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