hackintosh

ASUS P6T Hackintosh & i7 970 6-core Gulftown CPU

Posted on by Jan

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:

 

Stunning OS X Lion boot times on an ASUS P6T Hackintosh

Posted on by Jan

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91KXHvhhiE

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjQLFm66aJc

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?

Tips & tricks using XPC for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion developer preview 2

Posted on by Jan

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! Continue reading →

ASUS P6T & Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview 2

Posted on by Jan

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. Continue reading →

ASUS P6T & Mac OS X Lion 10.7 dev preview using XPC boot loader

Posted on by Jan

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. Continue reading →