being.

 

[lsyxmac]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z790 Aorus elite AX, the CPU is 13700K, and macOS is Ventura 13.2.1, but the multi-core running score of GeekGeekbench6 is only 10,000 points, and other people's scores are around 17,000 to 20,000 points.
How to fix it?

 

[nottooshabby]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte Z790 Aorus elite AX, the CPU is 13700K, and macOS is Ventura 13.2.1, but the multi-core running score of GeekGeekbench6 is only 10,000 points, and other people's scores are around 17,000 to 20,000 points.
How to fix it?

What CPU cooler are you using? Are your temps staying reasonable?

 

[lsyxmac]

What CPU cooler are you using? Are your temps staying reasonable?

240 water cooling，The score is normal under Windows

System report said Hyper -thread technology have stopped , but I have enabled this feature in BIOS.