Best place to start?

[Ghender3]

I'm brand new here. I have inherited a nicely upgraded Dell XPS 8500 with an AMD Radeon HD 7770 -2 GB (Dell OEM). Most information I have seen so far leads me to believe that this system is not too difficult to run OS X on.

 

I've searched InsanelyMac up and down, and haven't found much recent information on this system, unfortunately.

 

I would prefer to install El Capitan or Sierra, and am aware that there is a display sleep issue with AMD video cards. I'm also aware that this video card may have issues at boot that can be circumvented using a 3rd part kext named verde.kext, that can either be loaded via EFI or by installing to the hard drive's System folder.

 

Some of the system particulars - Sandy Bridge core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz. Intel H77 Chipset. Realtek ALC887 audio, Realtek 8111E NIC. Intel USB 3.0 and Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. Integrated  graphics output through HDMI or VGA. And of course, the Radeon HD.

 

I also have concerns because of some posts I've see regarding Sandy Bridge and power management.

 

Any opinions on installing something newer than Mavericks on this unit? Is the Pandora Box installer a good choice here? I'm assuming that Clover is preferable at this time to Chameleon.

 

And, finally would it be advisable to attempt to get it running without the Radeon installed and then tackle that as a separate battle? Every time I start reading about framebuffers, my eyes glaze over.

 

Thanks

 

 

 

[nawcom]

H77 / i7-3770 is Ivy Bridge, not Sandy Bridge. And I believe I've seen a VGA patch for that as well for AppleIntelFramebufferCapri.kext to take care of that. 

 

Waiting until post-install to get AMD graphics working isn't that bad of an idea at all. That's probably what I'd do myself if I couldn't get it working first try with booting the install media.

[Ghender3]

Thanks to all for quick, encouraging replies, and for noting my error on CPU type.

 

Should I still look into and pursue SSDT patching for power management if it is an Ivy Bridge desktop? Most reports I've seen say this system is an easy Hackintosh (except for the recent issues with AMD Radeon GPUs), and working with SSDT editing doesn't look terribly easy. Although the Piker Alpha tool doesn't look that hard to use.

 

Is this one of those things that can be addressed once the system is up and running in more of a plain vanilla mode?

[liujianwei]

Clover can generate SSDT,so you do not need to do anything except enable P & C.I do not think power management is important because I need keep vanilla AICPUPM

[Ghender3]

Clover can generate SSDT,so you do not need to do anything except enable P & C.I do not think power management is important because I need keep vanilla AICPUPM

Do you mean generate P states and generate C states - I went to the Clover site and couldn't find anything about enabling P states and C states

[liujianwei]

Do you mean generate P states and generate C states - I went to the Clover site and couldn't find anything about enabling P states and C states

 

Yes

[Ghender3]

Thanks for all the input. Everything I've seen so far is pretty encouraging, but I am the most concerned about the Radeon HD 7770. Although this card is a known card under OS X, and there is even a known frame buffer that it "should" use, my card's ports don't match the reference card. Specifically, I have 1 display port, one DVI-I dual-link, and one HDMI port. So its "personality" doesn't match any of the Apple 7xxxx series port layouts.

 

Based upon what I've seen so far, editing and creating new frame buffers is not at all for novices. The more I read, the more "it failed" posts I see.

 

If I do a simple install, is there a reasonable chance that any one of the three ports will function properly and Quartz Extreme, Core Image, plus 2D and 3D hardware acceleration will work? I have little interest in running multiple monitors, and don't care that much whether I can get audio out from the Radeon's HDMI port.

 

Final question - I've read that most Radeon cards of this vintage (under El Capitan or Sierra) will not awaken if the computer sleeps, and that the only known fix is to set the integrated graphics (Intel HD 4000 in my case) as primary. I am assuming this is a BIOS setting I need to look for in the Dell Users's manual. Am I correct?

 

Thank you again all for your input

[liujianwei]

Thanks for all the input. Everything I've seen so far is pretty encouraging, but I am the most concerned about the Radeon HD 7770. Although this card is a known card under OS X, and there is even a known frame buffer that it "should" use, my card's ports don't match the reference card. Specifically, I have 1 display port, one DVI-I dual-link, and one HDMI port. So its "personality" doesn't match any of the Apple 7xxxx series port layouts.

 

Based upon what I've seen so far, editing and creating new frame buffers is not at all for novices. The more I read, the more "it failed" posts I see.

 

If I do a simple install, is there a reasonable chance that any one of the three ports will function properly and Quartz Extreme, Core Image, plus 2D and 3D hardware acceleration will work? I have little interest in running multiple monitors, and don't care that much whether I can get audio out from the Radeon's HDMI port.

 

Final question - I've read that most Radeon cards of this vintage (under El Capitan or Sierra) will not awaken if the computer sleeps, and that the only known fix is to set the integrated graphics (Intel HD 4000 in my case) as primary. I am assuming this is a BIOS setting I need to look for in the Dell Users's manual. Am I correct?

 

Thank you again all for your input

the only pc video card made for Mac is evergreen video card.the only fb is slice fb.the only graphics is slice graphic.iGPU should not wake at all.the problem is slice nvram.Thank Slice,i am slice's computer.

[Ghender3]

Looks like Cuthead is ready to marry Slice!  Slice may not be that psychotic though... 

 

@Gender3, I guess you already know what to do with that last post. If you're worried about the Radeon HD, you can try to disable it through DSDT or SSDT patching. You'll then operate solely on the HD4000 iGPU. Hackintosh do not support dual graphics anyway due to Apple's own implementation to handle this (they use a proprietary chip).

 

If you use Clover, you can extract your BIOS table by pressing F4 at the Clover screen. The extracted tables will go to the ACPI/origin folder of your EFI partition. Post a zipped copy here and we can have a look.

 

Hervé, I don't actually "own" the Dell XPS 8500 - yet. Would it make sense to, when I get it, attempt an installation with the Radeon HD 7770, simply see what happens, and if there are many, many graphics problems, just go ahead and purchase an nVIdia GPU? I'm getting the Dell for $0, and my time and sanity are worth something to me. I've looked at Slice's thread. From El Capitan forward, it appears there isn't much future for AMD cards for Hackintosh. 

[liujianwei]

sorry,power management is important, clover auto do all things so I do not know that power management is under clover control

pm work well without patch xcpm and aicpupm for my ivy bridge.

enabled clover c state and p state and kernel pm my power management does not work.

sysctl -n machdep.xcpm.mode

retrun 0