Nearly complete (CPU frequency, audio, CMOS reset)

[Sutanreyu]

Hi everyone... After weeks of battling various problems in getting my system up and running with macOS, I'm getting pretty tired of the endless tweaking and rebooting... I've got the GPU working somewhat satisfactory at this point, though not the way I would have liked. I have pretty old hardware and currently no means of upgrading -- so this is it for a while until I can get up and running and developing something worthwhile.

 

I built this PC out of the few spare parts of various machines that have all partially broken down over the years and ended up in my lab (aka. basement):

• Dell Studio 540 mainboard (Intel Chipset Series 4)
• Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.00GHz)
• 6GB DDR2 800MHz
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB

First hurdle was getting the installation to work; I had to use LegacyAppleAHCIPortIntelICHx.kext to get it to detect the limited settings the BIOS provided for setting the SATA mode to AHCI. It wouldn't boot otherwise. 

 

For getting the GPU to work, I've added my device ID to the appropriate kexts' Info.plist(s) and then used Clover to patch the driver binary on-the-fly. I'm not happy that I had to mod the property lists, as I wish everything would have been vanilla aside from what was needed in the EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other folder -- but it works. 

 

I used VoodooHDA for a while, but I'd like to move to AppleALC since I figure it would be better in the long run? I've set this aside for now -- no sound, but I may go back to it afterwards. With VoodooHDA, my mic wasn't working properly -- it would just give me feedback over the speakers, and wouldn't be actually picked up by software. The codec I've got is apparently a legacy Realtek ALC888; somewhat confusingly, I've heard that this was actually an 887? Not too big of a deal, at the moment.

 

However, one of the biggest issues I have is with CMOS resetting itself after waking from sleep. I've got 'AppleRTC' enabled in Clover, so I'm assuming that should have fixed that? Not too terrible, but I'd like to have this working so that my non-technical family would be able to use the computer while I'm away and not have to worry about explaining how to change the appropriate BIOS settings just for them to turn it back on. 

 

Most importantly, the CPU's frequencies hopping up and down and I've tried a multitude of things to fix this over the past 3 weeks. It's a huge headache and makes me want to dump the whole pursuit. I have the latest build of FakeSMC, no NullCPU, SpeedStep is disabled in BIOS... Generate P and C states checked... I have Min and Max multipliers set the same @ 9, BusFrequency set to 333,333kHz... SMBIOS is set to MacPro5,1 since I'm on Sierra and is the closest to matching my hardware (socket-wise) without going overboard. I'm legit tired of staying up to 5am+ searching the net and reading endless threads on various tweaks have worked for some... DSDT table patching seems to be a massive trial-and-error game of searching for values rather than hard logic.

 

I dunno what to do at this point. I can post my config, if need be. But I feel like I've wasted endless hours on something that may never fully work properly.