My rather dated ASUS P6T based Hackintosh lacked USB 3.0, a feature I really wanted because I already own an external USB 3 SSD drive which I’m using on my notebook. Quite a while ago, I bought this dirt cheap PCI-express 4 port USB card for $11 on eBay. However, the controller didn’t work on OS X no matter what (MultiBeast-)driver I tried. The connected SSD drive finally showed up once I applied some obscure XHCI compatibility settings to the .plist of the Apple USB driver but transferring files from/to the drive was beyond slow.

Last week, I noticed an USB 3 related entry in the MultiBeast release notes:

Added USB 3.0 – Universal which is RehabMan’s branch of Zenith432′s GenericUSBXHCI.kext

Once I installed this new driver using the latest MultiBeast and rebooted my Hackintosh, my external SSD started working like a treat! While I have no idea if this $11 controller is the best Hackintosh USB 3.0 controller (that was just a bait to lure you in) it’s still a good bang for your buck. This controller/driver combo might even work on a Mac Pro, which to this date still don’t have USB 3 support.

Kudos go out to everyone involved in creating this universal USB 3 driver. You’re awesome!

I just finished installing OS X Mountain Lion (latest preview) on my new Intel 520 SSD. The 520 is one of the fastest consumer SSD’s on the market today. Even though my 3 year old ASUS P6T mainboard doesn’t support SATA-3, the 520 still performs ridiculously fast. It takes a mere 6 seconds from the Apple logo to the desktop. The spinning Apple circle doesn’t even show up.

Installation went pretty smoothly using Tonymacx86′s UniBeast and MultiBeast.

Will somebody please teach the guys in Redmond about how to speed up an operating system boot?

My ASUS P6T motherboard features a gigabit-capable Realtek 8111C onboard NIC. There’s an official but old OS X driver for this network adapter available from Realtek, but it crashes my Hackintosh whenever I try to use an OpenVPN connection to a remote server. Luckily, there’s an alternate RTL 81xx driver from Lnx2Mac which doesn’t suffer from this limitation. However, when I did some network benchmarking using a remote Linux server, I wasn’t getting consistent results regarding throughput. It seemed that the further a remote server was away, the less consistent was the throughput I got. It even got worse when using a VPN. It took me quite a while until I found out that the culprit was the Lnx2Mac driver for my onboard network adapter. Don’t get me wrong, the Lnx2Mac driver is perfect if you just need some sort if Internet connection and I appreciate the efforts that have been put into it. But since I was looking for a high performance driver, it didn’t seem to be a good choice. Read more »

For the first time ever, an OS X update breaks compatibility with the X58 chipset. After applying the 10.7.4 update most X58-based Hackintoshs will see (if booted with the -v option) an ACPI related kernel panic or the kernel will just hang early in the boot process with a message like

IOAPIC: Version 0×20 Vectors 64:87
IOAPIC: Version 0×20 Vectors 88:111

Reverting  back to an older AppleACPIPlatform.kext will most likely bring the Hackintosh back from the dead. In order to get access to the disk you’ll need some sort of OS X boot/recovery drive. Make sure you rebuild the kext-cache or temporarily disable support for kernelcache in Chimera/Chameleon.

See this thread on insanelymac.com for a working AppleACPIPlatform.kext. Hopefully, someone finds out what changes need to be made in the boot loader and/or DSDT.

Want to use Bluetooth on your OS X 10.7 Lion Hackintosh? I went through several super-low-cost USB Bluetooth dongles until I found one that still works after waking the Hack from sleep, which seems to be a common problem for some Bluetooth dongles. I’m only using Bluetooth for my Magic Trackpad though but so far, this dongle works a treat. I got mine from eBay for $1.88 including free shipping (no kiddin’!) from this seller. The item is shipping from China, delivery may take 2 weeks. Read more »

While in Windows 7 the Radeon 6870′s GPU fan is almost inaudible under idle conditions, the fan is clearly audible in OS X Lion. In OS X the GPU fan is permanently changing its speed which creates quite some bothersome noise. If you can’t live with that noise, here’s a tip for the not-so-faint-of-heart about how to modify the fan control curve of your Radeon graphics card. This involves flashing your graphics card’s BIOS using an optimized temperature/fan-speed map. Ain’t that cool? :-) Read more »

If you’re about to build a new OS X 10.7 Hackintosh or to replace the graphics card in your current Hackintosh rig, you may want to consider the AMD Radeon HD 6870. Power-wise it’s a mid-range graphics card which comes with an affordable price tag. The big advantage of the Radeon 6870 is that it fully supports Quartz Extreme and Core Image (QE/CI) in OS X Lion out of the box, no additional kernel extension like ATY_y.kext needed. All you have to do is to set graphics enabler to YES in Chameleon’s com.apple.Boot.plist. If you don’t need a high-performance gamer graphics card, this is the one to go for!

AMD Radeon HD 6870 Series:
  Chipset Model:	AMD Radeon HD 6870 Series
  Type:	GPU
  Bus:	PCIe
  PCIe Lane Width:	x16
  VRAM (Total):	1024 MB
  Vendor:	ATI (0x1002)
  Device ID:	0x6738
  Revision ID:	0x0000

Today, I updated the i7 920 Nehalem quad core processor in my ASUS P6T based Hackintosh to an even more spiffy 970 6-core Gulftown CPU.  Since the i7 970 was retired and discontinued (EOL) recently, prices for the leftover stock have fallen sharply so I decided to get a new one as long as they’re still available. If you own an ASUS P6T make sure you use at least Bios rev. 1303 or the mainboard won’t recognize the 970.

Upon booting OS X I noticed that P-state P0 a.k.a “Turbo Mode” wasn’t working anymore with the new hexacore CPU on the mainboard. In order to get Turbo Mode back, I needed to edit Chameleon’s com.apple.Boot.plist. Here’s what I added:

	<key>GeneratePStates</key>
	<string>Yes</string>
	<key>GenerateCStates</key>
	<string>Yes</string>

With these settings Chameleon automatically takes care of the C-states and P-states for the CPU. Very cool, that saved me a lot of time messing around with the DSDT! You need at least a recent Chameleon version like RC5 though, the last official release from 2009 won’t support those properties.

Here’s the Geekbench score of the updated rig:

Mac OS X Lion boot performance has been optimized and shows off some ridiculous boot times if booting from an SSD. Here’s a video of an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh booting OS X Lion.

Inspired by MacRumors post about the new 27-inch BTO iMac being the fastest Mac ever, here’s the same with an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh, obviously it uses an SSD too just like the iMac shown in the video. The ASUS P6T rig is 2 years old and uses a Lynnfield Core i7 CPU (4 cores), so no fancy Sandy Bridge there.

Both videos were taken with an iPhone and no modifications were made, it’s straight from the iPhone’s camera.

Pretty sick, isn’t it?

The latest XPC EFI boot loader version 0.83.02 allows you to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion dev preview 2 without having to change or copy a single file on the OS X install volume. Apart from configuring XPC it all works out of the box which simplifies installing OS X Lion a whole lot. XPC now fully supports the new disk-image based installation process that was first introduced in Lion dev preview 1 and is able to boot from mounted .dmg volume images. I just gave it a try and it worked flawlessly on my Hackintosh rig! Read more »

Using the XPC method loosely described in this post I tried to install the new Mac OS X 10.7 11A419 build aka developer preview 2 on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh. Once the prepared USB thumb drive OS X 10.7 installer booted to the command line using the -s kernel argument in XPC, I tried to kextload FakeSMC.kext as usual. But after typing exit to continue the boot process, the system always hangs with the last message being

Kext com.apple.driver.DiskImages.FileBackingStore might not load – kextd is currently unavailable

The boot process can’t be completed successfully if a kext is being loaded from the console, no matter what kext it is. Read more »

I finally managed to run Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview on my ASUS P6T Hackintosh rig. Installation from a USB thumb drive is not as easy as it used to be in 10.6 and earlier because the new OS X installer boots from a BaseSystem.dmg in 10.7 Lion. But the really hard part was to find an EFI boot loader that doesn’t double panic/double fault when the Mach kernel is being loaded from an SATA-drive, once the installation is completed.

Chameleon and iBoot didn’t work on my Nehalem Core-i7 equipped P6T mobo, and I tried every version I could get hold of. Read more »

I just combo-updated my Hackintosh rig to Mac OS X 10.6.7 (dev release 10J860) and everything is still up and running after the mandatory reboot. As usual I had to reapply the custom AppleHDA.kext in order to get sound back. From an ASUS P6T standpoint, this update should be considered safe.