Hackintosh Thread 2015 Part 2 - Change is a good thing.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Hackintosh Thread 2015 Part 2 - Change is a good thing.

mewse: May 2, 2006

Got El Capitan running on a spare HP Probook 6560b. Followed this guide with some hiccups.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2016 18:01

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 01:17

mewse: May 2, 2006

So I got a ProBook 640 G1 from ebay as a designated hackintosh. Intel i5-4210m (Haswell).

I ordered a m.2 wifi chip without realizing the slot for wifi was old msata, so I transplanted the old chip from the 6560b I had been playing with, and it's working.

I put in a FHD IPS panel which was shockingly easy.

After install I had a bunch of weird behavior - graphical artifacts mostly but every reboot it would say CMOS checksum failed and then I tried to launch google chrome at one point and it kernel panicked -- is this relatively normal? It was disturbing to have the CMOS hosed with but it's been working fine since I got the correct drivers in and display acceleration seems perfect now.

I installed to a hard drive but I will be installing a SSD today -- is there disk imaging software I can use to shuttle the boot drive over, clover's EFI partition and everything? The hard drive is 500GB but the SSD is 256GB so I need something that can shrink the main partition.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2017 21:50

mewse: May 2, 2006

Craptacular! posted:

I replaced a power supply recently and while I was at it removed an old mechanical drive that was being used for backups of old legacy files. As far as I know, I had Clover installed one of my SSDs, both of which remain in use.

So, uh, why am I booting directly into Windows now and not even getting a choice of which operating system? I'm about this close to just using this Unibeast Sierra installer I made before I gave up on OSX for not supporting this year's crop of GPUs. I almost never use it anymore because of the lack of acceleration but I still sometimes need Pixelmator for something.

Have you checked boot order in your bios?

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 21:39

mewse: May 2, 2006

I'm just now experiencing a similar problem on this HP laptop. Installed a new SSD but couldn't boot from it with the old drive removed. I think there's something going on with nvram...

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 05:00

mewse: May 2, 2006

Upon further inspection this fuckin laptop can't boot from the m.2 ssd at all :ughh:

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 07:01

mewse: May 2, 2006

Intel SRT I think. Intended for a small SSD for cache.

I'm gonna experiment with turning it +spinning disk into a fusion disk with osx

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 17:08

mewse: May 2, 2006

xgalaxy posted:

I'm running Hackintosh with an LG ultra-wide and a GTX 970 connected via DisplayPort.
I get an occasional graphics glitch where some random rows of pixels will light up only the right side of the monitor for a brief flash.
It's not a big deal but annoying enough.

If I reduce the resolution from 3440x to something else the glitch goes away but obviously makes everything pretty fuzzy.

Is there another fix that I can do to get rid of this problem? Any ideas? Would a different video card solve it?

Does it happen in Windows? Could be a video card problem

# ¿ Jun 6, 2017 02:12

mewse: May 2, 2006

Dessert Rose posted:

I've been waiting for the iMac Pro, but I've been growing increasingly nervous about dropping multiple thousands on a first-gen Apple attempt at cramming a mac pro into an iMac. Also, it's December and we haven't heard anything about it, so that's worrisome on several levels as well.

Then I thought, maybe building my own wouldn't be so bad. Sounds like it's a lot easier these days, which is nice.

Looking at tonymacx86, all three of the recommended motherboards for the "pro" side are not being sold on Newegg right now. I see one on Amazon, but it's the one with a "Killer" NIC. I guess that thing I laughed at years ago when I was still building PCs actually somehow got itself put on motherboards, huh?

Any suggestions for a better (in stock?) motherboard? I haven't built a PC in approximately a decade, so I don't know what makes for a good motherboard or anything these days. Price isn't too much of a concern, seeing as I was previously planning on forking over an insane amount of dollars for Apple's offering, but one of the motivations for doing it this way is to save a couple thousand dollars over that. I want to hit that inflection point in the price/performance curve just before it goes completely off the deep end, basically.

e: dual socket would be pretty cool. Are there any supported dual socket motherboards?...

The new Intel 8000-series coffee lake cpus basically have 2 more cores at every price point, it might be worth waiting for that. I don't think I'd want to buy a new system with an i5-7600k right now because the i5-8600k has 6 cores vs 4.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2017 16:48

mewse: May 2, 2006

revmoo posted:

Is that really the cheapest a hackintosh can be built for these days? That feels like more than I spent on my first couple hackintoshes. It's been a while admittedly but that seems a bit high.

Z370 is a premium overclocking chipset so the motherboard there is probably adding significant cost. I have to think a gigabyte H310M would probably be just as good but it probably depends on the network chipset etc

# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 22:50

mewse: May 2, 2006

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

Is there any way to deal with the USB port limit other than through a custom SSDT? Having to follow 25 pages of poorly written instructions just to get my wifi working is the stage at which I�m considering dropping the hackintosh thing altogether. And I guess you�re not supposed to use USBInjectAll for this, because reasons?

My brain melted when I started reading about how to set up usb ports properly. Extremely loving frustrating

# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 18:15

mewse: May 2, 2006

Welsper posted:

I followed this guide. I got to skip renaming the controller so knocked it out pretty quick.

Thanks for linking that, I booted my hack laptop today and everything works but the usb ports (even sleep)

# ¿ Sep 7, 2019 18:58

mewse: May 2, 2006

Remember when they made the trash can mac pro they thought everyone would use thunderbolt for expansion. I think I saw a M1 macbook air review saying they're using intel chips for thunderbolt connectivity. Sadly I think the chances that they build out memory slots or SATA.. or a cpu socket are pretty miniscule.

Thunderbolt is like external PCIe right? And they're hanging the thunderbolt off Intel chips external to the SoC. A Mac Pro with PCIe slots might be the most we can hope for

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 03:11

mewse: May 2, 2006

BobHoward posted:

Apple implemented the Thunderbolt controller inside their own SoC. Those Intel chips people found in teardowns of M1 Macs are just Thunderbolt retimer chips. TB runs at a line rate of 20 Gbps, which is fast enough that it's super difficult to successfully get the signals through nasty evil things like connectors and almost any significant length of cable or PCB trace. So they sprinkle retransmitter / line conditioner ICs (aka retimers) at various points along the signal path to make it work.

That's interesting. Is it possible the controller implementation on board the SoC can run motherboard PCIe without re-timer chips?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2020 20:01

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 01:17

mewse: May 2, 2006

BobHoward posted:

Yes. Inside the chips, the building blocks are something like this:

* PCIe root complex (RC) - This implements the PCI Express protocol. It has an internal bus interface on one side, and a parallel PCIe interface on the other. Usually the latter is a standard called PIPE (PHY Interface for PCI Express).

* DisplayPort controller - Outputs a parallel DisplayPort stream

* Thunderbolt controller - Accepts parallel PCIe and DisplayPort, and tunnels the packets as TB packets. Has some form of parallel PHY interface on the other side.

* SERDES / PHY - SERializer/DESerializer and PHYsical layer interface - Converts between parallel interfaces at a lower clock and serial interfaces at a higher clock, and contains the specialized mixed signal circuits needed to send and receive ultra high speed serial signals connected outside the chip

Doing motherboard style PCIe just means that instead of connecting the PCIE RC to a Thunderbolt controller, they'd connect it (or some of its ports, it can have multiple PHY interfaces) directly to a PCIE PHY.

E: We don't know for sure whether they support that path as an alternate operating mode in M1, though some recent regulatory filings about a M1 Mac Mini motherboard with 10G Ethernet suggests that maybe they do, since the obvious way to implement 10GE is with a PCI Express 10GE NIC. The other way they could implement it is to have the 10GE controller integrated into M1, but that seems a little dubious for a chip design which seems destined to go into a future iPad Pro model.

Very cool. Wonder how solid their multiprocessing would be, if they could make a mac pro with multiple M1s and PCIe slots.

Looks like the current mac pro runs radeon cards, they'd have to convince AMD to build arm drivers or agree to have Apple port it

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 01:06

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Hackintosh Thread 2015 Part 2 - Change is a good thing.