Asrock X99 Extreme3 - Xeon E5-1650V3 - GTX 980 Ti - 32GB DDR4 ECC [SUCCESS]

OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite and 10.11.1 El Capitan on
Asrock X99 Extreme3 - Xeon E5-1650V3 -
GTX 980 Ti - 32GB DDR4 ECC​

Components

Asrock X99 Extreme3 Motherboard
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Asrock-X99-Extreme3-Mainboard-DDR4-Speicher/dp/B00NC4UZXS[/Amazon-de]

Intel Xeon E5-1650V3 6x3,5GHz (12 Threads) Processor
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Intel-BX80644E51650V3-E5-1650V3-Hexa-Core-Prozessor/dp/B00O2UWGW4[/Amazon-de]

Corsair Hydro Series H60 CPU-Cooler
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Corsair-Hydro-Performance-Wasserkühler-CW-9060007-WW/dp/B00A0HZMGA[/Amazon-de]

32GB DDR4 2133 MHz ECC Memory
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/TRANSCEND-DIMM-DDR4-2133Mhz-SRx4/dp/B00O1OTDMM[/Amazon-de]

Gainward NVidia GTX 980 Ti 6GB
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Gainward-GTX980TI-Phoenix-Grafikkarte-Display/dp/B0107X46UO[/Amazon-de]

EVGA SuperNova 750 G2-80Plus
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/EVGA-220-G2-0750-XR-Netzteil-Modular-retail/dp/B00J01K3E8[/Amazon-de]

Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 PCIe
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/512GB-Samsung-Express-Version-MZVPV512HDGL-00000/dp/B015CWR4M2[/Amazon-de]

Samsung 850 Pro 128GB
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-Basic-MZ-7KE128BW-interne-schwarz/dp/B00LF10L02[/Amazon-de]

Western Digital WD4000FYYZ 4TB
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Western-Digital-WD4000FYYZ-interne-Festplatte/dp/B0090UEQ8I[/Amazon-de]

IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 IOGGBU521
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/dp/B007GFX0PY[/Amazon-de]

Cooler Master Cosmos SE Case
[Amazon-de]http://www.amazon.de/Cooler-Master-PC-Gehäuse-Seitenfenster-COS-5000-KWN1/dp/B00EB2ZAK8[/Amazon-de]



Comments

This has been a tricky build as basically none of the solutions for other X99 builds I found on this awesome forum (and a couple of other forums) worked for this Asrock board. So for all of those who would like to build something similar I've put together guides on how to install Yosemite and El Capitan.

Remark: I've built this machine for a friend of mine who is primarily using it for 3D-Rendering.


Installation Notes

Installation guide for Yosemite: http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...-980-ti-osx-10-10-5-yosemite.html#post1167302
Installation guide for El Capitan: http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capita...80-ti-osx-10-11-1-el-capitan.html#post1167313


Benchmarks

Cinebench R15


Geek3d GpuTest 0.7.0


Geekbench 3.3 32-bit


Geekbench 3.3 64-bit

Thanks for your useful post!

I'm in the process of building a Customac for 24/7 computation, target is convolutional nets training. I need ECC ram and a couple of nvidia GPUs, so the only reasonable choice is x99 (with a xeon cpu, I was thinking of e5-1650v3, six cores, as a reasonable price-performance compromise), and given your guide, I think I'll go for the X99 Extreme 3 for the board!

Targets:

1. No unnecessary headaches during the installation process.
2. Stability
3. Power draw
4. Possibly, NVME

Now, 1 will probably be solved thanks to your guide. Regarding 2 and 3, may I ask whether you experience stability issues apart from sleep/wake problem with USB drives attached? Also, have you tried to run an NVME ssd?

Thanks again!

Hi Balnazzar,

thanks for your reply, I hope my guide is going to be helpful for you.

Regarding your questions: There are no stability issues (-you might want to use a CPU cooler like the Corsair H60-) and the PC I've built uses a NVME SSD as system drive for OSX and the applications.

Power consumption is pretty reasonable:
Idle: 65 W
CPU at 100%: 145 W
(mainly) GPU using CUDA when converting multiple video streams simultaneously: 175 W
CPU and GPU at 100%: 300 W

I haven't tested it yet but it might help if you enable "Deep sleep" in BIOS and fiddle with different
values of the "darkwake" argument in the Clover config.plist in case you're experiencing problems
with (deep-)sleep/wake.

Good luck and kind regards!

tomtomx86 said:

Hi Balnazzar,

thanks for your reply, I hope my guide is going to be helpful for you.

Regarding your questions: There are no stability issues (-you might want to use a CPU cooler like the Corsair H60-) and the PC I've built uses a NVME SSD as system drive for OSX and the applications.

Power consumption is pretty reasonable:
Idle: 65 W
CPU at 100%: 145 W
(mainly) GPU using CUDA when converting multiple video streams simultaneously: 175 W
CPU and GPU at 100%: 300 W

I haven't tested it yet but it might help if you enable "Deep sleep" in BIOS and fiddle with different
values of the "darkwake" argument in the Clover config.plist in case you're experiencing problems
with (deep-)sleep/wake.

Good luck and kind regards!

Click to expand...

Tomtomx86, you are a wonderful user. You managed to succeed where many other failed, that is, have a fully functional El Capitan installation on X99, and published a detailed guide about that. You even answer kindly and quickly to help requests by less skilled hackintoshers (like me)

You power draw is optimal (given that 140W should be the cpu consumption alone when on full load).

May I ask if you installed 10.11 on an AHCI ssd and then copied it with CCC (if not it, which other tool?) on the nvme drive?

Last but not least, thanks for your advice about deep sleep.

Heck, thanks for all

balnazzar said:

Tomtomx86, you are a wonderful user. You managed to succeed where many other failed, that is, have a fully functional El Capitan installation on X99, and published a detailed guide about that. You even answer kindly and quickly to help requests by less skilled hackintoshers (like me)

You power draw is optimal (given that 140W should be the cpu consumption alone when on full load).

May I ask if you installed 10.11 on an AHCI ssd and then copied it with CCC (if not it, which other tool?) on the nvme drive?

Last but not least, thanks for your advice about deep sleep.

Heck, thanks for all

Click to expand...

Hi Balnazzar,

thanks for your nice words, you're too kind

I installed 10.11 directly on the NVME SSD - no further drivers required.
The 145 W are what my measuring instrument tells me. It might not be the
best instrument in existence, but it's pretty accurate.

Have a good day and cheers!

@tomtomx86 just saw your great build and congratulations on making it all work! can you please tell me how the system is holding up and more importantly, how, if at all, you can tell that OS X is recognizing your RAM as ECC?

ferchizzle said:

@tomtomx86 just saw your great build and congratulations on making it all work! can you please tell me how the system is holding up and more importantly, how, if at all, you can tell that OS X is recognizing your RAM as ECC?

Click to expand...

The guy I built this machine for has been using it on a daily basis ever since. There hasn't been a single problem as far as I know.
You can find out whether OSX is recognizing your ECC RAM as such by looking into the system information in the Apple menu (the apple icon in your menubar) under "About his mac". In the system information there is an entry for RAM where you can check out whether the modules have ECC activated or not.

Cheers!

tomtomx86 said:

The guy I built this machine for has been using it on a daily basis ever since. There hasn't been a single problem as far as I know.
You can find out whether OSX is recognizing your ECC RAM as such by looking into the system information in the Apple menu (the apple icon in your menubar) under "About his mac". In the system information there is an entry for RAM where you can check out whether the modules have ECC activated or not.

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Sounds like you did a fantastic job with the build. Thank you for the info!

@slashterix check this build out - @tomtomx86 got a board working with ECC RAM