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another ex58a-ud3r & i7-920


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hi all,

 

after months of reading and reading and reading, i finally bit the bullet and ordered everything for my hack this week. i also ordered a dell 3008fpw last week which arrived just in time :)

 

parts purchased two days ago:

  • gigabyte ex58a-ud3r (rev2.0)
  • 6gb ddr3-1600 (g.skill)
  • seagate 500gb 7200rpm

from my windows machine, i brought over my existing i7-920 as well as inno3d gtx-285 that ive had for over a year now (this machine is now my wife's and i replaced those parts with an i7-930 and ati 5850). i couldve kept the 930 for myself but honestly, i think the 920 is tried and tested already and i dont think i'll be missing the slight speed difference.

 

(on a side note, i also purchased an asus m4a785t-m, am3 athlon 245 cpu, some ddr3 ram, and a few more 1tb drives at the same time. im using this as a headless server running unRAID. the box itself sits headless at the top cupboard of my walk in robe and contains 3tb drives + 1tb parity drive. very happy with its performance!)

 

UPDATE: Thurs 20th of May, 2010

 

right now its approaching midnight and im using kakewalk (slightly earlier version of 2.2 thanks to Tom Sawyer!). using the USB method, it took me an unbelievably long time making the image from my SL dvd and then restoring it to my 16gb sandisk usb drive :D

 

after that was done, i started to get worried as the mobo was not booting from the usb drive ;) ended up trying a different usb port (the very top one closest to the board) and this did the trick!

 

SL is currently installing and is past half way now. my 3008fpw is already displaying its native res of 2560x1600 during the install phase so thats a really good sign too that the gtx-285 is playing nice!!

 

UPDATE: Fri 21st of May, 2010

 

ok its still the same night... just a bit later now and i should be asleep. OSX install bar was chugging away then before it got to the end, the screen suddenly went dark. no hdd activity or anything. from what i can tell, it had frozen to black screen.

 

so i cold booted and changed boot order to now boot off the HDD (thinking that the files necessary are now on the HDD and the USB is no longer needed) and i'm not getting anywhere anymore :( after POST, it just freezes at "Verifying DMI Pool Data......."

 

ideas? i may as well go to bed so hopefully there will be a response in the morning.

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If the screen goes dark, that doesn't mean anything. The display will automatically shut itself off if there's no mouse movement, even if you're installing OS X. All you had to do was push a button on the keyboard and you would have been fine.

 

Start over from the beginning of the installation and just wake the screen up when/if it goes black.

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holy {censored} - you're right :)

 

i just started it again before seeing your response and noticed the screen when black again during install. moved ze mouse and thar she is. omg i feel stupid.

 

*eyes the status bar continue to go up*

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UPDATE: Fri 21st of May, 2010

 

only 4hrs sleep but i woke up this morning after leaving the install to finish and it was stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool Data......." again. stupid me but i didnt realise it still needs to boot from USB for the loader... set the USB drive as always first boot order and at the boot loader, chose the hdd it installed to and i was in OSX! was very happy to see video res is at my 3008fpw's native res.

 

LAN did not work out of the box though but i recall this post from Tom Sawyer stating that he had to manually choose eth to initiate it.

 

however, i've decided to do a reinstall one more time from scratch just to fully familiarise myself with the process before i log into it again and work out whats working and what's not working...

 

any pointers on what to check out? how do i confirm my video card is fully functioning?

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Good to hear that's all it was. I thought it was that – I've seen that happen on both real Macs and on my hackintosh before.

 

My Ethernet ports have worked fine, but as my sig says I have the EX58-UD5. Must be a difference between the motherboards.

 

To check if QE/CI is working, there's a couple of ways. You can launch Chess, and if you can play, you're fine. Or you can use Dashboard, and drag a widget out – if you see the ripple effect, you're good to go. Also, are you planning on using wireless or just wired for an Internet connection? If I could have I would have done the latter, but I can't so I've got a USB WiFi adapter that works fine.

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thanks for the reply!

 

chess plays well, as does the ripple effect. so i guess im lucky that the gtx285 worked right out of the box!

 

i'll be running wired - my whole house is wired up for gigabit with cat6 :)

 

time to look into the LAN issue...

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Update: Sat 22nd of May, 2010

 

finally got LAN working! it was quite simple actually... this basically summarises how they work with kakewalk:

 

EX58A-UD3R (Rev 1.0) has Realtek RTL8111D *WORKS*

EX58A-UD7 has Realtek RTL8111D *WORKS*

 

EX58A-UD3R (Rev 2.0) has Realtek RTL8111E *DOESNT WORK*

EX58A-UD5 has Realtek RTL8111E *DOESNT WORK*

 

thanks to this post, i've installed the drivers and am actually typing this message from my Mac Pro :(

 

afaik, everything is functioning... actually, i havent tested sleep yet. next important thing though is to test that my Apogee works via TI firewire then i think i'm ready to start installing software onto this puppy ;)

 

very happy that everything works! and let me tell you: the 3008fpw is a beautiful monitor :P

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Update: Mon 24th of May, 2010

 

ok so a full weekend has passed and ive been using my hack nonstop. my wife has had trouble pulling me away from it. I LOVE IT! :( everything is working beautifully...

 

i had two apps that were windows only so i've installed virtualbox and installed vista64 and it worked beautifully. obviously i wont use virtualbox for gaming - just these two apps that i still had to have.

 

i had a lot of data on my mbp including iMovie projects so i've moved these over onto the hack with no glitches and everything runs so smoothly! i reinstalled logic last night too and with the apogee duet, it runs sooo smoothly!

 

i'm grabbing a 160GB soon and will be trying to dualboot into windows7 tonight - purely for gaming, hence the small drive.

 

here's a pic of everything up and running at the login screen! :)

 

100523setup.jpg

 

the only things i havent tested or arent working yet are:

 

- time machine...

- sleep... im pretty sure this doesn't work because when i tested it, it shutdown completely, and when coming back up, it was a full startup again and no programs were restored. not urgent but i would like this to work tho

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ahh nice and thanks for the tip! i read a similar thing elsewhere too so had it noted.

 

i assume it all went through with absolutely zero issues?

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Update: Tue 25th of May, 2010

 

another solid night of using my hack and i still love it more and more. zero issues so far. no crashes. logic pro 9.1.1 is finally installed and im starting to install my AU's. still sorting out all my documents and moving files around because i installed my unRAID server at the same time so im slowly moving all the important stuff onto that too.

 

my only issue now is sleep. it doesn't seem to work. as noted previously, when i attempt to go to sleep, it shuts off instantly but when powering up again, it goes through the entire boot up process again (post > bootloader > etc) and none of the previous programs are up again.

 

again, kakewalk 2.2 was used. what should be the first thing to look at? has anyone else gotten sleep to work with the EX58A-UD3R?

 

thanks in advance!

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Phorte, is your display working at native resolution right? I ask because I read on another thread that a user could only get 1600 since he/she updated to 10.6.3 and it seemed so strange.

Thanks

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if you can afford it - DEFINITELY get one. i highly recommend it ;) i love my 30" and was so happy to have gotten it at the same time that i built my hack.

 

just make sure your video card supports dual-link dvi so that it can support the high res. normal dvi doesn't have enough bandwidth to go up to 2560x1600

 

and also get the 3008fpw and not the 3007fpw because the 3007fpw doesnt have an input scaler.

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Update: Sun 30th of May, 2010

 

well no real updates. ive been using this machine nonstop all week and loving it every second. STILL installing AU's for Logic...

 

once again - my only outstanding issue is sleeping.

 

before when i tried sleepenabler.kext, i just copied to /e/e/ and ran Kext Utility. i read somewhere that someone resolve sound issues by dragging the kext into Kext Utility instead, and this makes it install into /s/l/e/ instead so i gave this a shot and its still not waking up from sleep correctly...

 

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD :(;;; grrrrr

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Have you tried post #14 from this forum for the sleep??

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t=0&start=0

 

so i gave everything in this thread a shot and it still does the exact same thing :( i have a feeling something changed in my rev2.0 and everyone else with the x58a-ud3r has rev1.0 still...

 

i'll just continue to wait and see. thanks again for the headsup on that one!

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Update: Saturday 5th of June, 2010

 

no real updates... still haven't resolved my sleep issues. i read somewhere that sleep might work if you disable legacy usb support. i gave this a shot and used a ps2 adaptor for my keyboard but the apple keyboard would not play ball with the ps2 adaptor.

 

ive also since added another 6gb of the exact same RAM so i'm now running 12GB (6x2GB) of G.Skill NQ DDR3-1600 RAM.

 

i also added a brand new 160GB WD SATA drive and have successfully installed windows7 onto using previous instructions (unpluged all OSX drives, to the windows install, then plug back in using main OSX bootloader to select OS's).

 

nullspot has create a new thread for the limited number of users who have the same X58A-UD3R rev 2.0 board as me here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=220199

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Phorte,

 

I have a very similar setup as you do, ex58a-UD3R, Reve 2, i7 920. Sleep is also an issue, though not on the very top of the list. My problem is that I have 8 gigs of ram, under 32 bit (so that I can have network recognized), my system can only recognize 2 gigs of ram (check under both iStat widget and Activity Monitor) regardless of what "About This Mac" sez, and when I switched to 64 bit, I get 4 gigs of ram working.

 

Another major issue I have is that in iStat, my CPU temp ranges around 54 C and peaked at 64 C.

 

I am wondering what is your situation, have you noticed the same issue? And what is ur CPU temp?

 

I work on photoshop with very large files (most of time around 700 mb files, and quite often file size hopped over 1 gig), working with 2 gigs of ram slows the system significantly, and at high temp cpu, the system might run a tap slower.

 

please shine some light on me.

 

Thank you.

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With an X58 motherboard your RAM should come in triplets, not pairs - so you'd have either 6 GB or 12 GB. That's just for better speed, though - AFAIK that doesn't mean 8 GB won't work. Perhaps your RAM is faulty? I'm running Mac OS X in 64-bit and all six gigs of RAM that I have is recognized.

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Hi Mackilroy, I did realize the ram came in trips, so in my pursue of finding a solution, I have taken out one stick of ram, and still only 2 gigs were recognized.

 

It is posible that my ram might be faulty, I will check with my supplier this weekend.

 

I do just want to confirm that when you said all 6 gigs of ram were recognized, you do mean that in activity monitor, it is showing 6 gigs?

 

Also, I know wer are running 2 quite different mobo and cpu, but what is your average temp of cpu?

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