NEW Intel P55 Mobos & Core i7 860 / i5 750 CPU LGA1156

[tomek_mk2]

Thanks Tony's guide and a little bit of googling i'm running Snow Leopard without any problems (except sleep). My config:

 

Gigabyte P55M-UD2 + Intel Core i5

 

Gigabyte Radeon 4850 512 MB

 

2x2GB Patriot 1333 RAM

 

2x WesterDigitall 1TB (Green Line)

 

Petnagram WiFi N USB Stick

 

PCIe to Express Card interface

 

RME HDSPe Express Card + RME RMP audio interface

 

AKAI MPK 49 MIDI Controller

 

Native Instruments Maschine Controller

 

Software: Ableton Live 8.09 + Native Instruments Komplete 6

 

I repeat everything is perfectly working, but sleep (Tony: Any sleep progress?)

 

 

 

Thanks Tony very very much

 

Tomek

[snokarver]

I would have to disagree with you for several reasons:

 

1. Some drives support TRIM, and although 10.6.2 sure doesn't, Apple will most likely build support for it very soon (10.5.7 at the latest), since they not only already have SSD's as in option in their laptops, but have a keen interest in making them a worthwhile upgrade (they make hefty profits on them). Most people coughing up an extra $200+ for these drives aren't basic consumers but power users, and they will know what technology they are buying and wether or not it supports important technologies such as TRIM.

 

Apple has offered a SSD option for quite some time and never even attempted to add TRIM to OS X. Right now no OS has it except Windows 7. Plus TRIM support is somewhat volatile. It's going to take Apple a while to implement it, and it's currently not even under development. So there's no chance for there to be support for it "very soon."

 

Looking at the performance hit these SSDs take when run under OS X, I doubt most people buying them are aware of just how bad the hit is.

 

2. You only really notice a huge slowdown if you constantly delete and re-write on the SSD (since the issue arises from "deleted" blocks having to be removed as new ones are being written). I am looking to simply install the OS and all my applications on a SSD, as most people would, and unless I was very indecisive as to what to what programs I wanted, or if I reached the full capacity of the drive, I would notice no slowdown in write speed.

 

Which is what constantly happens with swap files. All you have to do is copy one large file to the drive, and after you delete it those blocks are filled. Then the problems will start occurring until the drive is zeroed. You don't have to constantly delete and rewrite, just delete one big file and the problem starts.

 

3. Keep in mind that this performance decrease is for write speed, not read speed. Although it will take longer to save to the drive, data will still be accessed many, many times quicker than any RAID of HDD's.

 

That's to say that, in terms of the performance gains in accessing/running applications, booting the OS, opening files, you will immediately see extraordinary speed boosts, and continue to enjoy the speed of the drive without it degrading at all.

 

The performance will most certainly degrade over time. That's what all the reports are and that's the experience I have with my SSD.

 

In my opinion, read speeds are what make SSD's worth the price. Even if, over time, saving to them can slow down, access time can still be at an astounding 250MB/s, and that will never change over the life of the drive.

 

Considering there are platter drives approaching 150MB/s without the problems SSDs have without TRIM, one is much better off with one of those. My SSD sold for over $600 a year ago, and now it's going for about $200. One is much better off getting a drive they know will perform consistently now, and then getting a SSD later when their problems with OS X are gone. Considering how fast prices are dropping and how fast the SSD technology is changing, it doesn't make a lot of sense to drop a ton of money on a drive that, before long, will end up with 10MB/s write speeds.

 

I still use my SSD as my boot drive and for most of my apps. But if the drive hadn't been given to me I certainly wouldn't have bought one.

[goldenaustin]

So on the topic of SSDs and write degradation over time, is this "phenomena" permanent? Or can I simply reformat the SSD and start over again good as new? Or better yet, take a backup, and then later on, reformat the SSD, and then restore from the backup?

[profdre]

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/190717 Just a quick and dirty 3,6 GHz and max. 58 °C (4 cores encoding) and Vcore 1,25 V!

[profdre]

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/190717 Just a quick and dirty 3,6 GHz and max. 58 °C (4 cores encoding) and Vcore 1,25 V!

 

What about this? Seems to be the fastest i5 Hackintosh on Geekbench: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/190743 Just raised Vcore to 1,27 V..don't know if it's really stable but posting right now from the 4 GHz machine BOINC is running and maxing out all cores...63 °C max. (21 °C in my room)

[Adony]

Ok i've progressed a lot thanks to your advice. Now, graphics are working. The problems are :

 

- Still no sound !! I did like you said, installed the two kexts (AppleHDA and HDAEnabler) with kext helper, restore the caches, repaired with disk utility, rebooted... But the sound is still not working. Do I have to remove something ? I did tony's method before so maybe I have to clean (but I doubt it). When I boot, i have a line saying something like "unable to load ****.AppleHDA.kext".

 

- I installed my Dlink wifi N card without any problem but I don't detect any network. When I am under windows I can see 5 of them (with low power but still...)

 

- I plugged an old usb bluetooth dongle (Intuix I think) and it installed by itself. My mighty mouse works but as soon as i left i for a while without touching, the pointer becomes laggy... I think the mouse is entering sleep mode and reactivation doesn't work very well with this dongle. Is there any software trick or do i need to get a new dongle ?

 

- One last problem : flash videos through safari and firefox are working excepted on one web site : gametrailers.com. The pre-video ad starts, then stops at half and the video never loads. That may no sound like a big issue but I wonder if other people are experiencing it. It shows however that this is not 100% functional. And I'd like to watch videos on gametrailers I think it may be because of the gaphic card (4890 for me).

 

Thanks again for your help and please comment these four issues

 

 

One last thing : when i want to boot back on my windows 7 disk I have to set bios parameters to defaults (mainly AHCI to SATA) or boot fails... is there a way to skip this ? Maybe it does when you install windows after snow leopard, which is not my case.

[theotherone]

So, if there is still someone out there in doubt, i freaked out my GIGABYTE P55M-UD2-install today (see my sig):

 

I installed the board in a bigger case and added as much HDs as i can, so ALL SATA-Slots are filled and working. If this wasn't enough, i even added a older Highpoint PCI-x Raid-card and added 2 x 1,5 TB as a stripe to it (10.6-compatible drivers available). And i also filled the last remaining pci-slot (one slot occupied from the ZOTAC GTX 260) with an additional GIG-Ethernet Card. So, internally there is nearly everything connected what the Board has to offer (i don't bother with IDE or Floppy, so this is unused).

 

Because the Machine is outside my room in a cool place, i connected externally a lot of long 5m cables for the 24" & 22" Screens, several 5m USB-Extender cables, a 5 m FireWire 400 cable. So i am sitting in an absolute silence room. I have a DVB-T USB Box connected with eyetv, a usb-cardreader for banking, creative x-fi usb-sound, scanners and several other devices. I even checked the optical sound-out, which worked flawlessly.

 

So even under this "heavy load"-condition the tonymac-install on my board and the nearly 10 internal HDs, internal Sound, external USB/eSATA, FireWire, all running rock-solid, stable and cool (running over night). I couldn't be happier!

 

So, the GA-P55M-UD2 is a great Board and a absolute bargain, i think one of the best buys in the still new P55-Area.

 

Thanks to all who contributed!

 

What's missing? Sleep (not important to me). Other then that there is only one cosmetic thing: System-Profiler didn't "see" my internal-sata-sockets since i have used all of them (but they work and are shown and usable under diskutility and finder).

[goldenaustin]

What about this? Seems to be the fastest i5 Hackintosh on Geekbench: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/190743 Just raised Vcore to 1,27 V..don't know if it's really stable but posting right now from the 4 GHz machine BOINC is running and maxing out all cores...63 °C max. (21 °C in my room)

 

That's because I didn't post my i5 score of 10700, although I'm running at 4.2. I'd rather have your score at 4.0 than mine at 4.2. I'm seeing high 60's in prime95 under Windows and mid 70's using Linx, but I haven't tried BOINC.

[joechip123]

Well, I seem to have narrowed down the issue: I got out my old 5400RPM laptop HD and put it inside my tower, then I booted into my regular HD's install of SL by plugging in my USB key and interrupting the Chameleon installer. Then I followed Tony's alternate method #1, installing SL onto my 5400 RPM drive. That install boots perfectly. So I tried installing SL onto my 7200 RPM drive (the one I've been trying to install to this whole time) using exactly the same method - booting off of the 5400 RPM drive and using Tony's alternate method #1, and same damn problem:

 

boot0: GPT

boot0: testing

boot0: testing

boot0: error

 

I tried swapping the power and SATA cables of the drives, and got exactly the same result. I just tried restoring my 7200 RPM drive from the 5400 RPM one, and still no dice. WTF is wrong with this drive? Any idea of how I fix it? Having to interrupt the boot process of my 5400 RPM drive isn't a good permanent solution...

 

If it makes any difference, my HDD I'm trying to use is a WD Caviar Green 1.5TB SATA drive.

[goldenaustin]

Hey thank you alot

I got the sound and all to work. Did you get the sleep to work though?

 

Now it's just my RAM. I activated the profile in the BIOS, and it says its a 1600 but in SL it keeps on saying it's at 1333. Is there anything else I need to change?

 

Thank you again

 

Great to hear. I tried to get sleep to work at some point, but ran into boot issues, so I skipped it. It wasn't a big issue for me. Where are you looking at for your RAM info? If I remember correctly, I thought those values were static values specified in the smbios.plist file. I'll have to double check tomorrow morning though.

 

Well, I seem to have narrowed down the issue: I got out my old 5400RPM laptop HD and put it inside my tower, then I booted into my regular HD's install of SL by plugging in my USB key and interrupting the Chameleon installer. Then I followed Tony's alternate method #1, installing SL onto my 5400 RPM drive. That install boots perfectly. So I tried installing SL onto my 7200 RPM drive (the one I've been trying to install to this whole time) using exactly the same method - booting off of the 5400 RPM drive and using Tony's alternate method #1, and same damn problem:

 

boot0: GPT

boot0: testing

boot0: testing

boot0: error

 

I tried swapping the power and SATA cables of the drives, and got exactly the same result. I just tried restoring my 7200 RPM drive from the 5400 RPM one, and still no dice. WTF is wrong with this drive? Any idea of how I fix it? Having to interrupt the boot process of my 5400 RPM drive isn't a good permanent solution...

 

If it makes any difference, my HDD I'm trying to use is a WD Caviar Green 1.5TB SATA drive.

 

I have the same problem when I make a clone of my working drive, then try to boot off the clone. I'm thinking about trying to make the partition "active" using fdisk as described here:

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22844

[aushack]

OK, since the issues in my last post, ive managed to get 10.6.0 installed on an external USB hard drive and installed PC EFI and the necessary files from tonymacx86's retail P55 guide on it, but it now hangs at

 

AppleAHCIDiskQueueManager::sentPowerState(0x6a62500, 2 -> 1) timed out after 100105 ms

 

anyone know how to get passed this so i can finally boot into 10.6.0? is it because Im using an external USB drive rather than a SATA drive? just want to get to the desktop so i can prepare my SATA hard drive properly and then finally update to a 10.6.2 vanilla install.

[profdre]

Well, I seem to have narrowed down the issue: I got out my old 5400RPM laptop HD and put it inside my tower, then I booted into my regular HD's install of SL by plugging in my USB key and interrupting the Chameleon installer. Then I followed Tony's alternate method #1, installing SL onto my 5400 RPM drive. That install boots perfectly. So I tried installing SL onto my 7200 RPM drive (the one I've been trying to install to this whole time) using exactly the same method - booting off of the 5400 RPM drive and using Tony's alternate method #1, and same damn problem:

 

boot0: GPT

boot0: testing

boot0: testing

boot0: error

 

I tried swapping the power and SATA cables of the drives, and got exactly the same result. I just tried restoring my 7200 RPM drive from the 5400 RPM one, and still no dice. WTF is wrong with this drive? Any idea of how I fix it? Having to interrupt the boot process of my 5400 RPM drive isn't a good permanent solution...

 

If it makes any difference, my HDD I'm trying to use is a WD Caviar Green 1.5TB SATA drive.

 

I know this error...all you have to do is reinstalling PC EFI 10.1 on your boot drive and then you have to replace the bootfile...seems like the bootloader isn't copied when you're cloning your drive...

[Adony]

Ok i've progressed a lot thanks to your advice. Now, graphics are working. The problems are :

 

- Still no sound !! I did like you said, installed the two kexts (AppleHDA and HDAEnabler) with kext helper, restore the caches, repaired with disk utility, rebooted... But the sound is still not working. Do I have to remove something ? I did tony's method before so maybe I have to clean (but I doubt it). When I boot, i have a line saying something like "unable to load ****.AppleHDA.kext".

 

- I installed my Dlink wifi N card without any problem but I don't detect any network. When I am under windows I can see 5 of them (with low power but still...)

 

- I plugged an old usb bluetooth dongle (Intuix I think) and it installed by itself. My mighty mouse works but as soon as i left i for a while without touching, the pointer becomes laggy... I think the mouse is entering sleep mode and reactivation doesn't work very well with this dongle. Is there any software trick or do i need to get a new dongle ?

 

- One last problem : flash videos through safari and firefox are working excepted on one web site : gametrailers.com. The pre-video ad starts, then stops at half and the video never loads. That may no sound like a big issue but I wonder if other people are experiencing it. It shows however that this is not 100% functional. And I'd like to watch videos on gametrailers I think it may be because of the gaphic card (4890 for me).

 

Thanks again for your help and please comment these four issues

 

 

One last thing : when i want to boot back on my windows 7 disk I have to set bios parameters to defaults (mainly AHCI to SATA) or boot fails... is there a way to skip this ? Maybe it does when you install windows after snow leopard, which is not my case.

 

 

Ok good news : the sound works and it solved the flash videos problem. I just had to remove the LegacyAppleHDA.kext (or something like that) from my /Extra/Extensions folder. Apparently there was a conflict with other files.

 

Eeverything is working now, excepted the wifi range and my old dangle. I didn't try sleep neither.

[tonymacx86]

Ok good news : the sound works and it solved the flash videos problem. I just had to remove the LegacyAppleHDA.kext (or something like that) from my /Extra/Extensions folder. Apparently there was a conflict with other files.

 

Eeverything is working now, excepted the wifi range and my old dangle. I didn't try sleep neither.

 

Good to hear you got the issue solved! Just put up a few new posts- including a dual boot guide for Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

[lectrcman]

Yes, they should and it's nice that they actually work on the UD2...but you're right, they must work, elsewise the mobo would be useless for a Hackintosh...I'm just wondering why they don't work on the UD4(P) and I'm not the only one with this problem...and you have also installed using tonymacx86's method? Or do you included any other driver for the S-ATA chip? I think on the UD4 the JMicronATA kext is necessary for the 2 grey Gigabyte ports, am I right?

 

I am using a UD4P and they work because my HD's and BD drive are hooked to them. System Profiler shows them as unknown controller but they work fine.

[jhenley01]

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/190717 Just a quick and dirty 3,6 GHz and max. 58 °C (4 cores encoding) and Vcore 1,25 V!

 

I have you beat by a hair at 9866. I'm running an i5 OC'd to 3.67 at stock voltage as well. Are you doing anything special to get your temps that low? I installed a massive Freezer 7 heatsink and 2 extra case fans but am still staying in the high 60's to low 70's in Prime95. BTW the new i7 iMacs are only scoring 9638 on Geekbench so big win to us overclockers!

[capdog]

Regarding SSD drives, take a look at the Anandtech article. Some are worse than others. But the Intel X25-M G2 drives do not degrade that badly, and even once they are completely 'used', the performance levels out (once each write requires a complete cycle), and when they get to that point they are still orders of magnitude faster than a WD Velociraptor.

 

You can always clone your drive off, and then Smart erase the drive, then clone your data back, restoring performance. Doing that every six months is no big deal if you're a power user.

 

Or wait until Intel releases TRIM support firmware (hopefully next few weeks), there will probably be a OS-independent method of doing it for various filesystems (hopefully included HFS+), then you don't even have to clone the drive.

[I am Freak]

Here is a fix for DSDT for HPET ( no more need for NullCPUPM.kext ) on GA-P55-UD4, Bios version F3.

Not tested on others.

 

Original Code:

Device (HPET)
			{
				Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0103"))
				Name (ATT3, ResourceTemplate ()
				{
					IRQNoFlags ()
						{0}
					IRQNoFlags ()
						{8}
					Memory32Fixed (ReadWrite,
						0xFED00000,		 // Address Base
						0x00000400,		 // Address Length
						)
				})
				Name (ATT4, ResourceTemplate ()
				{
				})
				Method (_STA, 0, NotSerialized)
				{
					If (LGreaterEqual (OSFX, 0x03))
					{
						If (HPTF)
						{
							Return (0x0F)
						}
						Else
						{
							Return (0x00)
						}
					}
					Else
					{
						Return (0x00)
					}
				}

				Method (_CRS, 0, NotSerialized)
				{
					If (LGreaterEqual (OSFX, 0x03))
					{
						If (HPTF)
						{
							Return (ATT3)
						}
						Else
						{
							Return (ATT4)
						}
					}
					Else
					{
						Return (ATT4)
					}
				}
			}

 

Fixed Code:

Device (HPET)
			{
				Name (_HID, EisaId ("PNP0103"))
				Name (ATT3, ResourceTemplate ()
				{
					IRQNoFlags ()
						{0}
					IRQNoFlags ()
						{8}
					Memory32Fixed (ReadWrite,
						0xFED00000,		 // Address Base
						0x00000400,		 // Address Length
						)
				})
				Name (ATT4, ResourceTemplate ()
				{
				})
				Method (_STA, 0, NotSerialized)
				{
					Return (0x0F)
				}

				Method (_CRS, 0, NotSerialized)
				{
					Return (ATT3)
				}
			}

[joechip123]

I have the same problem when I make a clone of my working drive, then try to boot off the clone. I'm thinking about trying to make the partition "active" using fdisk as described here:

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22844

 

I've tried that, and no luck. It worked to set my computer to boot off of the OSX partition on my 5400 RPM drive (mainly for Windows). My partition is marked as active on my 7200 RPM drive (the one I want to boot from by default but gets the boot0:error), but I've still got the same issue. I'm pretty convinced it's some little thing in those settings though. I just don't know anything about how that stuff works...

 

Anyone have any other ideas?

[goldenaustin]

I've tried that, and no luck. It worked to set my computer to boot off of the OSX partition on my 5400 RPM drive (mainly for Windows). My partition is marked as active on my 7200 RPM drive (the one I want to boot from by default but gets the boot0:error), but I've still got the same issue. I'm pretty convinced it's some little thing in those settings though. I just don't know anything about how that stuff works...

 

Anyone have any other ideas?

 

Ah, just reread your original post, and I'm guessing you have a 1.5TB partition. Are you seeing an HFS+ error instead of what you actually posted? I actually got passed my problem and I'm also using a 1.5TB green.

[aushack]

WOO! ive finally got a 10.6.2 vanilla install working on my P55-UD4P with a Core i5 and a 4870 using tonymacx86's retail P55 guide . its very snappy and score about 6380 on Geekbench.

 

but i cant get the audio working. is this because i have the Realtek 889A compared to tonymacx86's 888B? i tried installing the 10.6.1 AppleHDA as in the retail guide, but after a reboot no sound. so i tried disabling AppleHDA by adding ".bak" on the end of and then tried reinstalling the Legacy 888A kext again. but now i get a kernel panic on boot.

 

how do i boot back in and get sound working on a UD4P with the Realtek 889A? thanks

[Treky]

WOO! ive finally got a 10.6.2 vanilla install working on my P55-UD4P with a Core i5 and a 4870 using tonymacx86's retail P55 guide . its very snappy and score about 6380 on Geekbench.

 

but i cant get the audio working. is this because i have the Realtek 889A compared to tonymacx86's 888B? i tried installing the 10.6.1 AppleHDA as in the retail guide, but after a reboot no sound. so i tried disabling AppleHDA by adding ".bak" on the end of and then tried reinstalling the Legacy 888A kext again. but now i get a kernel panic on boot.

 

how do i boot back in and get sound working on a UD4P with the Realtek 889A? thanks

AppleHDA.kext of MAC OS X 10.6.0 (10.6.1 dosen't update it) in combination with LegacyHDA.kext for ACL889 in extra/extensions folder work without problems, except the flood of error messages by starting the computer. LegacyHDA.kext is not a audio driver, it include only a config file, so it need AppleHDA.kext. I modified my dsdt.aml HDEF section too, not sure whether it is necessary with LegacyHDA.

The use of an older extension and the much errors make me a bit stomachache when I think on the feature updates.

[joechip123]

Ah, just reread your original post, and I'm guessing you have a 1.5TB partition. Are you seeing an HFS+ error instead of what you actually posted? I actually got passed my problem and I'm also using a 1.5TB green.

 

I haven't seen an HFS+ error. If there was one, where would I see it?

[aushack]

AppleHDA.kext of MAC OS X 10.6.0 (10.6.1 dosen't update it) in combination with LegacyHDA.kext for ACL889 in extra/extensions folder work without problems, except the flood of error messages by starting the computer. LegacyHDA.kext is not a audio driver, it include only a config file, so it need AppleHDA.kext. I modified my dsdt.aml HDEF section too, not sure whether it is necessary with LegacyHDA.

The use of an older extension and the much errors make me a bit stomachache when I think on the feature updates.

 

thanks. oh so you dont put LegacyHDA in Extensions? you just install AppleHDA from 10.6.0 using Kext Helper and then use Kext Utility on the two Extensions folders?

 

how do i get back to the desktop it keeps panicking? ive tried safe boot, boot without kext caches and renaming AppleHDA correctly and then recreating the kext cache in single user mode, but i dont think i did it right. any pointers? remove LegacyHDA, create kext cache?

 

also can you get your Intel P55 sata ports working? i could only install and boot into OS X from the Gigabyte ports and my Windows 7 drive doesnt show in Finder when in the P55 sata port. ive tried AHCI on the Intel ports in the BIOS.

 

sorry for all the questions

[goldenaustin]

I haven't seen an HFS+ error. If there was one, where would I see it?

 

It would be one of the Boot0: lines prior to the Boot0: error line. Here's my clone and boot steps I followed:

 

1) partition the 1.5 to two smaller partitions, using GUID

2) installer Chameleon boot loader along with the modified boot file

3) clone the drive using CCC or disk utilty, but make sure you uncheck that files will overwritten. ie. we don't want to overwrite anything from Chameleon

4) Make partition active using the steps in post #3 of this thread, and not the thread I referenced before:

 

1. boot with -s option.

2. fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0

3. flag <partition no. where OSX is installed>

4. write

5. update

6. quit

7. reboot.

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...amp;mode=linear

 

Hope this works, since our errors, and same drive have me very suspicous.