Jump to content

[SUCCESS] MSI B250I PRO ITX, Pentium G4600 Powerful budget desktop


macinsane
 Share

3 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

Powerful budget Hackintosh for the living room

 

Components used:

 

MSI B250I Pro Mini-ITX

Pentium G4600

Arctic Freezer 33 semi passive CPU cooler

ASUS Geforce GT1030

8 GB GSkill DDR4-2133 RAM

Samsung 256GB PCIe SSD

GMYLE Bluetooth USB

Silverstone ITX Case

PICO Mini ATX 120W

 

My plan was to build a Hackintosh with the best price-performance-ratio to be used as media player in the living room hooked to the TV. For that use it should be silent, fanless at best. So I decided to go for the Pentium G4600 which offers nearly the same performance as the I3-7100 for a much lower price and the MSI B250I Pro Mini ITX board, the cheapest one with M.2 slots for PCIe and Wifi. The Arctic Freezer 33 is my favourite choice as CPU cooler and I’m using it for all my builds. The fan literally never spins up during usual daily usage.

 

For graphics card the fanless GT1030 is the obvious choice as it delivers the best performance with the lowest possible power consumption. Speaking of power: As the Arctic Freezer is too huge for a standard ATX power supply to fit in an ITX case I go for a PICO Mini ATX adapter that allows up to 120 watts on 16 volts, so a common laptop power supply can be used and of course it runs noiseless as wished.  

 

Everything works like a real mac, there are no power management, sleep or wake issues. You can even use your Bluetooth keyboard or mouse to wake it and it will sleep well again. It is not necessary to disable USB power via DSDT. For this build I don’t even bother to compile one. This hasn’t happened for years J

 

Of course the installation needs preparation because the Pentium CPU isn’t supported out of the box. You need to configure your UEFI right and get your config.plist for Clover in order before you can start, otherwise macOS will simply kernel panic. Telling it the other way: there is no post installation action required ;)

 

And for those who are planning to use the Intel HD630 instead of a dedicated graphics card: You can’t. It sounds promising at first to have a macOS supported Intel HD on this chip but it seems as if Intel has just branded it this way and in reality using a different architecture. The best you can achieve is to get into desktop by spoofing a Skylake ID but you won’t get hardware acceleration this way.   

 

*For this guide I assume that you already know how to prepare a macOS install drive, how to install Clover bootloader and configure it, mounting your EFI partition and so on. You know: the basic skills. If you don’t you’ll find beginners guides for these tasks on the forum.*

 

*CREDITS: Go to all people involved in the hackintosh community. For this guide I searched and tested for days, finding all the bits needed to complete the installation. If you think one or two of the presented solutions here is based on one of your own unique ideas please feel free to tell me and I will add your name here at once of course. Many thanks to all of you!*

 

Clover version used: 4392

 

Installed OS: 10.13.3

 

UEFI Configuration

 

\Advanced\Integrated Peripherals\

            SATA Mode AHCI MODE

 

\Advanced\USB Configuration

XHCI-Handoff ENABLED

 

\Advanced\Integrated Graphics Configuration\

            Initiate Graphics Adapter PEG

            IGD Multi Monitor DISABLED

 

\Advanced\Windows OS Configuration

            Everything DISABLED

 

\Advanced\Wake Up Event Setup

            Everything DISABLED

            or at least:

            Resume By USB Device ENABLED if you like

 

\Overclocking\CPU Features

            Intel VT-d Tech DISABLED     

            C1E Support ENABLED

            (very important, needed to prevent kernel panics on boot)

 

Clover Configuration

 

Just use Clover Configurator for convenient editing of your config.plist. For successful boot at least FakeCPUID must be added and KernelXCPM be ticked.

 

ACPI

 

Change HDAS to HDEF

Change HECI to IMEI

Change SAT0 to SATA

Change GFX0 to IGPU

 

Fix Shutdown TRUE

 

Devices

 

Audio Inject 1 (if you use AppleALC)

 

Kernel and Kext Patches

 

FakeCPUID 0x0306A0

KernelXCPM True

Apple RTC True

 

Kernel to Patch

 

Find b9a00100 000f32 Replace b9a00100 0031c0 to disable AVX

(This is needed because the Pentium lacks AVX support. Without it apps like Safari and AppStore are likely to crash.)

 

SmBIOS

 

iMac18,2

 

Kexts and SSDT

 

/EFI/CLOVER/ACPI/patched

 

Toleda's SSDT-HDMI-NVIDIA-PEG0.aml 

Download at GitHub.

(needed for HDMI/DVI audio with AppleALC (on non GT1030 cards) and fixes a wake up issues that could lead to black screen)  

 

/EFI/CLOVER/drivers64UEFI

 

Remove any Osxaptiofix or Memoryfix installed by Clover and use OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000.efi instead. Solves the occasional “Does printf work?” completely.

 

/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other

 

FakeSMC.kext

Lilu.kext

FakePCIID.kext

NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext

Shiki.kext

RealtekRTL8111.kext

USBInjectAll.kext

XHCI-200-series-injector.kext

 

For audio use AppleALC.kext or VoodooHDA.kext (never both!) and AppleHDADisabler.kext

Only VoodooHDA enables HDMI, DP or DVI audio on GT1030. Other cards may work with AppleALC (tested with GT710 and DVI audio works).

 

Nvidia webdrivers Issues

 

Don’t use the designated webdrivers for 10.13.3! They give you extremely poor OpenCL performance what leads to choppy video playback. Instead use NVDAWebPatcher to patch the webdrivers for 10.13.2 and install them instead. I’m not kidding the 10.13.3 drivers are unusable, this step is mandatory.

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Great work!

 

I have a MOB Asrock B250M-HDV DD4 and a 128GB SSD and IGPU HD 630 running HS 10.13.3

 

Do you think a 120W 20 pin connector can handle it?

I'm planning to buy this one:

https://pt.aliexpress.com/item/Realan-1109-DC-ATX-PSU-12V-120W-Pico-ATX-Switch-Pico-PSU-24pin-MINI-ITX-DC/32783294346.html

 

Can you help me to enable GPU Acceleration on it? Everybody says its impossible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...