UtterDisbelief 5 - Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H i3-4350 16GB GT730

UtterDisbelief's 5th Build: i3-4350 - GA-H97M-D3H - 16GB - Gigabyte GT730




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Components

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H 1150 MATX
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00K872FB2/[/AMAZON-uk]

CPU: Intel Core i3 4350 Dual Core CPU Retail (Socket 1150, 3.60GHz, 4MB, 54W
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00JKATRXM/[/AMAZON-uk]

Memory: Crucial Sport Ballistix 2x8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory Kit 1.5V unbuffered
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007PNNTY4/[/AMAZON-uk]

Graphics card: Gigabyte GT730 2GB DDR3 DVI VGA HDMI Out PCI-E Graphics Card
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00LHLB1WC/[/AMAZON-uk]


Already Owned

Apple OS X Yosemite

Case: Lian LI PC-A04FNA PC Case Mini-Tower / Micro-ATX / USB 3.0 / Silver
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004J3OXO8/][/AMAZON-uk]

SSD: Crucial MX100 128GB
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00KFAGD88/[/AMAZON-uk]

HDD: Western Digital 500GB SATA III Black Data Drive
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/500GB-Desktop-SATA-Hard-Drive/dp/B008968L6M/[/AMAZON-uk]

PSU: Corsair CXM 430w Semi-Modular
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00ALYP208/[/AMAZON-uk]

TP-Link TL-WDN4800 Dual-Band wi-fi PCI-E card
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007GMPZ0A/[/AMAZON-uk]

Pioneer DVD-RW SATA optical drive - which I was using in an external caddy previously and is now mounted in the Lian-Li case.
[AMAZON-uk]http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004FJG8R6/[/AMAZON-uk]


Comments

My fifth Hackintosh project, hot on the heels yet again of my previous one - UtterDisbelief 4.

UD-4 bugged me only because it had no real upgradability prospects and the USB ports were mixed 2.0/3.0. This seemed to confuse things.

The new build was straightforward making use of previous components that had proved good at their jobs. I won't go over these items again.

The new Gigabyte motherboard is very similar to all their other models but features 4 memory slots for up to 32gb RAM. This is the D3H part of the item designation. HD3 gives you just 2 slots and up to 16gb. The Audio chipset is Realtek 892 and you can see on the Amazon photos of the motherboard, uses more audio capacitors for better quality sound. The PCI-E / PCI slot mix is different too and the new board features 2 PCI-E graphics card slots. I have no intention of using second card so use the bottom slot for the wi-fi card.

The Intel CPU is one of the latest Haswell i3's and runs at 3.6ghz. Previously I had the 4340, this time the 4350. Not sure what the difference is but figure it's an update so might offer benefits. I'm using the stock cooler from a Zeon 1150 chip as this features a copper-slug core rather than the plain aluminium one supplied.

Graphics was a downgrade and has made virtually no difference in performance proving that I never really stretch my hardware too much! I'd used a GT640 before and it was very reliable and compatible. I had mentioned an accelerated-graphics glitch in previous posts and never got to the bottom of what was causing them. Thought a change might solve the rare problem. The GT740 is it's replacement but I went with the GT730 because it is smaller although still a two-slot card. It runs cooler for sure and frees up a backplate for either ventilation with the standard Lian-Li plates or a USB port backplate etc. The motherboard slot itself is still overhung. Funnily enough the rare graphics glitch still occurs (well it has done just once so far - perhaps a left-over from the previous config?). I had to change the GraphicsEnabler=N to Y in the chameleon plist and to get the machine to first boot required a manual boot argument at the main screen. Once in I edited the plist and all is fine.

Wi-fi is reliably catered for by my previous rock-solid choice.

Bluetooth is via a Belkin USB adaptor model number F8T065 with a BT 4.0 spec and it uses a fully compatible Broadcomm 20702 chip.

Keyboard is an Apple Extended USB MB110B/B and pointer is an Apple Magic Mouse.

Temperature-wise the Hackintosh is running coolly with the CPU around the 31-degrees-C mark and the graphics at 25, though I have seen CPU spikes up to 38-degrees.

Updating Yosemite to OS X 10.10.1 was done via the App Store before I had a chance to panic! I usually prefer to download the combo update and do it manually. I needn't have worried though. All went fine. Just had to re-install the sound driver.

(Don't forget if you are building from scratch you will need to follow the “boot0: Error” fix as described in Tonymacx86 guidance here:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/25-boot0-e...ial-guide.html )

So far the build is rock-solid with no crashes.

In the motherboard BIOS initially I disabled both VT-D and the Windows 8 functions because this is what I'd had to do previously. However I now find I can set VT-D to Enabled and still boot fine. Parallels VM software is now much happier as a consequence! (It gives a warning message on start up if VT-D is disabled.)

(For new builders note I also used Chameleon Wizard to configure the SMBios.plist because I was getting the SOMESRLNMBR problem in the About This Mac /More Info... box along with a 2001 iMac! All is back to normal now.)

Wake-from-sleep is working this time but I have had to do some work to bring back sound. The answer was found here at Tonymacx86:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/audio/151504-no-audio-after-sleep-wake-realtek-alc-applehda-fixes.html

A bit scary for a first-time Xcoder like me, but did the job.

Lucky you have sleep working! Mine doesn't on Z97M-D3H which is very similar

Yes, I didn't expect it too myself - past experience lead me to believe.

It's a problem that has beset all the builds I've attempted. This one though is an exception.

Nothing special done - no Darkwake flags, no mysterious code injections. I left the BIOS pretty much alone, just ensured the Windows 8 options were set to "Other OS" and that's it.

Multibeast has: trim enabler, 892 sound and the usual FakeSMC etc. Kept it basic and nothing else needed.

And the dead sound problem was solved using Toleda's thread.

Check the detail spec of your board compared with mine. If there are no differences except the Z97/H97 then I suspect it could be graphics...

The 6870 I used would sleep in my Mac Pro which was using chameleon to boot. I just using -xcpm power management to get around the Pentium Haswell CPU issue.

I need to get one of the bluetooth dongles like you have since mines an old 2.0 one I use for my Apple keyboard

Only noticeable difference is the ram section
H97 http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4971#sp
Z97 http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4970#sp

Yes, the RAM seems to be the big difference for the chipsets - and maybe overlocking functions.

The reason I mentioned graphics as my guess for your problem was because of your rare mix of motherboard and GPU. My own previous problems were that graphics would fail to re-initialise after sleep leaving a black screen. Not 100% sure why my unsupported 730 wakes!

Do you have Intel graphics enabled too?

Yes, although my Belkin BT version 2 worked it wasn't reliable. The newer version 4.0 is fine.

Igp disabled. The fans never actually turn off when I click sleep. It just goes black screen and into a coma.

6870 has native support

Graeme43 said:

Igp disabled. The fans never actually turn off when I click sleep. It just goes black screen and into a coma.

6870 has native support

Click to expand...

Hmmm... Wonder if CPU power management is not working properly? Maybe because of the 'unusual' CPU. From reading your build it looks like you had to do a fair bit of work to do to get it running correctly.

Well the Yosemite 10.10.2 upgrade broke sound as expected. The trouble was simply re-installing the MultiBeast kexts didn't restore it. What's more the machine wouldn't boot!

By trial and error I restored it to fully working again, booting into the machine using UniBeast.

I'm not 100% sure what broke boot but to remedy I simply copied the UniBeast org.chameleon.Boot.plist and smbios.plist over the ones on my machine using Terminal. Once done I modified one thing at a time until I was back working. A couple more UniBeast boots were needed to get there but sound was still broken.

In the end I re-installed the ALC892 kext slightly differently, disabling the HDAEnabler, see screenshot below:



Sound is back!

I haven't updated to 10.10.2 yet. You think apple screwed with the chameleon files?

Graeme43 said:

I haven't updated to 10.10.2 yet. You think apple screwed with the chameleon files?

Click to expand...

Intentionally or not, they keep us on our toes!