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Craig's Build: ASUS P8P67-LE / i5-2400 / GTX 550 Ti / 10.7.4

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Jan 25, 2012
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Motherboard
ASUS P8P67-LE
CPU
i5-2400
Graphics
GTX 550TI
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
  2. iOS
Craig's Build: ASUS P8P67-LE | i5-2400 | GTX 550 Ti

Craig's First Build: ASUS P8P67-LE | i5-2400 | GTX 550 Ti

Updated for Mountain Lion!

Components

ASUS P8P67-LE ATX Motherboard - Amazon

Intel Core i5-2400 3.10GHz Quad Core Processor - Amazon

2x Kingston 4GB 1333MHz Ram

LG BH10LS30 Blu-Ray Disc Rewriter and DVDRW Drive - Amazon

Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB GDDR5 - Amazon

1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 3.5" Hard Disk Drive - Amazon

Cooler Master Elite 330 ATX Mid Tower Case - I bought the 500W PSU along with this tower - Amazon


Items I have bought since the build

Apple Wireless Keyboard - Amazon

Apple Magic Mouse -Amazon

2x Thermalright TR-X-Silent-120 120mm Fan Black Retail -Amazon

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler -Amazon

XtraFlo 120mm CPU Fan 4-pin - Out of stock currently

Akasa AK-CBFA04-15 PWM Fan Splitter Cable for 2 Fans -Amazon



My Comments

I originally bought the above components for a Windows PC which I was building to replace my age old laptop. I knew nothing of the components I needed and simply customised a gaming system on DinoPC and then looked around for the best prices on the internet, for this reason I have updated the links to include CCLOnline and eBuyer - I have used both companies for buying components several times and would recommend them to anyone buying from within the UK.

As I built the system with Windows in mind, it has been complete luck that I have achieved fully functional installations of Lion and Mountain Lion! There has been minimum complications in Lion and with recent developments able to have HDMI audio output using a GTX 550 Ti - notoriously a for several reasons! In Mountain Lion, there is severe instability with Fermi based cards, seemingly only affecting the models models that are using the GF108 or GF116 GPU. However the current beta of 10.8.3, 12D50 is showing promising signs of fixing the issues with the above cards without having to fiddle with kexts or frameworks.


The OS X build

I am running two versions of OS X on two seperate HDDs, Mountain Lion is still in testing and ironing out all the wrinkles - I don't wish to move all my work until after exams so I know I won't lose everything! I have my main installation of 10.7.4, and 10.8.2 on a secondary drive. There are two issues when using the above system to create a working install of OS X, Asus 1155 boards don't have native power mangement, this can be fixed, and requirement of a SSDT for a processor to run above 1.6 GHz.


Using a DSDT will kernel panic on boot due without a fix from below

For native power management on Asus 1155 boards I am using a modified BIOS rom, version 3602 - to be updated to version 3608 soon. There are several solutions to power management, i.e. NullCPUPowerMangement (found in MultiBeast) or a patched AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement, however I find that the best way is to use a patched rom and flash your BIOS with it. You will only have to do it once and any future updates from Apple will not break this solution! These 100% do work.

A warning! Not all 3xxx roms are available as only P8P67-LE, -M, -M PRO and Maximus IV Extreme have working audio with this series of rom installed. If you still have any other boards than these, remain on the pre-3000 series roms. This problem was discovered a while ago and the database has been updated to reflect which roms will break the system and which will not, so you can only download the working rom for your system. Remember DSDT and bios versions must match up!


From 10.7.4+ CPUs may be stuck at x16 multiplier, limiting them to a clock speed of 1.6 GHz

tonymacx86 said:
Apple updated the power management drivers. These new drivers are effecting performance, as some CPUs are stuck at a 16x multiplier, thus limiting them to a maximum clock speed of 1.6 GHz.
The solution is simple for this, install the corresponding SSDT for your CPU in the /Extra folder which can be found in MultiBeast. There are several choices of SSDTs, however these can be tailored to your specific system using Revogirls SSDT generation script. The standard SSDTs found in MultiBeast are aimed at i5 and i7 CPUs - there are specific ones for i5/i7 CPUs which are overclocked to 4.2 GHz.


No Asus P8P67-LE DSDT in the database?

The database does not have a DSDT for my motherboard so I had to create my own DSDT. However I did not use the motherboard patch as stated in the guide, instead I used View attachment Asus Generic Patch without Audio.txt along with this patch for View attachment ALC892_Lion.txt and this patch for View attachment ALC892_ML.txt. This compiles to give the basic DSDT which you will find in the Resources -> DSDT section of this website.
The next step is to fix some cosmetic issues with the GTX 550 Ti. Once installed this card is listed as 1536 MB instead of 1024 MB - this is purely cosmetic and has no effect on performance. The edits in the DSDT allow for GraphicsEnabler=No to be present in org.Chameleon.boot.plist, i.e. more natural support.

The Installation

UniBeast

This guide covers both installing Lion and Mountain Lion on this system using UniBeast to create a bootable USB pen. This method is the easiest for a clean install of either OS X 10.7 or 10.8, I would always recommend a clean install when changing between major operating systems as this prevents unnecessary problems from arising. It can also act as a recovery device to boot into your installation if you break something! This does happen.

After booting to the USB pen and reaching the Chimera Bootloader you want to select USB, this is stated in the guide. If you have problems reaching the installation screen from here try the following things.
  • Asus Motherboard + NVIDIA Graphics - type PCIRootUID=0
  • Unsupported graphics - type GraphicsEnabler=No
Note: Nothing out of the ordinary is required to boot into the USB installer for Lion, however in Mountain Lion the GTX 550 Ti has issues in OS X 10.8+. To reach the installer safe booting -x is required for reasons mentioned in the comments section.


Dual Booting

At this point I swapped to a separate guide for dual booting Windows and OS X. I created three partitions so that when upgrading or repairing the operating system on either drive the valuable data is untouched and is easily shared between the two OS.
  1. 150 GB for Windows 7 - NTFS Format
  2. 150 GB for OS X Lion - Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)
  3. 700 GB for shared data drive - Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)
Note: This partition scheme is for the 1 TB Lion installation, when installing ML I used a single 500 GB HDD. You may follow the normal UniBeast guide for a simple installation. However, if you do wish to use this partition scheme follow my guide for sharing data between Windows and OS X.


Post Installation

MultiBeast

After completing the UniBeast installation you will not have any audio, graphics (Open CL) or networking. Using one of the DSDTs above you can select UserDSDT in MultiBeast for either Lion or ML. Refer to the following screenshots of MultiBeast settings for which version you are installing. Remember that selecting UserDSDT installs drivers and definitions itself so these do not need to be checked as these are done for you.
Note: In ML after booting with safe boot, update to 10.8.3 (when released) and then the 550 Ti will be working natively as it did in Lion. Once updated you will not have to boot with -x.


Lion Screenshot - MultiBeast v4.7.0

Lion_MultiBeast_v4.7.0.jpg

Mountain Lion Screenshot - MultiBeast v5.2.1

Coming soon

HDMI Audio - Lion & ML

When I first installed Lion I wished to have everything working as intended, HDMI was the last major hurdle. At the time toleda helped me with editing my DSDT. However as much as we tried there was an unknown error:
toleda said:
That problem in IOReg remains. Even when you do the AppleHDA.kext editing properly, you will not have HDMI audio. In IOReg/PEGP/GFX0/NVDA,Display-B@1/audio-codec-index, the value of 4 is not valid; 0, 1, 2, or 3 are valid. I don't know what causes it or how to fix it. The only way I've resolved the problem is a different graphics card.

This was a serious bummer, so I bought some speakers instead - no biggy, just not what I wanted. However time passed and Mountain Lion was released and discoveries were made in the meanwhile..
The working AppleHDA.kext_v1.7.9 is from 10.6.2 and was the first to support HDMI audio, Nvidia only. Device_ID validation was added in the next version for all audio codecs. I had noticed 1.7.9 kext always had HDMI audio on the second HDMI codec and verified it on one of my systems. If you look at your IOReg, the invalid audio-codec-index is still there, however, the kext ignores the value and makes HDMI audio. The problem occurs with the GTS 450 and GTX 550 Ti.

We have HDMI audio!
This required patching View attachment AppleHDA.kext.zip from 10.6.2, however the same kext can be used in both Lion and Mountain and is attached below. This can be installed with KextBeast and then repair permissions with Kext Utility.



CUDA Technologies

nVidia CUDA said:
CUDA™ is a parallel computing platform and programming model invented by NVIDIA. It enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU).
The latest version of CUDA is 5.0.37 (as of Sat 12 Jan) which can be found at nVidia Drivers 5.0.37 for Mac Release.


BIOS RAM Settings

I looked in my BIOS settings and found I could change the speed of my RAM from 1333 MHz to 1600 MHz, my system seems to be stable and no errors so far. Tests show an geekbench increase of approximately 100 points per stick of 4 GB ram :thumbup:, this is an easy way to buy cheaper ram and get the speeds of higher priced ones!


Summary

Benchmark Programmes

The two programs commonly used to run benchmarks for GPUs are LuxMark - LuxRender and Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3.0. Cinebench does not support Open CL and therefore should not be used.

1. In LuxMark v2.0, when using the ball render I tested with GPU alone and GPU + CPU together:
  • GPU only - 2669
  • GPU + CPU - 4465
2. In Eugene Heaven with high settings, the one's suggested for my system seemed to be high anyway, I achieved:
  • Average FPS of 30.2
  • Score of 760
What works:

  • Sleep, Wake from Sleep and Shutdown
  • Wireless keyboard and mouse in Chimera and can be used to wake from sleep
  • On-board sound - ALC892
  • Gigabit Ethernet - Realtek RTL811E
  • Speed-stepping - Ran MSRDumper for 5 minutes and saw 7 P-States reached: 16 17 18 19 20 36 37
  • HDMI audio through GTX 550 Ti
  • FireWire 400Mb/sec
To do/Not working:

I would like to take the opportunity to give a special thanks to samisnake, toleda, minihack and tonymacx86, MacMan and brycv to whom made all this possible :thumbup:

System Information
System Information.png

Geekbench for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit) Score
New Geekbench Score.png
 

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[GUIDE] How to Move the Home Directory "/Users" in OS X Lion

How to Change the Home Directory in OS X

Having two OS's works together best if you can move all of the below data, to it's own partition. This means that you can access the exact same data from both OS's - very handy if the tools you need to edit something can only be found in Windows or visa-versa and you need to swap between the two frequently. Also it prevents duplicate data and more importantly loss of data...

The guide has moved to http://www.tonymacx86.com/general-help/56671-guide-how-move-home-directory-users-os-x-lion.html
 

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I'd like to 2nd Gordo's compliments. I've written a post here on how to do that, too, but your's is much better. :eek: :lol: :thumbup:
 
Thank you very much, both of you :D I've been back and forth editing both the posts to try cut out all the rubbish I stick in to make it a lot more readable! I wasn't sure if it was common knowledge to people, but I definitely found I had no idea how to do this in OS X until I asked one of the guys on the genius bar one day :oops:

He told me to create a Root User or admin account and do it through there, but if you have administrative privileges as you normally do it works just fine. After all the help I received, this was a bit of something I could give back to everyone! And Stork, if you wish you can incorporate bits of this post into your guide if you wish?

PS. Just had the most fiddliest past few hours trying to fit my Hyper 212 evo cooler! It works great though, strain tests are 20 to 30 degrees cooler now. So can definitely recommend :thumbup:
 
Hey I'm using lion 10.7.4 aswell and I have gtx 550 ti and is shown as 1536 mb card and the performances are very low.
For example youtube 1080p is lagging like hell and in league of legends i have 30 fps (In windows i have > 80 fps).
If I use your DSDT for BIOS version 3602 - with Graphics card edits and org.chameleon.boot.plist it will work? I mean with full QE/CI and decent fps in games?

P.S: I didn't modify anything for my graphic card just used the graphic card driver from MultiBeast and CUBA drivers and I have transparent menus and the things said above but is still running miserable.
P.S2: Not sure if is relevant but in info.plst it shows that I'm using Macpro 3,1 as far as I remember.

Thanks :)
 
Unfortunately you must have the same BIOS version as the DSDT you are using and as they are for different boards you can't do a straight swap. But if you find Toleda's HDMI audio guide it describes about making the edits to your DSDT to recognise the graphics card, this is the only way I found for the card to register the correct size.

If you want to take a shortcut, open up your own DSDT and download my DSDT with edits and copy and paste them into the correct place as they are the same card. Once you have done this the the value will be changed to 1024 MB and you won't need GraphicsEnabler=Yes anymore :thumbup:

The only thing is I could still play games such as TF2 and watch 1080p films in VLC on my computer? I don't think they were really bad fps. In TF2 now if I stand somewhere with no action it sits at 60fps I believe.

If you need any help just ask!
 
We can't really discuss ML until it is officially released, but when it is it's going to be happy days for us if it is supported OOB. But in fairness, my card worked with GE=Yes and I have no troubles at all with the DSDT edits for the card, took a while and it was a pain but it's more vanilla.
 
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