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Rant... 5 years, 5 months ago #4449

Been using a hackintosh for over a year due to the Mac Pro not being updated. Due to a monitor issue that I thought was a graphics card issue, I wiped my bios settings and now am forced into windows only. OMG I HATE windows. It has a litany of intrusive issues. I miss my mac so much. Please please please Apple, release a new fucking mac...

Re: Rant... 5 years, 5 months ago #4450

Are you talking about Windows 10? Cause I'd agree with you.

Also, Linux is still an option for you.

Re: Rant... 5 years, 5 months ago #4451

Yes definitely windows 10.. I could definitely switch to Linux, but I had this machine ready as a Bootcamp gaming machine already, so I was willing to give Windows a try. October 30th new macs should be announced. I can scrape by until then.

Re: Rant... 5 years, 5 months ago #4452

Well, Mac Mini is ordered. Seems overpriced, but it is what it is. (Total for a MINI being 2200+ seems obnoxious)

Re: Rant... 5 years, 4 months ago #4453

They start below $1000. It's your decision to spec it up

Re: Rant... 5 years, 4 months ago #4454

Should be fairly easy to get back into OS X with only minor changes (VT-d disabled, EHCI/XHCI handoff set to Auto instead of Smart Auto, XMP Profile 1 on RAM (autotetected if using iMac14,2 (IGP only) or 14,3 (IGP and/or GPU)). This assumes you used Clover and have proper settings there. If so, just resetting the BIOS should get you back in rather quickly.

Hackintosh protip: Always, always make a USB installer and copy your Clover EFI install do the EFI partition of the USB flash drive.

I've got a dual boot Winblows 10 Pro/10.12.6 hackintosh here. Of course mine was done a bit more thoroughly by creating a clean DSDT, renaming the USB ports (no longer necessary manually in many cases) and dropping OEM and DMAR tables in Clover. My only regret with this build is that I got the shittiest sample of the entire 4770k CPU line. It can't OC for shit. At all. Not even with a Noctua NH-D14 w/ three fan push/pull/pull (exhaust is final pull) configuration. Probably a TIM issue underneath the heat spreader on the CPU itself. Haswell was infamous for that.

Love my 1080Ti though.

Re: Rant... 5 years, 4 months ago #4455

Mac Mini is nice and fast. Adding a Vega 64 over eGPU in a few weeks. Faster than my old Mac Pro, no where near as fast as my Hackintosh was.. At least I've gotr a good gaming rig still.

My EFI is on usb backed up. There was a major fight against my motherboard the first time, never wa sable to upgrade to High Sierra, definitely not Mojave. Nice to have an official mac again for daily work in the office. Home machine is still a Mac Pro

Re: Rant... 5 years, 4 months ago #4456

I'd still be on my Mac Pro except it's a 1,1 whose time has come and gone. Literally nothing that I need to run runs on it anymore other than QuickTime 7 Pro (for MIDI exporting). It's been relegated to being a Windows XP machine for my grandpa since all he needs is web browsing (Firefox), email (Outlook), Solitaire and Scrabble 2.0.

Once official Coffee Lake support is in, I'll be looking to go with a 9900k build. Really want a new system that has HDCP 2.2 components for my 4k blu-ray desires.

Re: Rant... 4 years, 5 months ago #4508

menace690 wrote:
Been using a hackintosh for over a year due to the Mac Pro not being updated. Due to a monitor issue that I thought was a graphics card issue, I wiped my bios settings and now am forced into windows only. OMG I HATE windows. It has a litany of intrusive issues. I miss my mac so much. Please please please Apple, release a new fucking mac...


Guessing you need more stuff in your computer however, as a budget-conscious father who cannot justify forking out for an Mac Pro or iMac pro, I've recently acquired a Mac Mini with an eGPU. This is mostly for the purpose of being able to emulate Saturn/Dreamcast games smoothly, but it also allows me to play a few games from the last ~15 years that require something marginally better than integrated graphics. The stats are:
- Refurbished 2018 Mac Mini (3Ghz 6-core i5, 256GB SSD is standard... which is nice as iMacs come with fusion drives but it cannot be upgraded)
- 16GB RAM (upgraded it myself - TBH I don't need any more)
- Razer Core X with an 8GB Sapphire RX Vega 64
- 24" monitor & decent wireless mouse/keyboard

I costed this machine somewhere between the price of a 21.5" iMac and a 27" iMac (8GB RAM, 3Ghz i5 and fusion drive). Thus, I reckon it's a pretty good deal because I can now upgrade my CPU.

The eGPU lag's quite significant in that I get ~20-30% of the performance once would expect from an RX Vega 64. However, graphics are still super fast (i.e. benchmarks are the only place I notice any 'slowness'), I can upgrade it in the future and IMO it makes my Mac ALMOST like a hackintosh, but with a legit Mac.

Food for thought if anybody's wanting to get a Mac with a semi-decent GPU. The RX Vega 64 allows me to play the following with settings maxed out (haven't tried anything else):
- Redream (Dreamcast games... worth noting I'm no purist and I've got the graphics 'enhancements' cranked up full. To the best of my knowledge it renders 3d graphics at 3840x2880 then squishes everything down to 1600x900 so that you get much sharper looking graphics... purists probably hate it but I like it)
- Mednafen (I use it for Saturn games and compile it without the other emu cores... quite impressive as the author notes it requires a lot of grunt... it's quite an accurate emu for a system that's notoriously difficult to emulate too)
- Dreamfall Chapters (not a 'high-end' game but made by a small studio using an engine that's not as fast as some of the commercial engines so in its day, people with high-end setups were still complaining about slow-downs due to a lack of optimisation... so this one's a bit of a crown jewel for me)
- The Witcher 2 (I played the first on a hackintosh back in ~2012 so this was nice as I could never play the sequel)
- Second Life (another one of those 'not high end but still resource intensive' games)

We'll see how I feel in 5 years time when I wanna upgrade my GPU (Thunderbolt 3's still not quite as fast as I'd like it) but for now I'm really pleased with the setup! Just trying to think of some more emus this coulda opened my world up to. Any suggestions? Probably some of those more taxing arcade games (ones that are either tough to emulate or 3D).
Last Edit: 4 years, 5 months ago by jetboy.

Re: Rant... 4 years, 5 months ago #4509

Ehhh. Those are mostly emulators. Not exactly taxing on the GPU side. The CPU will be your bottleneck there. Load up a game like Everspace via Steam and you'll see where the PCIe x4 link width of Thunderbolt 3 has its limitations, especially if you game above 1080p.

Thankfully I'm almost ready to embark on my next hackintosh build. It'll have the following:

Intel i9-9900k
64 GB DDR4-3200 RAM
EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3
2x 500 GB Samsung 860 Pro SSDs (Windows and OS X boot drives respectively)
2x 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSDs (Windows and OS X games drives respectively)
Gigabyte Aorus Gaming Ultra Z390 motherboard
Noctua NH-D15 heatsink/fan
Corsair AX-1200i PSU

I chose the 9900k for two reasons. First, if I need to adjust anything for stability's sake, I can do so with an unlocked CPU. Locked CPUs, all I can adjust is maybe BCLK if I'm lucky. Second, it has the highest base and turbo combined speed. And it can run at its max turbo speed on all 8 cores with the NH-D15 cooler.

The only thing holding my system back in terms of bandwidth is the DMI 3.0 link from the PCH to the CPU. DMI 3.0 maxes out at PCIe x4 bandwidth, which ironically makes RAIDing NVMe drives pointless unless you're on an X299 HEDT (Intel) system (AMD discounted due to lack of proper OS X compatibility, otherwise Threadripper/Epyc would work wonders).

Sadly I'm going to spend most of my time in Windows now thanks to OS X just not having the games I want to play. Currently playing Star Ocean 4 4k remaster in Windows. Makes the PS4 version feel like dogshit. Once my new system is up and running I'll have space to install FF15, Witcher 3, Gauntlet and the rest of my Steam library.

Wish I could get a Mac that was worthy of gaming, but Apple still refuses to acknowledge real gamers exist outside of iOS. And because they're still cockblocking nvidia with anti-trust actions, all I'd be left with is AMD anyway, and even their 5700X still can't best a 1080 Ti, let alone a 2080 or 2080 Ti.

I will say this though: The dual RBs' M1 arcade music player is faaaaaaaar superior in OS X than it is in Windows unless there's some up to date version with a GUI other than BridgeM1 that I've somehow missed. OS X version is just far and away the better user experience (and more stable as well).

Re: Rant... 4 years, 5 months ago #4510

Squishy Tia wrote:
Ehhh. Those are mostly emulators. Not exactly taxing on the GPU side. The CPU will be your bottleneck there. Load up a game like Everspace via Steam and you'll see where the PCIe x4 link width of Thunderbolt 3 has its limitations, especially if you game above 1080p.

Thankfully I'm almost ready to embark on my next hackintosh build. It'll have the following:

Intel i9-9900k
64 GB DDR4-3200 RAM
EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3
2x 500 GB Samsung 860 Pro SSDs (Windows and OS X boot drives respectively)
2x 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSDs (Windows and OS X games drives respectively)
Gigabyte Aorus Gaming Ultra Z390 motherboard
Noctua NH-D15 heatsink/fan
Corsair AX-1200i PSU


Fair call - sounds like an awesome setup (can only imagine what an equivalent would cost from Apple). I guess finding an adequate setup is all a matter of perspective. Fortunately my needs are a lot lower so I'm able to party on with my current setup. Be fun to try Everspace as I'd be interested to see how far off I am when it comes to modern games.

PS - interesting that you're going with a Nvidia card... any reason why? (I assume Catalina has GTX 1080 Ti drivers, but actively avoided Nvidia cards as Apple doesn't seem to be supporting them with Metal).

Re: Rant... 4 years, 4 months ago #4524

Metal fully supprts nVidia. It's Apple that is blocking nVidia currently. In order for graphics drivers to work properly with apps, they must pass library validation. That requires notarization (signing) by Apple. nVidia could release drivers for Mojave and Catalina, but Apple's refusal to sign them means that any app that is notarized and requires library validation (increasingly common) will either display garbled or non-functional text and graphics. World of Warcraft, for example, on non-signed drivers would be unusable because the entire screen would be a garbled mess.

It should be noted that nVidia's latest CUDA release for OS X has entries for hardware revision 418 drivers, meaning nVidia has working drivers, but cannot release them without Apple notarizing them.

None of the OSes have built in drivers for the Maxwell or Pascal series (9xx/10xx respectively). That requires nVidia's web drivers, which Apple stopped signing for OSes after 10.13.6. Mojave and Catalina have no drivers for nVida cards past the Kepler line (6xx/7xx series).

I already had the 1080Ti and have no intention of switching to a shittier AMD card. Not even their new 5700X can match the 1080Ti, let alone a 2080Ti. And since I still have Windows 10 to fall back on for mainstream gaming, I'm not ditching an $800 GPU for a lesser one. That leaves me stuck at 10.13.6 at best, but given how god awful Catalina is and the horrible file and metadata fragmentation problems APFS has, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to have the latest and greatest.

It should be noted that Metal 2 now has AMD specific functions that no nVidia GPU can access, at least without potentially crashing outright. Apple did that because they apparently are going forward with AMD only and eschewing nVidia. They even went so far as to remove the component in OS X that allows dual CPU use, thus breaking even the 2010/2012 Mac Pro 5,1 models that had just gotten firmware updates for APFS usage. That removal also tells us that Apple will not release a dual CPU version of their new Mac Pro, so it is crippled out of the box as the Xeon Scalable platform will reduce DIMM speed to 800 MHz when populating the second half of any of the available channels or when populating all slots in a 12 channel system/CPU combo. Because Apple is only going to ship single CPU variants, maxed out systems lose a shitload of bandwidth as a result.

I'm building my next hackintosh for overkill so what games I play in OS X I can play at decent settings, and when I have to go to Windows, I get the full benefit of the hardware. And unlike their iMac with the same 9900k CPU, my rig won't thermally throttle under load. In fact, it'll be hard pressed to even hit 70C.

I'm planning for the future, with or without Apple.
Last Edit: 4 years, 4 months ago by Squishy Tia.

Re: Rant... 4 years, 4 months ago #4525

Squishy Tia wrote:
They even went so far as to remove the component in OS X that allows dual CPU use, thus breaking even the 2010/2012 Mac Pro 5,1 models that had just gotten firmware updates for APFS usage. That removal also tells us that Apple will not release a dual CPU version of their new Mac Pro, so it is crippled out of the box as the Xeon Scalable platform will reduce DIMM speed to 800 MHz when populating the second half of any of the available channels or when populating all slots in a 12 channel system/CPU combo. Because Apple is only going to ship single CPU variants, maxed out systems lose a shitload of bandwidth as a result.

What... the... hell... Apple?!?!? Where'd you find this info at, btw?

Re: Rant... 4 years, 4 months ago #4527

Here's the source. Use CMD-F to find the text "Removal of MacPro4,1". It'll be the second result. They're not missing instructions this time around. Apple just flat out removed the board IDs from the necessary kext and it isn't exactly easy to work around that.

The irony here is that it'll actually be easier for a dual Xeon hackintosh to work around that in the end than a real Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 because of how the OS checks for board ID vs. how it checks for things like the serial number and MLB number.

But without dual CPU versions, the new Mac Pros will indeed be crippled in terms of RAM bandwidth, and that's the most important aspect in professional rendering. You want that full 1.5 TB RAM in the new Mac Pro? Better pony up for six 256 GB DIMMs, because filling it with 128 GB DIMMs will screw you plenty.

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