XYMer's Home away from Home

Ok so I bought yet another powersupply because the previous Hackintosh/PC/piece of garbage seemed to have a powersupply that died. I had no way (that I know of, seeing as I don’t have an MCSE certification) to test it, so I purchased another powersupply. Well, it did the same thing as before: powerbutton on = fans whirred up for a second as did the LEDs, then it quickly faded away. Pushed power again, same crap. Seems the powersupply was just fine and dandy.

SO!!!!

Is it the CPU or the motherboard that is faulty? And how do I test? I haven’t exactly got a secret laboratory in my mother’s basement (sorry, she died back in 2001) so my options are limited. How can I figure out what component died without proper test equipment? It’s either the Tonymacx86-approved Gigabyte GA-Z97M-DS3H or the Intel i5-4670K CPU (both purchased brand-new two years ago). The thing just up and ate shit one night after I was watching a movie from the external hard drive; I woke up in the middle of the night (I always fall asleep watching movies, even the most exciting action movies put me to sleep) and the computer was powered off… so I pushed the power button (see above: powerbutton on = fans whirred up for a second as did the LEDs, then it quickly faded away. Pushed power again, same crap) yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda and another yadda. The thing was working fine until it ate it’s own balls.

Now, if it is the motherboard (I would suspect these things are pumped out by the hundreds of thousands without proper testing) then how do I test it? If it is the CPU (which it is my understanding Intel doesn’t let SHIT CRAP GARBAGE out into the wild, hence the jacked-up-as-compared-to-AMD-CPUs pricetag) then how do I test it?

Seriously, these Hackintosh projects are going to bankrupt me. Why do I keep falling for this shit time after time??? To date (since 2013) I seem to have invested close to $4,500.00 into these retardo-asscrap waste of time Hackintosh projects. I’d be better off investing in blowjobs from toothless methed-out street hookers or taking up heroin use or something.

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

Do you have a decent flashlight and magnifying glass? Take a couple of sweeps across the motherboard slowly and look for bulging/leaking capacitors. If the system is shutting down immediately like that, it's almost certainly the motherboard. Which in turn almost assuredly means the CPU is fried as well.

The only way to check the CPU is visually, looking for melted and/or singed pins on its underside, which requires removing the HS/F. Check the mobo first and if you find no signs of damage there, check the CPU. And the next time you power it up, leave the case open so you can actually watch the motherboard in operation as you do so. The last computer I ran into with a malfunctioning PSU worked fine on a new power supply once, and once only. Then the very next time I tried a totally brand new PSU, it turned on, began smoking, and immediately caught fire. Had I not been there with the case open and ready to pull the plug instantly, my house would have burned down.

You're looking for bulging capacitors and scorched VRMs. Find either, and you've got a dead system.

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I'd recommend investing in a SmartUPS, though it needs to be one scaled big enough to handle your equipment. Which primarily will depend on the wattage of the PSU you stick inside. I have a 1500VA UPS with a 750W PSU but I also want 15-20 minutes of runtime on battery since my local monopoly drops power regularly.

Thanks guys for the advice. I shall inspect using the trusty iPhone camera (LOL my eyesight is shit these days, and still I haven’t gone to see an optometrist). Really crappy that bad capacitors are capable of taking out the CPU as well. Downward spiral effect. Meanwhile am going to test the four sticks of Corsair Vengeance RAM (1600 speed if I remember correctly, 4 x 4BG modules) in one of the two remaining (there were 8 in total over the span of time) PCs/Hackintoshes… if it’s still good maybe someone on eBay might buy it.

(edit after a handful of precious minutes of my seemingly wasted life )

No sign of leaking or bulging capacitors. I might—should I feel adventurous, and after a handful of beers—try plopping the CPU into one of the remaining two Z97 based systems to see if it still works.

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

I suggest you forego the beers. You're going to need reaction speed if anything catches fire. Not joking there.

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Keep a fire extinguisher handy.

My doc sent me to an optometrist. My eyes are fine, just old. Reading glasses it is.

How coincidental, my wife bought me reading glasses last week! Eyes were better made when we were young.

Thread hijacking here. I just bought APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 900VA for secondary stuff, and it seems ok to me. I am then considering buying a BR900GI APC UPS 1500 VA UPS APC 1500 VA (BR1500GI) and the related APC BR24BPG Back-UPS Pro External Battery Pack (for 1500VA Back-UPS Pro models). Any opinions if this bigger one is good for a PC and 55" TV as the display? My choices seem to be APC or CyberPower, but there does not seem to be any other option in this setup, that does not cost too much.

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A couple jobs ago I had the first generation of the Back-UPS Pro with the battery pack. Worked fine. Only problem is the protection is substantially lower than a Smart-UPS. If you have bad power you'll wish you had opted for a SmartUPS.

Thanks, I had no idea that such difference existed. Then it would be APC Smart-UPS 1500VA/1000W LCD 230V (SMT1500I), or are there better ones in this price class?

Edit: How does the external battery option work with these? Could not find a product that would fit to the battery socket? Do you just connect a similar battery that the case holds inside? 3AM again here, better get to the bed now.

Edit2: Ah it is just the connector for the internal battery, there does not seem to be external battery for this device.

Edit 3: Seems that the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 1500, 230V (BR1500GI) with external battery device gives me some 100 minutes time on battery time, and the APC Smart-UPS C 2000VA LCD 230V (SMC2000I) gives me just a few minutes more. The APC Smart-UPS 1500VA LCD 230V costs me ฿22,500, and the BR1500GI with the external power back costs ฿13,000 and the powerpack ฿5,790 altogether ฿18790.

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The rule of thumb is get a UPS that is rated to handle the load of your PC's power supply + 10%. This gives you enough headroom for your PC + Display + modem/router/gateway needs so you can at least safely shut down. Mine would be a harder target to hit within any reasonable price range because my system has a 1200w PSU in it and a TV for a display, in addition to an ASUS RT-AC88U router and Arris SB8200 modem. Granted I should never really hit that without going CrossFireX/SLI, but it pays to be cautious.

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I would need a runtime for about one hour. My current longer term solution is to start Toyota Hilux for the inverter and laptop.

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If you want external battery packs you can look at the Smart-UPS XL line. Those can handle multiple battery packs and runtime can easily go into the hours, however the larger XLs need a 220V twistlock input in the US. They range from expensive to really expensive, however you can hook up an entire rack of equipment to one via a PDU and just keep adding battery packs until you find a happy medium for load vs. runtime. The Back-UPS Pro, unless something changed, only allowed a single external battery, so if you only get 30 minutes of runtime then all you can do is buy another Back-UPS Pro and spread your load out across UPSes.

Smart-UPS does a better job of filtering power, whereas Back-UPS is basically always on wall power until the power jumps above or drops below a set amount (the exact point is configurable with the Windows software client). With the Back-UPS there is a delay before it intervenes, with the Smart-UPS there is virtually no delay. Smart-UPS units tend to go through batteries more often because it shunts power to and from the battery with every event, Back-UPS tends to let everything through until it gets really bad. I'd rather buy lead-acid batteries than computer components.

Looks like getting a diesel generator is cheaper.

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Well well well. Another month, another $100 spent (including shipping costs), and a refurbished direct-from-China Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 arrived to my door yesterday. Since—for the time being—I have no life, I decided this evening to plug the CPU (which I was unable to determine was toast or still working), powersupply, graphics card, RAM, etc. into the motherboard, existing dual-boot HD (10.11.x & Windoze 8.1), put everything back together, and BAM shit still works and boots into both OS flavours (I had to set load defaults in BIOS and reboot, so no real setup other than hardware). What a pleasant surprise. However, I am still concerned that these motherboards just don’t last very long, and seeing as this one is refurbished (no idea what was replaced) clearly it’s days are numbered.

Meanwhile (I see a recurring pattern with my posts frequently involving that word ) I a need to find out if a Radeon R9 290x will support Metal for OS 10.12/10.13/etc.; any ideas if it is supported in either version, or will I pretty much have to count on getting one of the “affordable” $219 (after mail-in rebate) RX 580 Radeons from NewEgg? My quest is to be free from Windows, and have Metal support so that my boys and I can eventually play the latest Unreal and Fortnite (they have been BEGGING ME constantly to get machines set up for Fortnite, apparently it is some kick-ass game that even everyone’s step grandma plays).

All I need now is a “free” (LOL!) day so as to hang around and babysit/hand-hold the High Sierra installation process, because all I have otherwise is evenings… and I am always too worn out to be patient in the evenings. Oh life is fun.

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

All R200 and later GPUs are supported in both Metal 1_1 and 2_1 (v1, v2). You'll be fine. It'll be some time before Apple forces v2 support-only in certain cases. Just remember to boot in verbose mode so you can see what's going on in case issues arise.

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Awesome to know this. Thanks! I’ve also got a Radeon HD 7970 which supposedly “looks like” the same thing as a “Hawaii” Radeon R9 200 series to both macOS and Windoze 8.1, but I’m not betting my last horse on it having true Metal support in macOS. So going forward with the R9 290x it looks like I’ll either need to upgrade to Sierra or just nuke-and-repave and do a freshie install of High Sierra on this system.

Thanks!

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

The 7970 has metal support. It's a GCN 1.0 GPU. All GCN GPUs are supported by Metal.

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7970 is R280X, 7950 is R280. They're the same basic hardware with a different BIOS.

Great stuff!!! Thanks again for all the great help from you amazing subject matter experts!!!

Tonight shortly after 9:10PM the thing decided to just up and reboot itself, I heard the “beep” of a restarting PC… only to turn around and see it boot to the all-too-familiar Windows “No boot disk found” (I cannot remember the exact wording). Seems somehow the HD took a crap all over itself after having been running with the “new” refurbished motherboard in under 24 hours. So, it seemed like the right time to stay up past my old man bedtime; see below.

On a whim—and since I have no life, just work/sleep/eat/shit/repeat—I decided to install High Sierra onto the “newly resurrected” Z97-based Hackintosh with the Radeon R9 290x on a spare 1TB hard drive. Amazingly the installation took under an hour ( ). Sure, I had to fizzlefart around with the Clover boot arguments to actually get the video signal transmitting to the monitor (I honestly don’t remember what I did, but something I changed worked), but it seems to be playing nicely, and is pretending to be a 13,1 21.5” iMac which is just spiffy by my standards. Metal = running, confirmed by throwing it through the RC5-72 OpenCL gauntlet, wherein it is cranking away at a rate of ~3,640 MKeys/sec. Easiest setup of getting audio to work and ethernet as well. Am I getting better at Hackintosh builds/setups/OS install/etc., or is this just luck???

Next step is to attempt to get the amaze-balls-overkill ASRock Z97 Fatal1ty setup (hellofa waste for dual GPU ready PCI slots which surely won’t work in macOS) working with the Radeon HD 7970 with a fresh install of High Sierra. Shame sorta, as it’s been been running fine as a Windoze 8.1 dual Radeon HD 6970 gaming machine for when my sons come and visit for some fun LAN-based Q1/Q2/Q3A/Q3TA/UT/UT2004/etc. fragging action… but I am pretty sure all those games can get along with High Sierra with some help from the interwebs.

Thanks again for your (collectively) help and advice on getting these Hackintosh thingies running “smoothly” (your mileage may vary, mine is measured in yards so it seems).

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

I'm not sure why you're using iMac13,1. You should be using iMac14,2 since you have a dedicated GPU. Your graphics problem likely has at least something to do with the fact you chose a sysdef of an iMac with only an IGP, not a dedicated GPU.

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I went with the automatic Multibeast selection, which was 13,1. Anything I need to know other than changing the system definition to a 14,2 other than selecting it within Multibeast and then lettin’ er rip and restart?

(EDIT)

Nevermind, everything’s working beautifully! I had no idea that a Hackintosh could run this smoothly/flawlessly*.

* so far!

Thanks!

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

Be aware that if you accessed Messages while you had the 13,1 sysdef you might not have access to it properly on the 14,2 sysdef without fixing it first. One thing you want to do ASAP is gather up your serial number that was generated in the SMBIOS section in Clover (use Clover Configurator to mount the EFI partition and then access the config.plist file to get to that), and the MLB number in the Rt Variables section.

Note: Proper use of Clover Configuration without the EFI already mounted is to use the Mount EFI function (it'll tell you which is your boot drive, which is the EFI partition you want), then click the "house" (home) icon to refresh CC, then click the config.plist in the EFI > EFI > CLOVER > config.plist entry.

You'll need these serial and MLB numbers if you change sysdefs later and wish to retain full Messages functionality.

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I guess I am super old-as-dirt-school, as I only use messaging on my iPhone. Desktop Hackintoshes for the time being are purely for novelty and proof-of-concept until I am comfortable with their quirks/workarounds, and then I shall rely on one for all of my important stuff.

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women

When Apple asked you to enter your Apple ID, did you give it to them, or did you hit the relatively hard to find skip button?

I was able to install/configure/setup macOS High Sierra without entering in my Apple ID. I haven’t yet found myself using one of the two Hackintoshes currently in my possession for anything real (I honestly haven’t had time for the past few weeks to even get that far) so my Apple ID being associated with either machine is still an idea whose time is not yet ripe for the picking.

-he who stacks pork

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Powerbook 180, System 7.1, 100MB HD, 8MB
Surly 1x1, 9:zero:7 Whiteout, Chinese 29er, Salsa Juan Solo, Gary Fisher Rig, Surly Instigator, Surly Troll, Ahrens Slalom, Frankendale Cannonstein 650b
I enjoy picnics on the beach with hot and crazy women