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Upcoming Intel X58 Mobos & Core i7 CPUs

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Voltic
Voltic
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I have an ASUS P6T and an i7 920 on the way... not sure how long it'll take since I have to wait for shipping from the US to Japan but I'll post what I get when it gets here provided it doesn't blow up my house's tiny circuit box. :unsure:

 

As far as cooling, I'm not sure I'd push it very far on the stock sink and fan... I personally ordered a Thermalright Ultra 120 with an LGA1366 bracket for mine along with a Noctua fan to mount on the fan bracket... FrozenCPU is one of the couple sites that have them but I think they might be out of stock now. Play it safe, spend the extra on a good sink and fan if you intend on overclocking... it's a lot more money wasted if it burns up. :thumbsup_anim:

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luh3417
luh3417
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The only question is if it runs osx86! Or do we have to wait until Macworld in January or WWDC in June for Apple to squeeze out 10.6 and/or hardware that uses i7.

 

Sorry about the NOK. Guess Intel doesn't sell many Extreme Edition CPU there since that would also cost $3000. I hear its pretty costly in Iceland too, but at least they have lots of snow there to cool it with... That said, I thought Norway was one of the richest countries in Europe thanks to its offshore oil wealth and in fact largely stayed out of the EU and EMU to hoard their riches, n'est pas?

 

I'd say why fool with the stock cooler when there are so many good alternatives available (plus quieter). http://legionhardware.com/document.php?id=790 is the first review I saw of OC the i7, maybe post your question there if its not already answered in the discussion there.

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Cruisin Aruban
Cruisin Aruban
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So far I've tried an older 10.5.2 Kalyway disk on the Gigabyte GS-EX58-UD5 with an NVIDIA 8800GT. The DVD boots up and the install goes great, but very shortly after Mac OS starts to load, I get a black screen and immediate reboot. Thus far I'm not able to get in via safe mode or single user mode either. I'm going to try the install again tonight without the NVIDIA drivers chosen and see if I get better luck or trying a kernel other than vanilla. I'll also be on the hunt for a later install disk to see if that makes a difference.

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Cruisin Aruban
Cruisin Aruban
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SUCCESS!

 

Kalyway is up and running with the Kabyl 9.2.2 kernel! Core Image and Quartz Extreme all good.

 

Forgot to add the sounds drivers, so doing a quick reinstall to see if they'll work right off the DVD installer. It's a Realtek ALC889A chipset, so I'm hoping it works easily.

 

Onboard NICs working also.

 

@luh3417: Wow, that's a crazy process. I'll try to give that a whirl over the weekend.

 

Still no audio, and definitely some quirkiness in Mac OS reporting what it's seeing, but working well overall. I'll try getting the audio to work over the weekend probably, and post what I find. I'm also really excited to try the retail DVD method. Here's some screens of what Mac OS thinks it sees :)

post-13227-1227225224_thumb.png

post-13227-1227225244_thumb.png

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bofors
bofors
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... and definitely some quirkiness in Mac OS reporting what it's seeing, but working well overall.

 

Great, thanks for the report.

 

I noticed that only 4 cores are reported by OS X in Profiler.app, did you have HyperThreading turned off in BIOS?

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bofors
bofors
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Strangely enough, ActivityMonitor.app shows only 1 core.

 

Now that is really messed up.

 

I would probably run some command line diagnostics next.

 

I would also check in with real experts like Netkas and see what the plan for x58 is going to be.

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Cruisin Aruban
Cruisin Aruban
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Ok guys,

 

please run all the diagnostics, all cores running? Hows the speed with the i7? Any xbench, ibench, visualhub encoding time, cinebench would really be appreciated.

 

I have to buy a new rig and would really like to order a I7...

 

thanks

 

PoloBear,

So far it's only showing 1 core, but I'm finding performance to be amazing. I'm sure X58 drivers will make it out in due time and get everything working 100%. Intel has already said they've gotten Mac OS running on i7.

Attached is the xbench I just ran. Anecdotaly: it's the fastest system I've ever handled, bar none.

For anyone interested: I've been running some games on it for testing, and they've run perfectly with settings on full.

As I said before, the only issue I'm having is with sound, but since it's a common chipset (that's been working on other gigabyte boards) I'm fairly certain I just need to find the right implementation of the driver.

If there's any other tests/benchmarks you'd like me to run through for you, please let me know.

post-13227-1227318313_thumb.png

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Cruisin Aruban
Cruisin Aruban
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EDIT:

Front panel is working, but in my haste I forgot to change it in the Sound Preferences. There does seem to be some crackling though. I'm hoping the digital out works as well, I'll be testing that later. I'm still planning on dumping the codec through linux, which I'll post later. In the mean time, here's what I'm using for anyone who's using the GA-EX58-UD5.

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?act...st&id=37775

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PoloBear
PoloBear
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Cruisin Aruban...

 

Thanks for the Xbench. Last couple of months I switched my mainboard two or three times, and because of the sound problems, even after the Leopard updates I bought a creative Xfi-USB. So no more sound problems at all...

 

The I7 920 looks pretty good, its fast and compared to the C2Q9550 its also cheaper. But because of the mainboards and the new memory, the update is about €400.

 

Could be so kind to run cinebench. And if you are in overclocking, give the feed the monster and go to 3,4 and run the benchs again.....

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Cruisin Aruban
Cruisin Aruban
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OK, here's the cinebench. Of note: It detects 8 processors on it's own, which should mean that while the Mac OS reporting utilities don't know which end is up, the OS is presenting 8 cores (4 physical, 4 hyperthreaded) to the apps. This seems confirmed by the 4X multiprocessor speedup (though I'm admittedly no Cinebench expert).

 

CINEBENCH R10

****************************************************

Tester :

Processor : Quad Core Intel i7 920 (Added by me)

MHz : 2667 (Added by me)

Number of CPUs : 8

Operating System : OS X 32 BIT 10.5.2

 

Graphics Card : NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 OpenGL Engine

Resolution : <fill this out>

Color Depth : <fill this out>

 

Rendering (Single CPU): 3497 CB-CPU

Rendering (Multiple CPU): 14240 CB-CPU

 

Multiprocessor Speedup: 4.07

 

Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 7091 CB-GFX

 

@PoloBear: Thanks for the suggestion on the USB xfi. I've been hoping to find USB sound that worked. Also, this is my 1st system since a couple of oven-hot P4's, so my overclocking lingo is horribly old. 3,4?

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PoloBear
PoloBear
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With propper air cooling, the I7 920 should be able to reach 4ghz, only slight increase in core voltage. My overclocking showed me, that windows is more forgiving. I could get every q6600, q9300, c2d6400 primestable in windows, but for running osx, I had to increase processor speed.

My q9300 was running on XP at 3,5 GHz, OSX was possible with 3,2. Now I have a q6600 @3.1 which is capable of 3,6 on XP....

 

 

So for my computing needs, mainly visualhub, I am thinking of buying me a Macpro, but then the fun will be gone...no more overclocking, surfing insanelymac for new methods of hacking, no more SSD-Harddisk tryouts...

I have allready replaced my iphone 2G and bought me a Iphone 3G which robbed me the fun of jailbreaking.....

 

well, I dont know...

 

My cinebench results are

 

C2Q 6600 running at 3,1 GHz stock 8800gt

 

Rendering 1 CPU: 3180 CB-CPU

Rendering x CPU: 9260 CB-CPU

multiprocessor speedup 2.91 x

 

Opengl 5496 CB-GFX

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luh3417
luh3417
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So, it looks like I'll be putting off messing with the vanilla kernel this weekend. The power supply in my old system went up in smoke (literally) so this is my only system until I get that replaced. I'll still be happy to run any benchmarks and may still do some more audio testing.

My advice is to stick to Seasonic brand power supplies. The i7 is not a power hog...

 

...but if you want to overclock it it starts to use some watts. OC info: http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=790&p=2

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gamergh0st
gamergh0st
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HOLY SMOKES I7 runs OS X@!!!!@U#Y$*732y48!~~!!!

 

 

I guess Im getting i7 for christmas :)

 

 

I was actually thinking of going with the Asus P6T...I like the features better on the asus, especially the overclocking, is there any reason in particular to go with the gigabytes?

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digital_dreamer
digital_dreamer
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I like the Asus P6T, too, but I think it's an issue of more OSX86 compatible hardware. I'm not sure.

 

Both boards have the same Northbridge (duh) and Southbridge. SATA plus RAID support is handled via Southbridge (ICH10R). Differences are below:

ASUS:

• LAN: Marvell 88E8056

• Audio = ADI AD2000B

• Firewire = VIA VT6308

• SAS RAID = Marvell 88SE6320 (don't know about this)

• PATA and eSATA = Marvell 88SE6111 (don't know about this either, but doubt many would use it)

 

GIGABYTE:

• LAN: Realtek 8111D

• Audio: ALC 889A

- Firewire: TI TSB43AB23

• PATA: GIGABYTE SATA2 chip?? (

• Floppy drive (LOL!): iTE 8720

 

 

We'll leave it to Cruisin Aruban to get all the bugs worked out. ;)

 

regards,

MAJ

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Chivs
Chivs
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I have this combo (Gigabyte) working from a retail install using Chameleon.

 

Vanilla kernel does not work, needed to use modbin, ICH10R is recognized and all aspects seem to be working well, used combo update to 10.5.5, no orange icons etc.

 

Only issue is shutdown and sleep not working correctly

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JaE-V
JaE-V
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I have this combo (Gigabyte) working from a retail install using Chameleon.

 

Vanilla kernel does not work, needed to use modbin, ICH10R is recognized and all aspects seem to be working well, used combo update to 10.5.5, no orange icons etc.

 

Only issue is shutdown and sleep not working correctly

 

Is it identifying your processor cores? Or just one?

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ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ
ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ
Posted
Posted
I have this combo (Gigabyte) working from a retail install using Chameleon.

 

Vanilla kernel does not work, needed to use modbin, ICH10R is recognized and all aspects seem to be working well, used combo update to 10.5.5, no orange icons etc.

 

Only issue is shutdown and sleep not working correctly

 

no vanilla kernel? :( :( :( :( no sleep/shutdown ;):shock: :shock:

 

what method did you use to try the vanilla kernel?

 

EDIT: wait, isnt modbin for AMD CPUs????? that is possibly the reason for no shutdown/sleep.

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