This thread was created to serve users of the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L motherboard. This is the vendor's product page:
Here's a link to newegg's page for this board (typical price is $85 US + $9 shipping + tax): newegg.com page.

99% of what I know about this board and how to install OSX86 on it is taken from the amazing guide for the GA-P35-DS3L board located here from weaksauce12: [Guide & Software] A Recipe for Delicious Leopard Soup - Now with Vanilla Flavor!. I created this thread to keep discussion of the EP35 board separate from the P35.

The EP35 version of the board is very similar to the P35, adding a "Dynamic Energy Saver" feature. However, whereas success with weaksauce12's guide on the P35 is very consistent, results on the EP35 seem to vary considerably. The BIOSes appear to be quite different, and perhaps there are differences that are more subtle.

Please use this thread to post what you know about this board and to ask questions so we can improve everyone's installation/knowledge/experience. Please don't PM me with questions, please keep everything in the thread. Thanks!

I successfully installed 10.5.4 using weaksauce12's guide. I think the major difference was that my board was running BIOS F4, released 2008/04/03. It seemed like most people with the EP35 were on F5, released 2008/07/17. (EDIT: I've since upgraded to the F5 BIOS with no issues.)

According to Gigabyte, these are the only differences: Of course, supporting the new processors is a highly-desired feature, so if you're having issues on BIOS F5, it's not practical to suggest a downgrade of your BIOS and going out to buy a new CPU.The rest of my system spec's are in my signature.

As an alternative to using weaksauce12's guide, you can consider a retail install discussed on this thread from eclau: Retail Leopard on Gigabyte EP35-DS3L

Current EP35 Status (with possible solutions below):

1. dci693: EP35 with F5 BIOS, E2180 CPU, 7200GS - 100% working. Originally installed with F4 BIOS, then flashed to F5.
2. MacInsanely: EP35 with F4 BIOS, Q6600 CPU - 100% working
3. bibendum: EP35 with F5 BIOS, Q9450 CPU, 8800GT - 100% working; chose video drivers from the kalyway install, then removed and installed other video drivers, sleep broke under F4 BIOS but works under F5.
4. lookup: EP35 - working ("beachball of death" on wake from sleep was caused by booting off external USB HD)
5. greythorne: EP35 with F5 BIOS, E8400 CPU, ASUS EN8800GTS 320mb video card working - got rid of kernel panics by removing IDE devices
6. yossicl: EP35 with F5 BIOS, E6760 CPU, 8500GT - 100% working with update from BIOS F4 to F5
7. seanmcgpa: EP35 with F5 BIOS: 100% working
8. Armentage: nearly 100% working, F4 BIOS, "Machine is a little wobbly"
9. bcohen4:
10. singapura: F4 BIOS, 100% working, WMP300N wireless card not working
11. small cat: F5 BIOS, working nearly 100% (sleep not yet tested), running without AHCI
12. kai920: 100% working on F5 BIOS, had issues on F4, also had issues booting from external USB drive but switch to internal.

Outstanding issues:

1. bibendum - if you have a spare drive, try doing a stock Leopard Soup install without the custom options (for some reason those particular settings seem to work best) and seeing if that fixes sleep; if that doesn't work, try updating to the F5 BIOS

Be sure to include your system spec's in your signature and indicate whether your drives are IDE or SATA so we can keep track.

I have the EP35-DS3L with BIOS F4, working 100% fine.

And as I recall, you used weaksauce12's guide as well. Is that right?

Yup

Cross posting this from Weaksauce's thread since I'm using the EP35 board
--
Coupla things -

First, I've been slowly assembling the components for this as things came on sale:

$80 Open box of the GA-P35-DS3L (not from NewEgg)
$279 Q9450 CPU
$50 Antec Neo-HE-430 power supply
$65 CoolerMaster CM690 case

etc...

Went to assemble everything and opened up the box that said GA-P35-DS3L, took it out of the anti-static bag and found that I had been sent a GA-P35C-DS3R motherboard. Should work, but I'd read of some incompatibilities, so ordered a (now) $59 GA-EP35-DS3L board (openbox) from NewEgg. Once it came a day later, I started my assembly. Installed via this guide last night. I too selected the audio and video drivers off the Kalyway disc (to be replaced when they were clobbered by the 10.5.4 update) so I had the animation play properly after the install.

The only thing that wasn't working on my EP35 board was wake from sleep. My board came with the F4 BIOS (different numbering than the P35 board) and I found that F5 was available, so I downloaded it from the GigaByte site. Here's a handy tip for those without a Windows computer around..., Darwine - http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/ - will let you run the self extracting archives to get at the tasty BIOS within. Which you can copy to a flash drive and use the QFlash utility to update your BIOS (press the END key during the first POST screen)...

Flashing to the F5 BIOS made sleep work, so now everything seems good. I migrated my user from my old BA2 system and am passing the trusty BadAxe2 system on to my son to replace his hot, noisy, long-in-the-tooth, won't-sleep-because-I-put-a-flashed-x800-in-it Dualie 1Gig G4 Mirror Door... (I built an Atom D945GCLF hackintosh into a G4 Cube case for my daughter).

Patrick

I noticed that you had a q9450. That's a Yorkfield CPU, but not an E0 stepping CPU. BIOS F5 supposedly updates the code for E0 CPUs. I wonder if Gigabyte's description is accurate.

What video card do you have?

Right now an 8800GT, but also have an ATI 3870 to try out...

Patrick

I'm still getting the "beachball of death" upon reawake. Could it be that my ODD is running off of IDE? For all of the people that have sleep working, is anything connected via IDE?

What's an ODD? I have nothing on IDE, and I purposefully went totally SATA so I could avoid it. Seemed as if people had fewer issues if their builds were SATA-only. I should point out that on my first hack build (using mtotho's guide here ) I had sleep working great, but ran OSX off an IDE boot drive.

On my current SATA-only build, sleep works even better. Wake from sleep happens even faster than I thought possible.

Great to see a thread dedicated to EP35 users.

OK mine is also Gigabyte-EP35-DS3L BIOS F4 released 2008/04/03. Now everything is working, even the onboard Ethernet works when wake from sleep. But there is one issue im faced and that is i am unable to run VMware, Parallels or Virtualbox when doing so a grey screen appears asking to restart the whole system. I am able to run virtual machine fine in my windows vista so i ruled out an hardware issue.

So if any of you here running VMware and the likes please tell me how you when about running it.

Thanks and i'll be watching this thread.

Regards,

May i also check with you guys your motherboard rev? Mine is rev1.0

I'll be reinstalling Parallels and XP in the next few days, once I get around to slipstreaming my SP2 disk to SP3. I believe there's only one version of this board so far (at least, there's no mention of any other revisions on the Gigabyte website.)

XP on VMWare Fusion works fine here...

Everything work except shutdown any idea?

did you install powerfix from weaksuace12 package?

Ok, used virtualbox to install XP SP3, installation went fine but when i tried to open an IDE connected hard drive grey screen appeared asking to restart Mac OS X.

So looks like this board is not stable to run virtual machine on a Mac OS X. This is from my experience.

Am i missing anything here? Basically i followed weaksauce12 guide to the letter and yet unable to run virtual machine, whereas on the other hand people with the same motherboard are able to run virtual machine!!

Im still confused.............., Perhaps a change of mobo is in order!!

i have to mention that im running on MBR and not GUID if that makes any difference as to why i am unable to run virtual machine.

Not yet, I will try to, Thanks.


VMWARE fusion work perfect with XP 64bit SP2 running on my SATA drive (native not image).

As I mentioned in a previous post, I removed all the IDE devices from my build because I thought it might be causing instability. Much of my software has changed and been updated so I can't be sure of the reason, but my current build is so far more stable. I know that's probably not the answer you want, but if other options don't pan out, replace the IDE drive with a SATA.

Have you run memtest86+ overnight? You wrote that VMs work fine in Vista, but that doesn't rule out a hardware problem. Is your system overclocked? I found on my previous build on the P35 board (which included an IDE boot drive for OSX) that half of my kernel panics occurred when I started up Parallels Desktop. I'm pretty sure my hardware was fine. Then when I rebuilt it with only SATA drives, not a single kernel panic (though I only used it for two weeks before moving onto the EP35 board).

I just slipstreamed SP3 onto my XP disc this morning, so maybe tonight I'll get to install Parallels onto my EP35 and test a bit.

Oh you must do that immediately. The very reason for it is to solve power down issues!

I'm thinking you may not have followed the guide "to the letter" if you're running MBR instead of GUID?

Patrick

Just keeping tabs here...if we can nail down the cross-platform issues, we'll be able to merge this project into a single thread that serves all users with Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Rev1/2 and GA-EP35-DS3L boards, which would be great. To users of both boards, there are two things you should do before asking questions:

1. Run an in-depth memory test on your system (that means 6 passes with zero errors using Memtest86+)
2. Follow the guide TO THE LETTER!

If you're having weird issues, run a memory test. This is especially important if you are overclocking! If you don't follow certain steps of the guide for personal reasons, please notify us, i.e. if you format to MBR because you want to dual-boot XP or something like that. Also, it helps to post your hardware setup or to keep it in your sig so that we know what you're running, i.e. processor, video card, motherboard and BIOS revision, that sort of thing.

Current EP35 Status:

1. dci693: EP35 with F4 BIOS, E2180 CPU, 7200GS - 100% working
2. MacInsanely: EP35 with F4 BIOS, Q6600 CPU - 100% working
3. bibendum: EP35 with F5 BIOS, Q9450 CPU, 8800GT - 100% working; custom Kalyway Leopard options (audio/video), sleep broke under F4 BIOS
4. lookup: EP35 - "beachball of death" on wake, IDE DVD
5. greythorne: EP35 with F4 BIOS, E8400 CPU, 9600GT - kernel panic when using virtualization; customized with MBR formatting in place of GUID
6. yossicl: EP35 with F4 BIOS, E6760 CPU, 8500GT - broken sleep (needs to install CHUD etc.)

So far it looks like:

1. yossicl - broken sleep can be fixed with CHUD/PowerOff
2. greythorne - getting a kernel panic; run memtest86+ and perhaps try the F5 BIOS; if you have a spare drive available, try a GUID installation and see if a virtualization package works on that (although it's worked fine on all of my MBR-formatted boot drives, so I doubt that's the issue)
3. lookup - sleep is broken in a different way; perhaps an IDE problem? try removing from system and disabling IDE in BIOS
4. bibendum - if you have a spare drive, try doing a stock Leopard Soup install without the custom options (for some reason those particular settings seem to work best) and seeing if that fixes sleep; if that doesn't work, try updating to the F5 BIOS

The ultimate goal is to get everyone to "100% working" status. My P35 system works 100% - everything shows up correctly in System Profiler. It's running 10.5.4 with the latest updates. ALL of my software works, from Adobe CS3 to Office 2008 to Final Cut Pro 6 and Shake 4.1 to VMware Fusion. Sleep works, Restart works, Shutdown works. The DVD drive doesn't hang and the Apple DVD Player program works perfectly. It can play 1080p MKV files using VLC and Perian on "minimum" hardware ($70 E2180 and $30 7300GT). AFP/Bonjour shares work on the default Leopard driver with the Encore PCI Network card. Bottom line, you shouldn't be having Kernel Panics ("gray screens"), software lockups (unless the software is buggy), non-working virtualization software (VMware, Parallels, Crossover) or any other weird issues...it should perform just like a real Mac!

dci693, thanks for starting this thread, this is definitely helping me sort the EP35 issues out in my noggin

Hey, you did all the work, I just started a different thread! But I'm happy to do what I can to give back to the forums. I'm going to cut and paste your summary of the EP35 board results so far, put it in the first post, and try to keep it up-to-date.

OK, installed Parallels tonight and it works fine so far, but it's only been one night. I have it configured will a full gig of memory and 50gb of space, just in case. Again, everything running off SATA.

Here is my experience, any questions please ask:

I used the Kalyway 10.5.2 DVD to install it, along with the drivers provided here. Here are the HW specs:

Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180
MB: GA-EP35-DS3L Rev 1.0 BIOS version F5
XFX Geforce 8600GT 512MB
2 GB RAM DDR2 667MHz Kingston (2*1GB)
SATA HD 80GB Seagate ST380815AS
SATA DVDRW LG GH20NS10
Firewire/USB PCI card (VIA)
PS/2 Keyboard
USB Mouse
Internal all in one USB memory card reader (samsung)
Generic USB webcam (not fully tested yet but detected properly)

QE/CI working. Built in audio and ethernet working fine. Shut down, restart and sleep also working fine.

I must tell you that the original set up was without the SATA DVDRW, since for installing and setting up the OSX I used a IDE DVDRW Drive (Lite On DH-20A4H) which also worked perfectly since the beginning, I changed the drive for the SATA after everything was set up and running.

So from my experience, any GA-P35-DS3L (EP35, or just plain P35 Rev 1 or 2 should be compatible)

Just an FYI, the only addition was the NVInject driver for the video card. Which was replaced later. If I can allocate a spare drive, I might try flashing back to F4 BIOS and install without selecting the video driver to see if wake from sleep works, but I'm not sure I'll have the time (I use this computer all the time)...

Oh - and the flash drive I used to install the BIOS was formatted FAT32 - it has to be FAT32 or FAT16 or the QFlash utility won't recognize it.

Patrick

Which video driver did you finally install then?

I know what you mean about having the time. After about 5 reinstalls, I just want to get working, and it gets a bit old.

I bought an EP35 (by mistake) for a backup Hackintosh / TimeMachine server. I used Weaksauce's P35 instructions, 100% working here... sleep, shutdown, reboot - flawless. F5 Bios.

Will post up a guide for new JAS and the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L....

Some more info at this thread: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=120115

What hardware?

Well...so far it looks like the default guide + F5 BIOS is the best combo for full functionality.

seanmcgpa, can you test IDE on your system? I want to know if that causes any conflicts with the rest of the system, especially on the F5 BIOS. If it's just a BIOS update issue, that would really relieve a lot of the headaches people have been having with the EP35!

Hi dci693,

CHUD/PowerOff didn't fixed my broken sleep/shutdown but after flashing the bios to F5 finaly it's work.

I also flashed the bios with the following picture using "Gigabyte Face Wizard program"


Thanks

That's really interesting. Seems like F4 is fine for some people and that F5 is required for others. I'm on F4 and have had exactly one kernel panic when shutting down. After I clone my current set up I'm going to try a flash to F5 to see how it goes.

EDIT: Crap, make that two kernel panics. Happened on shut down again today. that flash to F5 might happen sooner rather than later!

Weak,

One of my rig with F4 Bios, I did have issues installing Leopard from an IDE DVD burner. I'd get a kernel panic at the tail end of the Leopard install.

F5 - no problems at all.

Did you select "Load Optimized Defaults" after flashing to F5?
Guide is here: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/NewTec...bios_qflash.pdf

I didn't flash to F5 yet. And I never use that feature anyway. For better or worse, I manually set my BIOS settings exactly to what weaksauce12 has in his guide, except for the overclock settings, of course. My rig is not even overclocked at the moment. I'm running my E2180 at the stock 2.0 Ghz, and the computer surprisingly doesn't seem much slower. What I have not yet done is run a memtest on my new build. I am using new RAM, so there's always a chance I've got a bad stick somewhere.

As you can see (my rig in signature) I'm runing OSX 10.5.4 on IDE since F4 and it's working with no problem.

If you have some time, take some snapshots of your BIOS screens for me, I'd love to see how they compare (F5 BIOS if you upgrade). Some of the settings are critical, like disabling the Serial/Parallel ports (they cause HUGE OS problems!).

IDE still kind of looks like hit-or-miss...it works...but I suspect some people's problems are linked to IDE. Plus I think certain users who have 4 gigs of RAM in their system are having issues with the updated kexts. Hi-ho, hi-ho, a-bug fixing we go...

I'll try to get it done soon. My serial and parallel ports are definitely disabled. Funny, I remember that 4gb of RAM used to cause big issues with the original AHCI kexts for this board, so I purposefully took 2gb out of my P35 build to leave it with 2gb. However, my EP35 still has 4gb. I did, however, take out all IDE devices from both.

FWIW, I'm running 4 gigs of RAM...

I may, however, have skipped the bluetooth kexts - sorry, I can't remember...

Patrick

I just updated to F5 bios.

I removed IDE drives and everything seems to be fine. I don't think updating to F5 bios solved my problems because even after updating to F5 bios i still faced problems when running virtual machine, it normally happend when i open an IDE drive, after removing IDE drives no more kernel panic or any issues.

Will continue in this way, if any issues spotted i shall highlight here.

Thanks and regards.

Oh btw i changed my graphics card to ASUS EN8800GTS 320mb. So far all looks good.

No issue at all with my friend's rig which include an IDE harddisk, an IDE DVD drive and a SATA harddisk.

Retail DVD install, though

I updated my box to BIOS F5 this morning (love QFlash!). Recognized my FAT32 flash drive with no problem.

My first boot did not look good. The white Apple boot screen took much longer than normal and it never seemed to quite get into the OS. I also had left the flash drive attached, though I don't think that should've caused any issues. I admit I didn't wait too long because I just reset the system and booted it again.

Second boot: took about twice as long as a normal boot under F4 would've taken, but it did get into Leopard. Didn't have a chance to try a 3rd boot.

All my previous BIOS settings were kept after the flash from F4 to F5. I might try resetting the BIOS to defaults and redoing the settings (never a bad idea.)

I just figured out why my EP35-DS3L wasn't waking up from sleep. I'm booting off of a USB external hard drive. (sorry, no SATA drives). Thus, upon wake-up, the status LED on my external hard drive will stay on sleep. Problem... Solved. The beachball of death was caused by the OS locking up because it couldn't wake the HD from sleep. Going out and buying a SATA hard drive.

That's why you gotta tell us what hardware you're running! You mentioned an ODD that was IDE, and I asked you what an ODD was, but didn't get a reply!

ODD is Optical Disk Drive.

I posted this in the other thread as well but I will quote it here.



Hardware I'm running:
GA-EP35-DS3L
Intel e8500 core2duo 3.16
One SATA HDD
One IDE HP DVDR/RW w/ Lightscribe
2GB of ram
EVGA NVidia 8800gt
USB Mouse
ps/2 Keyboard

edit after restart ps2 keyboard does not work but does work right after ps2 fix installer, then fails after next restart.

I followedd the guide, but I am not able to reach the "intro" screen. Installation goes fine and then I reboot and remove the Kalyway dvd.  I go to boot from the hard disk and it seems to be working fine until I reach a screen that is like static on a tv but it doesn't move. My guess is because I never installed a video card???

What I did to try and fix this was install my video card with the first install but now I get the same problem I have always had, which is: "You need to restart your computer. Hold ddown the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button."

Specs are:

4gb corsair ram

Q6600

ep35-ds3l with F5

2x sata seagate hard drives

sata optical drive

After which step of the install does it fail? You mention a reboot, but after which step? Sounds like it's after the initial install from the 10.5.2 kalyway disk. What video card are you running?

I have gotten 10.5.4 running on a EP35 board--but had to disable AHCI, contrary to the instructions. Will this cause problems down the road? And when I try and run temp monitor, it says it can't find any sensors in my mac pro...

TIA for any tips on either.

sorry haha I have a gigabyte raddeon hd 3870 andd the install goes great and then after the successful install is when it does these things (fuzzy screen/"please reboot" message)

Is your video card on the HCL? And the whole install works OK until you try to install the video drivers?

if I follow the guide (which says don't install graphics card) then I get fuzzy screen after successful install.  If I do install the graphics card, which is also a successful install, then it asks me to do the reboot thing constantly, I can never get to the elcome screen.

Did you use natit? That's what's mentioned in the HCL: http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2