GA Z77X bios and HD 6850 GPU results in Clover crash

[aol]

I have had a great deal of success with Clover on a GA-Z77X-UP4 TH board with a discrete GA AMD HD 6850 GPU. Once the OS is up it is running very well. As far as I understand I'm in full UEFI mode. But I'm wondering if this is causing issues during booting because my 6850 is not (?) UEFI compliant (doesn't have the GOP or whatever)?

 

I'm having issues with booting. The symptoms I'm seeing:

1. if I have two monitors plugged into the 6850 (dvi and displayport), I get the Clover "console menu" (or whatever it's called?) rather than the usual GUI menu, and if I continue the boot, the monitor attached to the displayport output only shows output in a very small section of the screen in the upper left corner, with lots of artifacts. Note that this is not the whole screen squished, it's just the upper left corner - I can see the normal Apple icon in the upper left corner, and I can type in my password, log in, and interact with the Apple menu normally. But 85% of the screen is black and what I can see, artifacts terribly. 

2. if I have just my older (non thunderbolt) monitor plugged into a DVI output on the 6850, system boots fine - normal Clover GUI, normal desktop, I can then plug in my thunderbolt monitor to the displayport output and it's fine.

 

What is that Clover console menu? It seems to be a symptom of Clover crashing or not loading properly.

 

I have made lots of trials in the BIOS, enabling/disabling the onboard GPU, changing boot order, changing "init display" settings, turning off rapidstart, disabling full screen logo, and so on. There is no combination of BIOS settings that allows me to boot cold with both monitors plugged in and see the normal Clover GUI and get to the OS properly. Interestingly, I can't remember if I've EVER seen a POST on this board - where you see the BIOS version, the type of CPU, RAM, SATA devices, etc. Not even with just a DVI into the onboard GPU.

 

In the boot options, I see, in addition to UEFI options for my SSD and HD (I have Yosemite bootable on both), a mystery third option labelled "Mac OS X". I have no idea what this is. Does anyone know or have a clue what this option is or where it came from?

 

I've considered but haven't tried connecting the thunderbolt monitor using an adapter to one of the other outputs on the GPU. 

 

Most recently I've tried enabling onboard GPU, plugging a THIRD monitor into onboard DVI, plugging usual monitors into 6850 DVI and displayport, and booting. This displays normal Clover GUI to onboard DVI output, and black screens to 6850 outputs; and eventually the 6850 outputs come on and everything looks good. But then I noticed that the mouse seems to "stutter" if I look at it closely. I swear interacting with the OS in this configuration introduces a lagginess that is hard to quantify.

 

Anyone have any thoughts? I'm on the latest "stable" BIOS for this board. FYI I would recommend everyone stay away from this board. For this reason and wonky USB support. I got it because I thought thunderbolt was the future, but it's just not worth it.

[kvonlinee]

Thank for you report, some how the GA Z77X got a problem.

[aol]

The finickiness level seems high on this board. I discovered I can set a debug flag in the clover config to try to get a log of how/why clover is "crashing" back to the console menu rather than the GUI menu. The FAQ has a question about "why do I see a BIOS-like screen" that I'm assuming is the same as what I'm calling a console menu. The menu is white text on black screen, with all the same options as the GUI, but in text form, for example:

 

Boot Yosemite from Macintosh HD

Boot Yosemite from Recovery Partitition

Clover Options

Arcane menu option

Reboot

Shutdown

 

I note that if I disable CSM, I can't boot at all. I think the 6850 is legacy only.