blackswan22 Posted July 28, 2017 Share Posted July 28, 2017 Mini-ITX Storm Trooper Build: Phanteks Enthoo Evolv Mini-ITX Case ASUS Z170 Mini ITX Motherboard Intel i7 CPU 3.4 GHz Quadcore (Skylake) Alpenfohn Matterhorn White CPU Cooler Crucial Ballistix 16GB Ram Kit (8x2) EVGA 1050Ti 4GB Video Card Samsung 960 EVO M.2 SSD (250GB) (BOOT DRIVE) Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (STORAGE DRIVE) Broadcom BCM94352Z NGFF M.2 WiFi WLAN Bluetooth 4.0 802.11ac up to 867 Mbps card Fractal Design 140mm Fan EVGA 550 Watt Power Supply Already Owned: Apple Wired Keyboard Apple Wireless Mouse Special thanks to Rampage Dev, Pike R. Alpha and Rehabman for some of the patches and templates for this build, as well as the developers of Clover and everyone else who helps answers my questions on these threads! Fortunately I was able to trudge through this build without a troubleshooting post yet, so wanted to share some of my notes with everyone on this build. I have a slight lag upon first bootup, but only for about 10 seconds. Once the M.2 SSD kicks in the rest of the system boots up in about 8 seconds. Step 1: Motherboard Prep 1) Replace ASUS WIFI card with Apple Broadcom WIFI Card (Inside of WI-FI Module) 2) Install M.2 SSD into back of motherboard. 3) Install RAM, CPU and CPU Cooler. 4) Install other remaining other components. Step 2: Install Mac OS Sierra: Instead of creating a USB installer I decided to go about this a different route: 1) I took the 2TB storage drive that was going to be in the computer and loaded it into a usb docking station and hooked it up to my real Mac. I then formatted the drive using Disk Utility and installed Mac OS Sierra directly to that drive. 2) Once it finished installing, I went to System > Prefs. and under Startup Disk of my real Mac, restarted under the newly created OS on the new drive. From there I downloaded and installed the NVIDIA Web Driver that was appropriate for my version of OS, in my case that was Sierra 10.12.5. If you don’t know what driver you need you can click on the OS Version under the About this Mac heading, and it will reveal a code. The code corresponds to the NVIDIA web driver you will need to download and install. Restart using the NVIDIA web driver. 3) After that, under terminal- Sudo trimforce enable Restart again. 4) Now install Clover with appropriate config.plist and SSDT file provided courtesy of Rampage Dev. Clover Settings: x- Install for UEFI booting only x- Install Clover in the ESP Drivers64UEFI x - EmuVariableUefi-64 x - OsxAptioFix2Drv-64 Reboot one final time to the OS of your real Mac, eject the hard drive from docking station and install it back into the new computer. Step 3: POST If the boot args are correct in your config.plist then it should boot up just fine already! I found for the ASUS Z170i Motherboard running OS Sierra 10.12.5 with an 1151 chipset you need the following 1) Boot arguments: kext-dev-mode=1 dart=0 On OS Sierra 10.12.5, it no longer works to inject NVIDIA drivers via nvda_drv=1 in your config.plist. 2) You must inject NVIDIA web drivers via System Parameters of the config.plist. This can be done using Clover Configurator. 3) Using Clover Configurator > Under RT Variables, set the CsrActiveConfig to 0x67 4) Kexts: I only installed 3 kexts total to the EFI/Clover/Kexts/10.12: FakeSMC.kext IntelMausiEthernet.kext VoodooHDA.kext WI-FI and Bluetooth worked upon first boot up. I am also using an IOGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter plugged into one of the USB ports. The WI-FI signal is strong and the extension antenna works well. Step 4: Make the M.2 SSD the System Drive Insert Patches into config.plist: I needed some patches from Pike R. Alpha as well as RehabMan to get the Final touches up and running. One of the patches in my config.plist allows your Apple Disk utility to recognize and format the M.2 Samsung 960 Evo SSD. The other patch enables NVMe support for your new build and gives you the ability to use your M.2 drive as your bootup disk. Once those patches were added to my config.plist I was able to format my M.2 SSD hard drive as Guid partition/Mac OS Extended (Journaled) To avoid any trouble in duplicating the install, for the final step, what I did was use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my working OS Sierra hard drive onto the M.2 SSD. And that’s about it! Now there is a working OS of Sierra as well as a working backup of it on the other drive as well. *I also installed a CUDA driver for Premiere Pro and After Effects later on after everything was up and running. If you want my config.plist feel free to message me- I would post it but I do not have posting privileges for that yet. System is quiet, fast, and didn’t cost that much to build! I did not overclock anything. I went with the 3.4 Ghz Skylake processor over the 4.0 due to its lower power wattage. I didn't want to liquid cool this build. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
route99 Posted September 8, 2017 Share Posted September 8, 2017 Interesting/nice topic... will help a lot of people. Was looking for the differences between my Asus Z170 Pro Gaming and yours: https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/compare/457426;463869/ You clearly made other choices to take the i-version. My choice was driven by 6x SATA, 4x was borderline. At least you had a real Mac to make your installation....then you get at least a clean install.... My sun had a Macbook pro... but brought it back to the shop and got his money back (many problems..)... so I had to find another way of installing it. Needed myself a workaround: So I found a tweaked Sierra version after which I could do a real un-tweaked clean install using the original Sierra installer form Itunes... Maybe I should write my own topic on it. Really nice (boot)_ speed on that M2 drive... I now use a slower 7200rpm HDD, as it is "a nice to have setup" here , want Linux having around too for some server tests, which I could also do in a virtual world..., when I do not bring my laptop with (work) I still need Windows as main OS (full compatibility for work with Access 2016). Coming back to your experiences, some questions: * Apparently the Z170i built-in wifi was not compatible? * How did you install the sound? It was not done by default here. I've found a script (see below) that worked. As I have a Geforce GT 710 graphics, my boot flags were: kext-dev-mode=1 dart=0 . pciroot=1 npci=0x3000 And thanks for mentioning all the sources, several I knew but not all, being quite new in this field. ______________________________________________________________________________________ audio_cloverALC-120_v1.0f3.command These were installed: NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext Lilu.kext IntelMausiEthernet.kext (which I already installled for the LAN driver) AppleHDA.kext AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy.kext 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blackswan22 Posted September 18, 2017 Author Share Posted September 18, 2017 1) Correct- the built-in wifi module is not out of the box compatible with mac, so I purchased a broadcom wifi card for about $40 on ebay and replaced it. 2) Yes I actually did patch the audio but forgot to note it. I used the VoodooHDA.kext and placed it in the EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.12 folder. Although some install kexts with the kext helper into system/library/extensions after your OS boots, I've found that if you patch the audio by placing the kext in the EFI folder, you shouldn't have to re-patch the audio every time you do a software update. I originally installed the NvidiaGraphicsfixup and Lilu kext, but ended up removing them as I couldn't tell what they were doing or fixing if anything. My system seemed to be working fine without them. Not a problem! I'm fairly new to this as well, so I would advise that if you have any guides or topics to go ahead and post them- you never know what info might be helpful to someone else! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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