Introduction - Intel s2600cp Dual 2670 build.

[satantango]

Hi people there.

I am new to the forum but not new to hackintosh.

In 2012 I bought a dual xeon 5420 with a tyan board that run successfully os 10.6 for some years. This with a iatkos installer. Then I made a fresh install of 10.8 again from iatkos that runs great as well.

This success led me to buy an intel s2600cp board with two 2670 xeons and 128 gb ram.

I installed iatkos ml2 on it and it boots fine but the activity monitor only shows 3gb ram. The rest os the system and apps see 128gb, but it will crash when attempting to use more than 3gb, so I think activity monitor is right, and not the system profiler.

I have also tried niresh mavericks. It installs and runs great but can´t seem to make the gtx660 work. It works in 10.9 but without any acceleration, and updating to 10.9.5 and using nvidia web drivers makes the screen freeze all the time (the mouse pointer still responds a bit). This is with ge=no. I have also tried ge=yes but I think it just got to a black screen. I have tried all sort of stuff but nothing seems to work. Was using chimera 3.0 and now switched to clover wich has far too many options.

One thing I notice is that the screen seems to crash in relationship with disc activity. The more drive reads the more it freezes.

There are thousand things I could still try, like different bootloaders, pci slots, graphics cards, freezefix app, etc. But before I loose all of my hair I tought I should ask here if anybody is familiar with this board. I have read of similar builds but not a single one with the s2600cp. 

I don´t have experience with other installation methods like dsdt or creating a custom installer, just niresh and iatkos. Thought they should be fine as I got past the installer easily.

Would be glad to help if anybody is on the same boat.

Thanks in advance.

Pepo

 

[satantango]

I was able to get it working with the gtx 660 2gb up to 10.8.5.

96gb of ram are recognized (10.8 maximum I understand). 

Geekbench 3 is 2100 single, 32000 multi. Cuda-z is 42 fps (I think people in windoz get 48 fps so not that bad. Only thing I am not certain about is pci lane width. The mobo has 8x slots (back opened) but the system profiler only reports a 4x link. Do you think is just cosmetic or there is something wrong going on? I tried re-seating the card as I read dirt can cause this, still the same. 

My flags are

mach_kernel

npci=0x2000

boot graphics=yes

quiet boot=yes

timeout=5

usekernelcache=yes

graphics enabler=no

pcirootuid=0.

The system seems to run quite well, but my only flag skills are ge, -x -v, and not much more, so I'm open to suggestions. 

Will post a guide if anybody is interested. As I said I'm no expert but have tried many kexts and bootloaders so I could still help some. 

It's somewhat of an old os but I need it for work so at least now that it works I can take my time to install a newer os.

[MaLd0n]

go to sierra, fresh and clean install

[satantango]

Yeah, give me some time, I am just finishing this setup and would like to work a bit on my stuff (color grading) before I jump into a new installation.

Right now about my only problem is that the gtx660 seems to be working at 4x width (system profiler). I think it is so, as I can not play a prores 4k file in realtime. 1080p works like a dream, lots of realtime.

I have tested pci slots 3 and 5 on this mobo, wich are the ones supposed to run graphics cards. The both work, but only at 4x.

Is there any kext or plist file I should mod to enable more width? Its the only card in the system, running stock osx drivers.

I am making a clone to test nvidia drivers, but to me it looks more like an os thing. 

[mrjayviper]

Would be great if you can share all the files you used to make it work. Did you use any DSDT patch? Thanks