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Stability & Freezing of Hackintoshes Under High Load


shrieken213
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Hello,

 

Currently I have two hacks that I have assembled. One is a GA-H81M-H + i7-4770K + HD 4600 combo running on a RAID 1 500GB array; this runs headless. The other is a GA-Z97MX-Gaming 5 + i7-4790K @ 4.5 Ghz + GTX 770 4GB OC; this is my main computer. I will refer to them by their chipsets (H81 and Z97). I also have a 4 year old MacBook Pro 15" with a 2.2 Ghz Sandy Bridge quad core for comparison; this never, ever crashes.

 

I run rendering and BOINC (@home distributed computing) on the machines. They are both adequately cooled; H81 never breaks 70°C and Z97 I manually control the fans as I see fit. The problem is that under moderate load, H81 freezes up quite easily. At first I thought this was an issue with the graphics driver, so I went ahead and enabled QE/CI for the HD 4600. Other than the stutter from when it fades from black to desktop on boot, it works quite well. But the freezing still remains, both through headless operation via VNC and monitor out via HDMI, when the CPU is taxed enough.

 

By enough I mean the H81 barely breaks 50°C. Under full load in Compressor, it freezes in 1 minute; under limited load in BOINC, it lasts a couple minutes. With no CPU load the build is otherwise stable, but I do run Unison in the background to keep a RAID 5 6TB array in sync with an external backup, which uses ~8% of the CPU.

 

Also notable is the fact that the freezes occur more often when running headless via VNC than via a monitor.

 

Under tom.bridges's suggestion I investigated power management as a possible solution, but it is running Piker's script successfully and still freezes up. More notable is that the same CPU used to be in my old build, running solid stable at 4.3 Ghz under full load in Z87. So the CPU itself is not damaged for sure.

 

The Z97 build is much, much more stable, with power management also enabled through Piker's script. It lasts 30-80 minutes under the same limited load of BOINC, and I have yet to see it freeze up under Compressor. It does ultimately freeze up when taxed enough, though, regardless of temperature.

 

Which begs the question: Why does the H81 freeze so often, and are hackintoshes inherently unstable under heavy load? The temperatures are low enough and power management works as intended. Is it my power supply (only 250W, powering 6 hard drives & 3 fans), or does anyone have any idea on why this is so?

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