Upcoming Intel X58 Mobos & Core i7 CPUs

[ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ]

Well today i bit the bullet and ordered my new system. When i logged onto scan i was going to get the P6T, but it was out of stock, so i just thought f**k it and got the gigabyte. the saving virtually bought me the bluray drive

 

Intel i7 920

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3

LG GGC-H20L Bluray

1TB Western Digital WD1001FALS Black (OS X)

1.5TB Seagate ST31500341AS Barracuda. (time machine and windows)

Ati Radeon 4870x2 (for windows)

Nvidia 7300GT (for OS X)

 

the system will be watercooled, hoping to get a decent overclock out of this thing!

[JaE-V]

Well today i bit the bullet and ordered my new system. When i logged onto scan i was going to get the P6T, but it was out of stock, so i just thought f**k it and got the gigabyte. the saving virtually bought me the bluray drive

 

Intel i7 920

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3

LG GGC-H20L Bluray

1TB Western Digital WD1001FALS Black (OS X)

1.5TB Seagate ST31500341AS Barracuda. (time machine and windows)

Ati Radeon 4870x2 (for windows)

Nvidia 7300GT (for OS X)

 

the system will be watercooled, hoping to get a decent overclock out of this thing!

 

sweeet

[digital_dreamer]

Well today i bit the bullet and ordered my new system. When i logged onto scan i was going to get the P6T, but it was out of stock, so i just thought f**k it and got the gigabyte. the saving virtually bought me the bluray drive

 

Intel i7 920

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3

LG GGC-H20L Bluray

1TB Western Digital WD1001FALS Black (OS X)

1.5TB Seagate ST31500341AS Barracuda. (time machine and windows)

Ati Radeon 4870x2 (for windows)

Nvidia 7300GT (for OS X)

 

the system will be watercooled, hoping to get a decent overclock out of this thing!

 

Congratulations! You'll love it, in spite of the colours.

You'll have the 4870x2 running in OS X before too long.

 

How much did that BL drive set you back, if you don't mind telling? I was thinking of just getting a PS3, but that's more for living room TV/home theater, than something I'd put in the office. So, a BL drive seems better.

 

Got Audio working fine on the Kalyway "Test_Bed" drive, finally. Running on the Boot-132 drive is OS X 10.5.5 w/kernel 9.4 Mobin, but no audio, again. Audio is a beast.

 

Has anybody noticed that the LAN does not dynamically update connection status with the RLTR1000 drivers? I can unplug my ethernet cable from the mobo and it still thinks it's connected. Even release/renew the DHCP and it comes back with the correct IPs! Of course, it will not be connected, but the OS will keep trying, instead of realizing there's nothing plugged in. It's only after a looooong while it will self-assign. The port activity light will still flash on occasion with no cable in. Additionally, it will not accept a connection dynamically (DHCP) if you plug the cable in after boot - seems to work only during boot.

Someone mentioned that you must use static IPs with this driver, instead of DHCP, because it'll loose the connection after sleep and never connect again. Seems to make sense with the behavior I've seen here.

Anyhow, I just want to make sure I'm not the only one with this issue. Last night I was convinced that my onboard LAN had gone out, as I don't usually see this type of behavior on modern boards. Hope it's just a driver issue.

 

Best of wishes!

MAJ

[luh3417]

Anyone got Blu-Ray drive working (i7 or not)? What OS X software gets everything out of the BR disc, like the advanced audio?

New advanced audio standards explained: http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/1064 If you want to play it safe, the PS3 certainly fully handles all the advanced audio formats, like DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD. Make sure you check out Plex http://www.plexapp.com/ though I'm not sure it handles BR yet.

 

OK, ASUS overall sell twice as many boards as Gigabyte. And people are going for the ASUS i7 board because it overclocks automatically. But I suspect we'll soon find its not hard at all to OC the Gigabyte.

 

Let's post the BIOS settings we changed, like Wolfienuke and others did, especially as we make BIOS changes for overclocking.

[wolfienuke]

Has anybody noticed that the LAN does not dynamically update connection status with the RLTR1000 drivers? I can unplug my ethernet cable from the mobo and it still thinks it's connected. Even release/renew the DHCP and it comes back with the correct IPs! Of course, it will not be connected, but the OS will keep trying, instead of realizing there's nothing plugged in. It's only after a looooong while it will self-assign. The port activity light will still flash on occasion with no cable in. Additionally, it will not accept a connection dynamically (DHCP) if you plug the cable in after boot - seems to work only during boot.

Someone mentioned that you must use static IPs with this driver, instead of DHCP, because it'll loose the connection after sleep and never connect again. Seems to make sense with the behavior I've seen here.

Anyhow, I just want to make sure I'm not the only one with this issue. Last night I was convinced that my onboard LAN had gone out, as I don't usually see this type of behavior on modern boards. Hope it's just a driver issue.

I have the same issue, but my system will be a server set to DMZ so it's IP is static. I have noticed if the RJ45 connection is not plugged in during boot, the connection will always say Not Plugged In until I restart. It's a minor inconvenience when dealing with new hardware that has not been out on the market for too long. Overall, I thought I would have much more trouble with this new motherboard than it has been.

 

Hopefully we will get some new/better drivers before too long, but honestly I am content as it is right now.

 

Have you had any stability issues? I have not made the system my 24/7 server yet, so I am curious on how it performs after a few days of up time.

[johnathandoe]

Has anyone gotten a P6T to run OSX without totally crippling the CPU? If so, can you please post what method (kernel, bios setting, boot modifiers, flags, etc...) worked for you? It seems that everyone with a successful story, did it on a Gigabyte mobo. I haven't been able to get past "dsmos: starting" at best.

 

Thank you.

[ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ]

it set me back £65, and it will also read hddvds too.

 

os x currently does not support anything about bluray, but toast 9 will let you write to bluray -r and -rw and dual layer. im planning on running anydvd hd from parallels and ripping content with that. until then its up to apple to support bluray from finder and dvd player.

[@ROBASEFR]

yes, all cores seem to be recognized and working fine. A few other things are not recognized correctly yet.

 

 

I don't know if it's important but the F3 bios (11/14/08) is out for your card;

My MOB was already F3 on arrival !

 

I'm newbee, so I'm waiting a little bit longer for an stable working Install method.

 

 

(For the moment I'm on Vista x64 and my Geekbench(32bit) is at 6790)

[ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ]

has anybody used a retail install on the gigabyte board. im sure i have read it somewhere.

 

could you please post what extra kexts you installed to get it to boot? i think we should try and collate them. when i take delivery of my board i intend to make a custom boot123 disc for it that can either be put onto cd or usb stick and can then be used to install retail.

[digital_dreamer]

My mobo came with the F3 version of Award BIOS, too.

 

I have audio, now, but I haven't tested for all inputs/outputs. It wasn't until I installed the AppleAzaliaAudio.kext for the 889A that it all started working. My system is stable with sleep/wake from the keyboard, restart, LAN, QE, and HD audio. Shutdown doesn't work, however. It appears the graphic card shuts off (loses video), but the rest of the mobo is still powered up. But, with sleep and restart, who cares about shutdown?

 

I have a Retail install via Boot-132 and love it. So much more flexible than using a distro DVD. I've run all the latest updates without any problems, as well. But, this where you need to be careful.

Here's what I've done: You need two hard drives (not two partitions on the same drive), one for testing and one for your main install. Installed Kalyway 10.5.2 on a smaller physical hard drive and used that as my installer/test bed.

Then followed the v3 guide for the advanced user in Retail DVD Guide to install OS X on the main drive. I install from a image version of the Leopard DVD and combo update. Installs in 5 minutes. Now, I have a modified post-patch.sh script that can be used to install any kernel/kext combination I want to try out.

 

For updates, I typically look into the install packages with Pacifist to see if it modifies any "incompatible" kexts. As a general rule, f it doesn't replace kernel or touch the System/Extensions folder, then no problem. If I happen to run an update that borks my system, I simply need to boot into the test bed drive and run the post-patch.sh script and reboot. Ta-da! The post-patch simply removes the incompatible kexts and replaces them with the ones needed for the mobo. Of course, this won't fix ALL problems. But, at the very worst, I would have to reinstall from the DVD images.

 

I'm currently working on a more simplified, flexible, and foolproof version of the Boot-132 install script for this board. If anyone wishes, I can make this available here when done. But, right now, I'm trying to determine exactly what this board needs. LAN is a given, but I don't know why I had problems with audio and some others didn't. I looking into that. Naturally, we'd like a installer that works for everyone OOTB. Graphics will depend on the user installed card.

 

As a side note, I've noticed that when running on the 9.4 Mobdin kernel, I can't run 64-bit applications, like Geekbench 64-bit. So, I'm currently running the Kably 9.2.2 kernel.

 

kind regards,

MAJ

[ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ]

I have audio, now, but I haven't tested for all inputs/outputs. It wasn't until I installed the AppleAzaliaAudio.kext for the 889A that it all started working. My system is stable with sleep/wake from the keyboard, restart, LAN, QE, and HD audio. Shutdown doesn't work, however. It appears the graphic card shuts off (loses video), but the rest of the mobo is still powered up. But, with sleep and restart, who cares about shutdown?

 

This is a side effect of the taugura patch, you either get a kernel panic or some form of infinite loop with a driver or shut down process. there is a topic somewhere on this board where madtux has been going through sound drivers and fixing this bug, sorry i dont have a link.

 

I have a Retail install via Boot-132 and love it. So much more flexible than using a distro DVD. I've run all the latest updates without any problems, as well. But, this where you need to be careful.

Here's what I've done: You need two hard drives (not two partitions on the same drive), one for testing and one for your main install. Installed Kalyway 10.5.2 on a smaller physical hard drive and used that as my installer/test bed.

Then followed the v3 guide for the advanced user in Retail DVD Guide to install OS X on the main drive. I install from a image version of the Leopard DVD and combo update. Installs in 5 minutes. Now, I have a modified post-patch.sh script that can be used to install any kernel/kext combination I want to try out.

 

why dont you use the efi partition method, then there is no problems when installing apple updates, not even looking through them with pacifist, you could use a method i linked to earlier to fix your sound shutdown problem and you can even use your hdd in a real mac. If you keep a boot 123 usb stick handy, you can use this to recover if you install a kext incorrectly and it stops the system from loading.

 

As a side note, I've noticed that when running on the 9.4 Mobdin kernel, I can't run 64-bit applications, like Geekbench 64-bit. So, I'm currently running the Kably 9.2.2 kernel.

 

i would personally use the voodoo kernel with the busratio=xx boot flag.

 

just my

[jplee4907]

My mobo came with the F3 version of Award BIOS, too.

 

I have a Retail install via Boot-132 and love it. So much more flexible than using a distro DVD. I've run all the latest updates without any problems, as well. But, this where you need to be careful.

Here's what I've done: You need two hard drives (not two partitions on the same drive), one for testing and one for your main install. Installed Kalyway 10.5.2 on a smaller physical hard drive and used that as my installer/test bed.

Then followed the v3 guide for the advanced user in Retail DVD Guide to install OS X on the main drive. I install from a image version of the Leopard DVD and combo update. Installs in 5 minutes. Now, I have a modified post-patch.sh script that can be used to install any kernel/kext combination I want to try out.

 

For updates, I typically look into the install packages with Pacifist to see if it modifies any "incompatible" kexts. As a general rule, f it doesn't replace kernel or touch the System/Extensions folder, then no problem. If I happen to run an update that borks my system, I simply need to boot into the test bed drive and run the post-patch.sh script and reboot. Ta-da! The post-patch simply removes the incompatible kexts and replaces them with the ones needed for the mobo. Of course, this won't fix ALL problems. But, at the very worst, I would have to reinstall from the DVD images.

 

I'm currently working on a more simplified, flexible, and foolproof version of the Boot-132 install script for this board. If anyone wishes, I can make this available here when done. But, right now, I'm trying to determine exactly what this board needs. LAN is a given, but I don't know why I had problems with audio and some others didn't. I looking into that. Naturally, we'd like a installer that works for everyone OOTB. Graphics will depend on the user installed card.

 

kind regards,

MAJ

 

Great going! I'm a follower as a noob. I'm excited seeing you success, and please, leave your detailed ways to conquer X-58.

[Braindestroyer]

I hope that somebody can get it to work on P6T Deluxe cuz this board is awesome with the SAS controller. Maybe its only a dream. But time is on our side ^^ Great News

[johnathandoe]

I agree. I hope someone really gets this working on the P6T too. I have to than grassroot for leading me toward iDeneb. It is the only one that I can install on the P6T so far. But I still have not managed to get the OS to boot after install without a panic. I'm betting that it is a driver/kext issue. If anyone has any advice or success with the P6T, please share it with the community.

 

BTW - thanks again grassroot, please keep us posted if you make any more progress.

[hakeem9]

Another success story here using the Gigabyte X58-UD5. Critical that you put it in AHCI mode as mentioned earlier else it will install but wait for root device on boot. Works great using Kalyway 10.5.2 with kabyl 9.2.2 kernel, but could not get a variety of 8800 and 9800 NVidia cards (8800GTX 768mb, 9800GT 512mb) to work using EFI or NVinject/NVkush - EFI works on aforementioned cards with 10.5.5 kext's but very unstable and crashes often with artefacting. Currently using a 7800GTX 512mb flashed as a Quadro using NVinject 0.2.1 and it's perfect.

 

Make sure to use Realtek R1000 network driver option during install else it can hang at the account creation stage when it looks for network and gets stuck in a loop. Also DDR3/1333 SMBIOS, Time Machine fix and Intel Memory Controller.

[jplee4907]

I'm currently working on a more simplified, flexible, and foolproof version of the Boot-132 install script for this board. If anyone wishes, I can make this available here when done.

 

 

 

Hi

 

Much appreciate for your kind info on X58! I'm looking forward to having GA X58-DS4, which works out just like yours i guess.

I'm dying to hear about your latest improvements on your system...how things go?

And, if you can make your boot132 install script avaiable, that will be helpful.

 

One more, have you not tried to install with "EFI Partition" by munky? I'm looking for some who did with this method. Everybody says this is the ultimate way to install on X58, but haven't seen any yet.

 

jp

[digital_dreamer]

This is a side effect of the taugura patch, you either get a kernel panic or some form of infinite loop with a driver or shut down process. there is a topic somewhere on this board where madtux has been going through sound drivers and fixing this bug, sorry i dont have a link.

why dont you use the efi partition method, then there is no problems when installing apple updates, not even looking through them with pacifist, you could use a method i linked to earlier to fix your sound shutdown problem and you can even use your hdd in a real mac. If you keep a boot 123 usb stick handy, you can use this to recover if you install a kext incorrectly and it stops the system from loading.

i would personally use the voodoo kernel with the busratio=xx boot flag.

 

just my

 

Thanks for your suggestions!

The boot from EFI method is next on the list. This would be the perfect way to run the system, as the OS X install is left untouched. I think I'll pull all those terminal commands together in a script for easy running.

 

Speaking of the Boot-132 method, there's no reason for me to use it, as I have a Kalyway distro install on one drive for testing and can do a normal OS install to the main drive from there. However, I used the post-script to handle the kext removal/replacements. Studying it gave me great insight on what kexts are generally considered incompatible in x86 systems and what needs to be removed versus modified. The next step is finding the kexts appropriate for the board chipsets.

If you're not running a distro or boot from EFI setup, the retail install, plus running a pre-configured post-patch.sh (from the Boot-132 setup) for this board is a the ticket to a running (read: compatible) system.

Once you have a working system, it's a good suggestion to make a backup dmg of your working install, either with Disk Utility or CCC. Of course, it's better to fix the offending kext/file if you know what it is. But, if you do something stupid like run Diskwarrior and have it "fix" the "bad" boot blocks on a Boot-132 install, then you'll need that dmg backup. :-)

 

Anyone know what's the busratio for the i7? Is it 20? And, where do you input it. In the Boot.plist? I looked at the Voodoo documentation and it doesn't mention where that flag is keyed in. I'm a noob here and still learning.

 

Love this system and I'm so glad I got into this! It's a great replacement for my aging 1.2GHz dual G4 system I built from a Digital_Audio G4 board (installed in a standard ATX case). That system has served me reliably for many years running 24/7 (I never turn it off and it doesn't sleep).

 

kind regards,

MAJ

[PoloBear]

iThe standard busratio is 20, but with all advanced processor options enabled in bios, you get 21 for turbomode and lower ratios for EIST enabled.

 

 

There is also a new bios available: testbios f4k, I am running f4j...

[wolfienuke]

digital_dreamer,

You seem to have the same exact setup as me...

 

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5

Intel i7 920 (Did you OC to 3.2GHz on stock fan? If not, what did you use? Will it be safe to slightly OC on stock fan?)

ATI 2600 XT 256MB

6 GB Corsair EMS3 (Did you set the clock to 1600 in bios? I thought this was 1333...)

WD Raptor 72GBx2 RAID

Seagate 1.5TBx2 RAID

 

Can you list the kext's you used (with links/attachments), and which ones you removed? Maybe we can make a simple pkg installer or Boot-132 image for other GA-EX58-UD5 users. I would like to get my system up and running on an EFI partition (we can probably make a EFI partition shell script for the MB as well) which I have not done yet, but it seems worth the effort. Before we do this, the proper kexts,kernel, and system will be needed. I will be busy on the road with work until monday, but will have 2 weeks vacation after that to play with my new toys! I can't wait to set it up as my new server...

[ѕӎѳѳ₮ңӌ]

yeh, you can either key it in manually at boot or add it to the boot plist.

[luh3417]

I boot into XP to overclock because there are more software tools on XP. Since 99% of macs are not overclocked, there's not much reason to write such software. I would be very happy to use mac versions of the following if anyone knows of any.

 

- OCCT for generating loads on all cores

- Everest for measuring sensors

- cpu-z for seeing the RAM SPD speeds and confirming muliplier

- CoreTemp for monitoring temperatures and noting VID

 

I'm going to talk about overclocking the Gigabyte EX58-UD5. This is about ASUS but still relevant: http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=790&p=1 where it says

The only menu in the Asus P6T Deluxe BIOS that we needed to visit in order to reach the 4.0GHz overclock with our Core i7 965 Extreme Edition processor was the “Ai Tweaker” menu. Here we simply set the Ai Overclock Tuner setting to manual, increased the CPU ratio setting to x26, and set the base clock frequency to 154MHz. This boosted the DDR3 frequency to 1540MHz, which we left it at, while the QPI frequency was slightly overclocked to 7.4GHz.

 

Before we hung up our boots, we cracked out the Core i7 920 to see where we would end up using the cheapest of the three Core i7 processors. Now because this processor has a locked multiplier of 20x, the only way to increase the frequency is to boost the base clock. Therefore the base clock was increased from 133MHz to 190MHz, resulting in a total clock frequency of 3.80GHz, a healthy 43% overclock. Not bad for a sub-$300 Core i7 processor, and it was all made possible by the Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard.

 

The Core i7 920 was overclocked using the same CPU (1.40v) and memory (1.64v) voltage settings, while the memory frequency was boosted a little higher, reaching 1710MHz. However the Core i7 platform is very flexible when it comes to memory overclocking, as the memory features its own unique multiplier which works off the base clock.

 

For example, with the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition overclock we used a 10x clock multiplier on the memory (154 x 10 = 1540MHz). When overclocking the base clock to 190MHz, if we were to stick with the 10x multiplier the memory would be operating at 1900MHz. Although some DDR3 memory modules are rated for this frequency, with just 1.64 volts our particular memory was not.

 

Therefore we reduced the memory multiplier to 9x, which resulted in a memory clock frequency of 1710MHz, a frequency which our memory could handle. Of course if you have DDR3 memory that is limited to just 1066MHz or thereabouts, and you wanted to run the base clock at 190MHz, all you would have to do is reduce the memory multiplier to 6x or less.

Back in XP, I found that CoreTemp and Everest agree on my core temperatures, 40 - 43 (degrees celsius) at idle and 60 - 64 (across all 4 cores) at full load from OCCT. Also, neither CoreTemp nor my F3 BIOS seem to reveal any VID, though this is really only useful for getting a general idea of how fast your CPU can likely go. My CPU is an i7 920 SLBCH packed 11 Nov 08 in Costa Rica, batch 3838A755 stepping 4. This is with a Thermalright U-120a, Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal grease, and an Arctic Cooling fan. These pre-OC temperatures seem a little high, so I may change the fan.

 

For my initial test, I changed the base clock from 133 to 160 (to go from 2.66 to 3.20 GHz) and reduced the memory multiplier to 8.0 (which clocks RAM at 1280). And... it boots into XP. Idle temp of 41 - 45. Memory is G-Skill 2GB x 3, can do 7-7-7-18@1333 if you bump to 1.6V but I haven't pushed that yet. Have not touched any voltages yet. Next steps are to push for higher OC and then see if it is OCCT stable. This OC was OCCT stable for 5 minutes but temps got up to 65 - 69 degrees, and IMHO 70 is max. We may be limited by the Memory Multiplier since it only offers 6.0 8.0 10.0 and up on this F3 BIOS. Other odd thing is cpu-z reports multiplier of 21 not 20, and 16 when very idle, but I read that this is normal, though I don't understand the 21 part. Would love to hear from other people overclocking this EX58-UD5.

 

edit: now going 180 bus (3.6Ghz) at 6x memory multiplier. I know I can push the memory to both higher speed and tighter timings; just working on the CPU for now. It boots XP, but not clear its stable at load; I need a more powerful (and noisier) fan at the least.

[digital_dreamer]

Running the new Voodoo 9.5 kernel, now.

Keyed in "busratio=20" string as the kernel flag in the apple.boot.plist.

Better performance than the 9.2.2 kernel, plus 64-bit support that the Modbin 9.4 didn't provide.

 

I'm working on providing the kexts, install options, and instructions. Hope to be done this weekend.

 

I don't have the Thermalright Ultra-120 heatsink, yet. It just shipped, however.

Running 3.2GHz on the stock heatsink isn't a big deal if you're not pushing it too hard for too long. Gotta watch those temps, which you can only do in Windows or the BIOS, unfortunately. The Core i7 does have a reputation for running much hotter under load than the previous C2D CPUs. Given that the temps are directly related to load, I'll be keeping it easy until the heatsink upgrade.

 

regards,

MAJ

[luh3417]

For the record, I have a Thermalright Ultra 120a, not a TRUE (ThermalRight Ultra Extreme).

With this, I had to buy an additional kit with top pressure plate and back plate for the i7.

And a separate fan. Seems like there aren't all that many HSF kits for the i7 mount yet.

 

For the record, IMHO an OC system either runs OCCT torture test for 8 hour straight or it doesn't.

When I apply the full load, it heats up to 60 within seconds, then over the next few minutes heads

towards 70. And this is no stock heatsink. You'll soon have a great easy OC, don't push your luck...

[mattrb]

I would be very happy to use mac versions of the following if anyone knows of any.

 

- OCCT for generating loads on all cores

- Everest for measuring sensors

- cpu-z for seeing the RAM SPD speeds and confirming muliplier

- CoreTemp for monitoring temperatures and noting VID

 

Here is CPU-Z for the OSX!

Its called CPU-X, and it was made by brother netkas!

CPU-X

[digital_dreamer]

Funny. luh3417, you quoted the very same article and paragraphs from legionhardware.com as I did on a arstechnica.com forum when people were bemoaning the fixed multiplier in the 920.

 

regards,

MAJ