WhenMusicAttacks Posted March 22, 2020 Share Posted March 22, 2020 (edited) Hello everyone, I wanted to share with you my experience installing High Sierra on Gigabyte x58a Ud3R rev 1. This computer was built a long time ago with macOS 10.6.8, brought to me in dec 2019 by the owner telling me it had been left in a corner for the last 2 years because it became slower and unable to run newest plugins. Quarantine in italy gave me time to finally dive into it. Booting into into windows revealed the cpu was overheating at idle. A quick undervolting from the BIOS all the way down to -200 mv (the lowest possible value) and running fsck on the Mac SSD from my Elitebook with USB - SATA cable gave back full speed to the system. GPU was also getting loud and very hot, using GPU Z on windows I got the bios, edited with Nbitor to lower all the operating voltages to the lowest 0.95, under clocking the core a little bit to keep it stable and flashed with DOS bootable stick using nvflash. Finally a repast on the CPU gave me around 40c operating temperature; overall, a much more ecologic and quieter operation wich is one my first goals when i tune a compute, getting a better performance/energy (this is why i applied lower voltages in many bios settings below). Now I decided to install High Sierra because it is the latest macOs that can support older non metal cards like this GTS250 that is still based on the old g92 chip from the 8800gt . BOOTING MACOS I could not find a way to boot a usb installer, so I cloned an existing HS 10.13.6 installation to a HFS-formatted SSD, not sure if APFS is good on legacy install. Installed latest Clover legacy mode on the target SSD and got the SSDT from tonymac archives. Got the config from other discussions on insanelymac (don't exactly remember wich one i used as starting point). Standard kexts to /other : lilu, whatevergreen, applealc, fakesmc and plugins to monitor voltages and temperatures I spent some time figuring out how to boot the disk because SATA was set to IDE in bios and I had to use the native SATA 2 ports. Was just stupid not to use the first SATA port on the first place, not used to 3d party sata controllers these days. Had to use the @bios tool from Gigabyte in Windows to update the bios to the latest beta version (update did not work from inside the bios due to file mismatch error). GRAPHIC ACCELERATION Only Inject Nvidia was selected and this gave me system boot with full resolution and smooth animations. Gpu scaling is working as it should, with all states running at 0,95v and keeping around 45c temp. I reduced animations and transparency from Preferences - Accessibility - Monitor to improve performance. POWER MANAGEMENT First boot the multiplier was stuck at 12x To get speedstep I selected generate c and p states in clover configurator. One issue is that processor actually runs only at either 12x or 22x all cores, while on windows it is also going to intermediate 21 and also up to 23x on single core tasks. On macOs all the cores seem to be forced at the same speed all the time. I do not know if x58 requires TSCSYNC kexts like the later x series platforms. I had no issues during my brief period of testing using Logic Pro X embedded Beck template at 32 samples latency. Overall the system feels incredibly responsive I also selected all the C states generation options from clover configurator and in BIOS, idle temps dropped about 2c at some point between those settings and a BIOS update so maybe it is working. SLEEP seems to work fine for short period, did not leave it yet for longer than 30 minutes. I disabled hibernation using the commands here https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-native-power-management-for-laptops.175801/ During sleep USB 3 devices get ejected and USB keyboard light turns off during sleep. USB 2 devices that are seen as internal do not get unsafe removal warning. USB Usb 2 worked with the tonymac ssdt and usbinjectall. Some ports show the drives as internal but I can still eject them no problem from finder, so no big deal. To get USB 3 working I got the kext for the NEC controller from https://github.com/chris1111/USB-3.0-NEC . The installer actually failed to place any kext on my system clover folder, so I run it on my trusty elitebook and then got the mXHCD kext from that clover folder. Speed on external SSD is 150 write and 200 read, the drive could reach 380 read on UASP mode but its still very nice to have. USB power stays on after shutdown, this does not happen on windows. I tried to select Fix Shutdown, Halt Enabler, Fix Darwin and Fix USB on clover configurator. This is currently the most anoyn issue i have with this config as i keep the system in my room and have a redragon keyboard. SOLVED enabling ErP in bios AUDIO ALC889 I removed the injected ID on original TonyMac DSDT , inject 1 from Clover worked with latest AppleAlc . Need to fix front panel audio but I can live without it. OVERCLOCKING Since the cpu was stable at the lowest possible voltage offset I could select on BIOS, i decided to rise the fsb / BCLK a little bit. System started to act a bit weird around 140 mhz. I then started lowering the undervolt. I did set the RAM to run at 1.4 v at 10x multiplier (rated at 1600mhz at 1.7v). System became unstable because of RAM at around 155 mhz base (1550mhz ram, 3.3ghz CPU). I am testing stability mostly with automatic tools like PcMark 10 and Sandra on windows, since I have no similar long stress tools on macOs. This is giving me a very nice score of around 550 cinebench r15 multi core, actually same score on Windows . Geekebench 4 gives me a very low 2200 single but good 9600 multi > fixed with HPET 64bit options now getting 2500 single and 10500 multi. Temperatures are between 42c at idle (with C states enabled) and 60 on full load. Any FSB change of more than 2mhz actually hangs the old snow leopard install because it relies on SSDT for CPU but has shown no issues so far with the newer Clover Generated cpu scaling . TO BE FIXED / ONGOING: SATA 3 internal ports Front Panel Audio NOT TESTED firewire WRAP UP The whole system feels incredibly smooth (and smoother than on windows 10), i was not expecting this level of user experience, performance and efficiency with hardware that is 11 years old: the CPU is simply incredible also considered the low voltages it is able to operate ( 0.8vat 1.86ghz and 1.04 at the full 3.45ghz speed ). Sure i built some 9900k systems and they are fast, but they also run hotter and louder. Intel really is like microsoft, the bigger they become, the worst they get. I hope the rumors and code snippet in Catalina turn out in a proper Ryzen support very soon. The GPU is laughable by today's standard but still perfectly fine for desktop any DAW use with Logic Pro. I was also able to run the BruceX Test 5k export. The test took a long time going from 0 to 1% to the point i thought it did hang and then took i guess around 30 minutes to finish, but it kept the system usable while doing the render (while i had experience with i5 processors where the system would become almost unresponsive during the test). Systems also works fine with virtualsmc , but i will keep using fakesmc for sensors until i call this finished.BIOS SETTINGS MIT - Advanced Frequency Settings Base Clock Control > Enabled BLCLK Frequency > 153 <- this is based on my system CPU, has to be tested SPD > 10.0 MIT - Advanced Frequency Settings - Advanced CPU Core Features C3/C6/C7 State Support > Enabled CPU EIST Function > Enabled MIT - Adv Memory Settings SPD > 10.0MIT - Adv Voltage Settings LLC > Normal CPU Vcore > Normal DVID > - 0.15000v <- this is based on my system CPU, has to be tested QPI/VTT Volt > 1.180v CPU PLL > 1.7V ICH I/O > 1.450v ICH Core > 1.020V DRAM Voltage > 1.400v <- this is based on my system CPU, has to be tested ADVANCED BIOS FEATURES Quick Boot > Disabled Init Display First > PCIE x16-1 INTEGRATED PERIPHERALS ICH SATA Control Mode > AHCI USB3.0 Port > XHCI POWER MANAGEMENT SETUP HPET Mode > 64 bit ErP Support > Enabled GTS250mod.rom config.plist dsdt.aml Edited July 24, 2020 by WhenMusicAttacks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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