My second hackintosh. For some information on my motivation for building this machine, see hackintosh.

hackintosh hardware

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  case	Thermaltake Tower 900 Snow Edition	Tower 900	1	$219.99	$219.99
  power supply	Seasonic USA X-Series 660W modular ATX power supply, 80 PLUS Gold certified	SS660KMACTPFCF3	1	$149.99	$149.99
  motherboard	Asus Prime X299 Deluxe	Prime X299-Deluxe	1	$365.69	$365.69
  CPU	Intel Core i9-7940X 14-core processor	i9-7940X	1	$1129.99	$1129.99
  CPU waterblock	EK-FB ASUS PRIME X299 RGB Monoblock - Nickel	EK-FB monoblock	1	$150.00	$150.00
  RAM	Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 64GB (8x8) DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) DRAM	CMW64GX4M8C3200C16W	1	$629.99	$629.99
  NVMe SSDs	Samsung 970 EVO M.2 2280 1TB	MZ-V7E1T0BW	2	$229.99	$459.98
  hard drive	Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7,200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive	WD5002AALX	1	$94.99	$94.99
  video card			1	$289.99	$289.99
  video waterblock	Watercool HEATKILLER IV for RX Vega 56 and 64 - Acrylic/Nickel	15047	1	$144.95	$144.95
  case fans	Xigmatek XLF-F1453 140mm LED case fan	XLF-F1453	4	$19.99	$79.96
  radiator fans	Noctua NF-F12 PWM cooling fan	NF-F12 PWM	2	$19.49	$38.98
  Total					$3754.50

August 30, 2012

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  Microsoft Office 2011	Office 2011 for Mac	Office 2011 for Mac	1	$9.95	$9.95
  Total					$9.95

August 5, 2012

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  Numbers	Spreadsheets	Numbers	1	$19.99	$19.99
  Keynote	Presentations	Keynote	1	$19.99	$19.99
  Aperture	Photos	Aperture	1	$79.99	$79.99
  Total					$119.97

July 26, 2012

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  HyperDock	window management bindings, window previews from Dock, etc.	HyperDock	1	$9.95	$9.95
  Total					$9.95

• Date	Total
  Aug 30, 2012	$9.95
  Aug 5, 2012	$119.97
  Jul 26, 2012	$9.95
  Total	$139.87

hardware wishlist

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  USB 3.0 card	Orico Fresco 1100 based 4-port USB 3.0 PCIe card	PFU3-4P	1	$28.99	$28.99
  USB 3.0 hub	Anker Uspeed USB 3.0 7 Port Hub + 1 Charging Port	AK-68UPHUB-B8U	1	$47.99	$47.99
  USB 3.0 hub option 2	Satechi 10-port USB 3.0 Hub + 1 Charging Port	UH3-10P	1	$49.99	$49.99
  Total					$126.97

software wishlist

• Part	Description	P/N	Qty.	Unit Price	Total
  Pages	Word processor	Pages	1	$19.99	$19.99
  Total					$19.99

• Category	Total
  hardware wishlist	$126.97
  software wishlist	$19.99
  Total	$146.96

Cooling Effectiveness

Using the Corsair fans, with an ambient temperature of 22C, I saw core temperatures in HWMonitor reported as 51C, 57C, 49C and 51C after 15 minutes at full load. HWMonitor reports ambient as 46C, which is obviously bogus (where does that sensor reading come from?).

A disappointment with the Arc Midi case includes the filter in the top, which points toward it being intended for intake. With it being used as exhaust, it's just restriction and is probably going to be loaded up with dust in little time. It also causes warm air to be recirculated, since my radiator is not as wide as the mesh openings in the top of the case. I'll need to work up a solution to this issue.

A second disappointment is the stupid fan grill in the side door. Ideally the side door would have a window or just be solid. I made my own window from scratch-resistant polycarbonate.

I replaced the Corsair H100 fans with Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans. They're not as effective as the Corsair fans at full load, but they're MUCH quieter. I haven't decided whether or not to switch to using the top as an intake. It's completely against my intuition for air flow, but it would make it easier to clean the top filter (a vacuum would work fine). Right now, it's not like there aren't plenty of escapes for positive pressure... the rear 140mm fan and all the room around the radiator in the top of the case.

I want some additional lighting inside the case. At the moment I'm thinking I'm going to use one of my Luxeon dome light modules. They produce a tremendous amount of light, though I don't have a convenient way to mount one at the moment. However, that problem is relatively easy to solve.

Links

Links

Benchmark results

• Geekbench @ 4.2GHz
• Cinebench @ 4.2GHz
• Heaven v3.0 no AA
• Heaven v3.0 4xAA

Pictures

Manuals

BIOS

Diary

• December 10, 2018
  
  • I put the new Dell U3818DW on a Chief K1D120S monitor arm after mounting the K1D120S on my desk. I like the K1D120S, it works really well and the price was fantastic (clearance-like price). It freed up desk space and made it much easier to clean the top of the raised part of my desk.

    The new Sapphire Pulse RX580 card continues to work well as a replacement for my old GTX570. The GTX570 was causing crashes multiple times per day (when waking from sleep), probably due to crappy Nvidia drivers (the latest). I've had no such issues with the RX580. This was an inexpensive experiment which has worked out well. I can keep my hackintosh for a while longer before building a new desktop computer. I don't game on my desktop, but I will later want to use OpenCL for deep learning, at which point I'll use a new VEGA card with a higher core count CPU than I have right now.

• December 8, 2018
  
  • I rewrote the subsystem ID on my Intel X540-T2 10GBaseT card to make it work with the SmallTree drivers. I did this by booting ubuntu 18 from a USB thumb drive and executing ethtool. It worked fine, the X540-T2 ports now show up as en3 and en4. I may tweak this later to make one of them en0, but that'll mean tweaking things for Messages and other apps that depend on en0.

• November 6, 2014
  
  • I take back what I said yesterday about my hackintosh behaving well. RTC wakeups were still causing crashes while I was at work. At the moment I'm not sure why. But I don't like the idea of my machine waking up every 2 hours anyway, so I installed Sleepwatcher and now have it unloading discoveryd when I put the machine to sleep and reloading it when the machine wakes up. This should stop the RTC maintenance wakeups. I also re-enabled "wake from network" in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences so I can wake up my hackintosh from the outside world when I need to fetch a file from it.

• November 5, 2014
  
  • After much fussing, I finally have my hackintosh behaving as well or better with Yosemite than it was with Mountain Lion. I still only have two CPU P-states while using AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement, 1.6GHz and to 4.2GHz. Actually, I'm not sure that's true since HWSensors says otherwise. I have no SSDT installed, I'm letting Clover do things for me. I can live with this for now.

    I have yet to figure out why I can't completely boot from my OS backup drive. I do have full backups running to it now using the latest Carbon Copy Cloner. And I did install Clover on it, in the EFI partition like my primary boot drive. Same drivers, kernel extensions, etc. And I can boot the OS from that drive when the bootloader runs from my primary drive. It's possible that there's something wonky about my BIOS, I don't know yet. At the moment I'm not going to worry about it too much. The new primary boot drive is a Samsung 850 Pro which will likely outlive the rest of this machine.

    The only thing left is to get a decent USB 3.0 hub and to get Bluetooth working without using the IOGear USB Bluetooth dongle, so I can have Handoff work. I ordered a WiFi card setup from osxwifin.com, which will resolve the issue with the card I have now (which was bogusly sold as an Apple card; it's not!).

• November 2, 2014
  
  • All of my boot problems revolved around bugs in OsxAptioFixDrv.efi. I found a newer version on a forum and installed it. My boot problems are resolved. Note that I have to use the Nvidia Web drivers to get full resolution on my monitors at the moment, which leaves some things to be desired. Maybe I'll eventually upgrade to a GTX680 or some other Kepler card so I can ditch the Nvidia drivers if desired. The ones I'm using are a bit old, only because I was lazy and grabbed some that someone already modified to work with any system definition (I'm using iMac12,2 at the moment).

    I believe I have iMessages working again. The issue was that I had forgotten to transfer my ROM setting from Mountain Lion.

    It looks like SMS via my iPhone works. Yay! AirDrop works too, in both directions (desktop to phone, phone to desktop). I love you Apple!

• November 1, 2014
  
  • After nearly 20 hours of work, I have Yosemite running on my hackintosh. Most of the difficulty in installation revolved around waiting so long (I skipped Mavericks altogether). Getting a Clover USB stick to boot to the installation screen was very difficult. I could not use the latest Clover, I had to back down to r2976. I also had a great deal of difficulty using traditional BIOS (version F12 for my motherboard), and wound up updating to UEFI (version u1l). This alleviated a lot of headaches, but it was still difficult to get my Clover USB stick to boot to the Yosemite installation. Some of this revolved around my video card (Nvidia GTX570), I had to use nv_disable=1 as a boot argument in Clover.

    Further difficulties ensued once I had a Yosemite base installation. I had to install the Nvidia Web drivers and add PatchVBiosBytes to get my GTX570 to run at full resolution. Then I shot myself in the foot trying to get the Bluetooth on my WiFi card to work, and had to use single-user mode from my Clover USB stick to repair what I ahd done (modifying an Info.plist for Bluetooth).

    I have yet to dig into the issues with iCloud, but it should not be difficult.

    So at the moment, I'm alomost back to where I was with Mountain Lion, except for iCloud/iMessages and Bluetooth. I still need to dig into the Nvidia issue of running at full tilt all of the time.

• October 31, 2014
  
  • I went to MicroCenter and bought a 512G Samsung 850 Pro SSD drive so I can finally start working on updating to Yosemite. I skipped Mavericks, which likely means I'm in for some difficulties. Since this machine is my only desktop and my primary computer, I need to use a new drive so I'll have my old one as my backup.

    I hemmed and hawed over which SSD to buy for over a month. The 850 Pro is not cheap. But I've been very happy with my other Samsung SSD drives, and in the end it boiled down to reliability. The 850 Pro carries a 10 year warranty, well above any others in the industry (most are 3 years, some are 5 years). Recovering from a dead drive eats more of my time than the entire price of the drive is worth.

    I also bought a Sandisk Extreme 32G flash drive. This will replace one of my older 16G drives that I intend to use for the Clover and Yosemite bootstrap. I already have a 16G Sandisk Extreme that I use for work, and I've been very happy with it (it's speedy).

    Finally, I bought another Razer Naga mouse to replace my existing one. Razer sucks quality-wise, my old mouse was used less than 100 hours total (I almost never use it or even plug it in since I much prefer my Apple trackpad). The old mouse lights up and the buttons work but the sensor doesn't work. The only reason I bought another Razer is that MicroCenter doesn't have a lot of wired mice that work well with OS X in the store. I don't want Bluetooth or RF when installing a new OS, I need the reliability of a wired USB mouse.

• October 21, 2014
  
  • The Broadcom BCM84360CD card and PCI-E adapter arrived from eBay. I installed the card in the adapter. It looks like it'll work fine, and I'll probably yank out the FL1009-based USB 3.0 card to make room for it. I don't use the FL1009-based board now because...

    I installed GenericUSBXHCI.kext from here. I now have working USB 3.0 ports from my motherboard. Awesome! I need to do this on mom's hackintosh and again on my own when I install Yosemite.

• October 16, 2014
  
  • When I arrived home from work, my Best Fortress 1425 UPS was wailing. The batteries are just over 2 years old. I don't think the batteries are the issue here. This UPS is about 20 years old at this point (it's by far my oldest UPS), it's time to replace it. It doesn't have an HID compliant USB port and I want that in a new UPS.

• October 8, 2014
  
  • I ordered a Broadcom BCM84360CD card and a PCI-E adapter from eBay. As near as I can tell, I need this to have support for Handoff and Continuity in OS X Yosemite. Of course I won't use the WiFi and may or may not use the Bluetooth since my existing Bluetooth dongle works for my purposes.

• July 5, 2014
  
  • I updated my hackintosh to 10.8.5. I had some headaches with audio. Initially, I had no audio at all after the update, which was expected. After using MultiBeat 5.5.5 to update my audio, I still had no audio. I needed to remove the 'npci=0x3000' argument to Clover. Then I had output, but it was very muffled. I had used the "With DSDT" option, which edits the DSDT in-place. Umm, yeah, except it edits the one for Chameleon and I'm using Clover. I copied the new DSDT from /Extra/DSDT.aml to /EFI/ACPI/patched/DSDT.aml and all is well.

• February 22, 2013
  
  • I hooked up my Apple TV. I like it a lot; it just works. I had no problems using AirPlay from my hackintosh to watch a movie ("The Guard"). The AppleTV sees my iTunes collections without trouble. Now if only I could have a solid version of ZFS on OS X for free, I'd change depot's operating system to OS X so I could use it as an iTunes server. I will try running forked-daapd on depot.

    I added a second option for a USB 3.0 hub to my wish list. It's the Satechi UH3-10P, which has 10 USB 3.0 ports plus a charging port.

• February 16, 2013
  
  • I ordered a Moshi Luna keyboard. Since it doesn't have a built-in USB hub like my das keyboard, I also ordered a Satechi Premium 4-port Aluminum USB hub and a 3-meter USB extension cable. This will let me keep my USB Bluetooth adapter near my trackpad, and give me something nearby to plug in my mouse when I need it (almost never these days).

    I also ordered Sanyo eneloop AA batteries with a 4-location charger so I can start using them for my Magic Trackpad. I've been meaning to switch to rechargeables here and elsewhere for ages, to save money and reduce the amount of batteries I recycle. I am thrilled with the Energizer Ultimate lithium so far, but they're expensive and I would rather just use good-quality NiMH rechargeables.

• February 14, 2013
  
  • I got the FL1009-based USB 3.0 card working in my hackintosh. I believe the issue with mom's hackintosh was that I forgot to remove the PXHCD and/or CalDigit kexts. I should be able to get it working on her machine without trouble.

    Worth noting that the molex power header on this card SUCKS. It's very flimsy, and the holes for its latches are way too big so the latches will not stay in place. Hence the header bends awat from the board when trying to install the cable, or after installation if the cable is routed downward. As a result, I wound up drilling a small hole through the PCB to allow a cable tie to be installed to hold the header in place.

• February 7, 2013
  
  • Since I've been having trouble with lynx2mac's ethernet driver for some time (it sometimes fails miserably when waking from sleep, forcing a full power cycle to fix it), I've switched to using the Realtek driver for Lion. So far, it's working fine. I suspect this is really a Realtek hardware problem for which lynx2mac doesn't have a workaround.

• January 29, 2013
  
  • I figured out the problem with my das keyboard and my BIOS. For whatever reason, I need to hold down the key of interest (F12 or DEL, for example) instead of repeatedly pressing it when the BIOS splash screen is up. This is fine for me, and might not be different than the past. I don't go into the BIOS very often.

• January 28, 2013
  
  • I bought a new Samsung 840 Pro Series 512 gigabyte SSD today. Mainly because the price dropped to $467.99, but also because I wanted the faster I/O and the longer warranty than I had with the Samsung 830 SSD. I also wanted the extra disk space; my Samsung 830 was 256 gigabytes, I will now have roughly double the SSD space. The Samsung 830 will go into my 2009 MacBook Pro, which has seemed very slow lately because I've grown accustomed to having SSD. I am in the process of cloning my Samsung 830 to the new 840 right now, using Carbon Copy Cloner. I am using a Kingwin USI-2535 to do the cloning. It is a simple adapter device that lets you plug an IDE or SATA drive into a USB 2.0 port. I looked at some USB 3.0 models, but given that the USB 3.0 is flakey at best on my hackintosh, I decided it wasn't worth the expense. The USI-2535 was dirt cheap at $15.99. I'm assuming it'll work dandy for my MacBook Pro too. It is slow, but it works and I don't expect to use it often.

    I also bought an iogear GBU521 USB Bluetooth adapter, since it supports Bluetooth 4.0 and reportedly works better than the Rocketfish RF-MRBTAD I have been using. This appears to be true; though I had to re-pair my Magic Trackpad after putting the GBU521 in place, it looks like I don't have to wait 30 seconds after wake-from-sleep to use my trackpad now. It starts working immediately after the USB hub in my das keyboard is initialized.

    Finally, I bought a Samsung 840 Pro Series 256 gigabyte SSD for the second hackintosh I'm building for mom. It was on sale at $224.99, as was the Fractal Design Arc Midi case I bought for her. I also bought an EVGA GT640 video card for her. She's not going to be playing any games, it'll work just fine.

    I finished migrating to the new Samsung 840 Pro SSD. One of the things I had forgotten... my installation settings for Clover. I used GPT boot0hfs, following the instructions for creating a FAT-32 filesystem on the EFI partition.

    Samsung 840 Pro performance... I'm seeing 467 MB/sec write, 515 MB/sec read. Not dramatically different than the Samsung 830, but a bit faster and I now have space to breathe.

    Once done, I reconfigured my CarbonCopyCloner scheduled tasks to back up the new SSD. I also started a TimeMachine backup to my MyBookLive.

    One strange thing happened in this process... my das keyboard is no longer able to make the BIOS stop before it jumps to the bootloader. I suspect it has something to do with having the new USB to Bluetooth adapter plugged in to the hub on the das keyboard. I will have to figure it out shortly. Since I needed to be able to get to the boot menu in the BIOS while setting up the new SSD, I plugged my old Unicomp keyboard into one of the front panel USB ports. That worked fine.

• November 1, 2012
  
  • I finally got around to installing the BMW TIS and ETK under the Windows XP virtual machine on my hackintosh. The trick to getting both the MINI and BMW parts in the ETK is to use the 'denver78' password instead of the 'berlin56' password during installation. I continue to hate the java interface in the new versions of the ETK, but I'll live with it. I installed the 8/2007 version of the ETK and the 12/2007 version of the TIS.

• October 23, 2012
  
  • I arrived home today to find my hackintosh in a hung state, and it would not reboot due to the filesystem on the SSD being corrupted. I booted from my Carbon Copy clone disk and repartitioned the SSD and started a restore from my clone backup. I had more crashes, and sometimes was unable to boot. Verbose mode from the bootloader showed crashes at various points, which usually leads me to believe I have a RAM problem. I removed the DIMM from slot 1 on the motherboard and saw the same problems. I removed the DIMM from slot 4 and so far am not having any problems restoring my SSD. 75 gigabytes restored so far in 25 minutes, with about 50 gigabytes to go. Thank goodness I'm good about maintaining backups!

    This is one of those areas where I'm irked that Apple continues to use HFS and abandoned ZFS over licensing issues. HFS remains fairly easy to corrupt, journaled or not. A bad DIMM shouldn't result in the loss of the filesystem. I should also be able to force a filesystem to be mounted read-write if I can mount it read-only. I was able to mount the filesystem on the SSD as read-only, but for the life of me I could not figure out how to mount it read-write. That meant I had to erase it just so I could make it a target for Carbon Copy Cloner.

    I hope I can return the bad DIMM to MicroCenter, I don't really have time for an RMA. A new module is $45 and in stock.

    The slowness of my OS clone drive is annoying. It's a Western Digital Caviar Green. Not so bad for backups and restores, but it's somewhat painful to use as a boot drive, especially compared to the SSD. I really should replace it with a 7,200 or 10,000 rpm drive. But as long as my backups continue to work and I don't completely lose my SSD, I'm O.K.

• October 4, 2012
  
  • I finally got around to installing the Inland USB 3.0 PCIe card. It appears to work fine, at least with USB 2.0 devices. I don't have any USB 3.0 devices to try.

• September 12, 2012
  
  • It's only been a couple of days, but the new gigabit ethernet switch is working fine. I have not tried to quantify its performance, but I'm happy with it. I will buy a second one for the basement later this month. It was inexpensive and makes my computing life a little easier.

• September 7, 2012
  
  • I ordered a gigabit ethernet switch from Amazon, along with some Cat5e patch cables. Given my need to do network backups of a lot of data these days (from my hackintosh and my MacBook Pro), this was long overdue. If the switch I bought works well, I'll order another one for the basement. I've been getting by with 100baseT switches for many years, but the backup times for TimeMachine over 100baseT are unacceptable. It took almost 7 hours to do a full backup of my laptop to my new WD MyBook Live, and it takes equally long to do a full backup of my hackintosh over 100baseT. It's simple arithmetic, and I know my networked drives can handle much higher write rates than what's achievable over 100baseT.

• September 4, 2012
  
  • The keycaps for the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac arrived from wasdkeyboards.com, along with a pair of wire keycap puller tools and the O-rings to cushion the bottom of the keystroke. I installed all of the o-rings and then installed the keycaps. So far, I like the keycaps and the O-rings. The keycaps are an order of magnitude easier to read than the original daskeyboard keycaps, and I think the O-rings are going to teach me to type a little more lightly. They also reduce the noise from the keyboard without losing the click of the Cherry MX blue switches. For me this is a better setup than Cherry MX brown switches. Sort of the best of several worlds... click of Cherry MX blue, almost as quiet overall as Cherry MX brown, and there's cushioning when bottoming out the switches that gives me some of the benefits of Cherry MX black switches.

    We'll see how I feel about this setup after I've used the new setup for a week or two. I do still dislike how cramped parts some areas of the keyboard seem when compared to my old Unicomp buckling spring keyboard. The control keys in particular, since I'm a 20-year emacs user and use emacs keybindings in a number of places (not just in emacs).

• August 30, 2012
  
  • I bought Office 2011 for Mac via the Lear (my place of work) program. My assigned Product ID is 03347-018-8840762-02342. My activation key was FDV83-WC894-26T47-PMCWH-8D92P.

• August 27, 2012
  
  • The keycaps for the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac shipped from wasdkeyboards.com. To be perfectly accurate... the shipping label was created, but it looks like UPS hasn't picked up the box yet. I was hoping that they would be here by Friday, but that's probably unrealistic. Given that this weekend is a holiday weekend, I might not see them until next Tuesday.

    In any event, I'll be thrilled to replace the keycaps with the ones from wasdkeyboards.com. It will resolve my issues and I can go back to not having a lamp shining on my keyboard.

• August 26, 2012
  
  • Having grown tired of the hard-to-read printing on the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard, I ordered custom keycaps for it from wasdkeyboards.com. You can see my design on their website here, and I saved a screenshot here. I had no need for colors, hence I adhered to a monochrome theme. I went with white for all normal keys that produce output in text editors, light gray for most modifier keys, and dark gray for the keys that do something special in combination with the function key near the right control key. Note that I used larger than normal fonts where possible, to make it easier to read the keys in a dimly lit office. I also used the correct symbols on the modifiers that are used by OS X. This makes it a little easier for me to map to them when I see them shown for a hotkey in an OS X menu.

    I also ordered the wire keycap puller and a set of the 40A o-ring dampeners with .4mm travel reduction. I may or may not use the o-ring dampeners, depending on how they feel. My hope is that they reduce the shock to my right hand when I bottom out the keys, without adversely affecting the feel of the keyboard. I think I'll like them, but if not I just won't use them. At a minimum they'll probably be useful in training me ot not bottom out the keys.

• August 25, 2012
  
  • I enabled TRIM on my Samsung 830 SSD by using Trim Enabler from groths.org. So far, so good, but it's only been a couple of hours.

• August 21, 2012
  
  • The daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard arrived from Amazon. I swapped out my Unicomp and swapped in the daskeyboard. The USB hub works as I intended, with my Rocketfish USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter plugged in. I also moved my Razer Naga mouse to the second port on the keyboard's hub, since I don't use it full-time and this makes it easy to unplug and stash in a drawer when it's not in use. And of course all of this freed up one USB port on my hackintosh's case.

    This is the first keyboard I've owned with Cherry MX blue key switches. My first impression is that I like it a lot. It's much lighter touch than my Unicomp, and considerably quieter. However, as expected, I hate the printing on the keycaps; it's too small, and I prefer capital letters over small letters. I'm also certain that the printing is going to wear off quickly, like every white-on-black laser-etched-and-filled keyboard I've owned. There's a reason Unicomp only offered it for a very short time; the longevity is abysmal compared to dye-sublimated keycaps or even light-colored keys with just laser etching.

• August 19, 2012
  
  • I ordered the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard from Amazon. I hate the fact that the keys are black with white-filled laser etching that will inevitably wear off (quickly given how much I type). So assuming I like the keyboard, I'll buy new keycaps for it (a light color with laser etching). Every keyboard I've owned with white lettering on black caps has had the lettering wear off quickly.

    Short story made long... as much as I love my buckling spring keyboards like the one I use now, there are times when I want something slightly lighter in touch and a little bit quieter. I still want clicking for touch typing, just a slightly lighter touch. There isn't a chance in hell I'm ever going to use a rubber-dome type keyboard for daily use, I've been using buckling spring keyboards like the IBM Model M for over 20 years and IMHO non-mechanical keyboards just suck to type on for long periods. There's really no comparison in terms of keyboard quality. Rubber-dome keyboards are inexpensive, but they also suck. In fact any keyboard that requires full depression of the keys sucks for typing. I can live with the keyboard on my MacBook Pro, but I'd never want to use it for long coding sessions.

    Many years ago, I was a passenger in a car accident that damaged a bunch of cartilage in my right hand. I also had two reconstructive surgeries on my right thumb for a Bennett's fracture. For this reason, I can't tolerate keyboards that require me to bottom out the keyswitch to have a character transmitted. They cause daily pain, not to mention the frustration of their lack of longevity. A quality mechanical keyboard will last through decades of daily use, and not require one to bototm out the keys to get a character. They also never produce double hits.

    If I were buying for an operating system other than OS X, I'd probably buy a keyboard with Topre switches. They're probably the nicest available for typing, and they're available in 55g and 45g weights. However, I've not seen one made for the Mac, so they have the wrong labelling and are missing some of the special functions on the top row of function keys. I've been living with such issues for a long time using my Unicomp buckling spring keyboards, but I want to have the functions as I'm now using my hackintosh as my primary desktop. I also want the extra USB ports on the daskeyboard; one will hold my USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter for my magic trackpad, and the other will either be used for USB flash drives or for a Mobee Power Bar to keep my Magic Trackpad charged at all times. I've been using AA alkaline batteries in my Magic Trackpad, and it conusmes a pair of them about once a month. Given that I essentially never move it and it sits right next to my keyboard, I could use a 6" USB to micro USB cable plugged into the keyboard to keep my Magic Trackpad charged at all times. On the rare occasion I need to use my Razer Naga mouse (mostly when playing a game), I'll unplug it. That happens less than once a month. The same injury that causes me to suffer when using a rubber dome keyboard causes significantly more suffering when using a mouse; it's the reason that I used a Logitech Wireless Trackman Marble for over 10 years before changing my primary desktop to OS X.

    It's worth noting that the USB ports on the daskeyboard are fairly low current. There's no chance of using one to charge an iPhone or iPad in a reasonable amount of time. But it should work fine to power the Mobee Power Bar since I'll leave it plugged in all of the time; it'll essentially just be trickle charging the Mobee Power Bar round-the-clock. Even if it doesn't, it'll be nice to have my USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter literally inches from my Magic Trackpad; it completely eliminates any potential problems with reception.

    I know the daskeyboard surface attracts dust and fingerprints like a magnet. I have a cover designed in CAD to address that issue, which will be cut from anodized aluminum. I may or may not powdercoat it with a textured powder.

• August 18, 2012
  
  • I removed the batteries from my old Best Fortress 1425 rackmount UPS, and cleaned up the inside of its case (vacuum, then the blowgun at 90PSI). I then went to the local Batteries Plus and bought new batteries and installed them. This UPS is ancient, and hence doesn't have an HID-compliant USB port. However, it has true sine wave output and is a rackmount. That's more convenient for my office since I have Middle Atlantic studio racks. I mounted it in the rack to the right of my desk and am now using it.

• August 13, 2012
  
  • I tried using the CalDigit USB 3.0 driver by installing it from MultBeast 5.0.1. With the lynx2mac ethernet driver, I lose my network after sleep/wake (ifconfig en0 shows no IP address assigned, though everything looks OK in System Preferences). With the RealtekRTL81xx ethernet driver, I get almost immediate crashes when using the Razer Naga mouse.

    I've gone back to using the LaCie PXHCD driver (from the LaCie web site, not from MultiBeast 4.6.x) and the lynx2mac ethernet driver. I do sometimes have to unplug/replug my Razer Naga mouse after sleep/wake, but the OS doesn't crash and I don't lose my network.

• August 12, 2012
  
  • I installed XQuartz 2.7.2. I thought I had installed it earlier, but apparently that was on Lion or my MacBook Pro.

• August 11, 2012
  
  • I installed Picasa and SketchUp from Google. I also installed FrontDesigner from Front Panel Express.

    Under my VM for Windows XP, I installed eMachineShop 1.76 from emachineshop.com.

• August 9, 2012
  
  • I moved /System/Library/Extensions/AppleTyMCEDriver.kext to my home directory so I could change my system definition to MacPro 5,1. This let me load the AGPM kext so I could check my video card's power management. I added an entry for my GTX 570 HD in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/Info.plist. Yes, power management is working fine. I see no significant difference in idle temperature, but I didn't expect it; my idle GPU temperature is around 50C, which is expected given that I don't have a ton of airflow over the card. The GPU fan never spins up fast because it doesn't need to run fast. In 3D tests like Unigine, my GPU never gets anywhere near the thermal limit.

    I bought Carbon Copy Cloner. It works well for what I need, and I intend to keep using it.

• August 8, 2012
  
  • I removed the two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green drives from my old FreeBSD desktop. They were not being used there except to hold music. I put them into my hackintosh and will be using them for secondary backup for now, using Carbon Copy Cloner. While these drives are slow, and not the most reliable drives, they'll suffice for now. I have no plans to disable Time Machine, I'll continue to use it to back up to one of my machines in the basement. For now I'm using the trial version of Carbon Copy cloner to see how it goes. If it works as desired, I'll pay for it. I'm using the first drive to backup my data drive. The second drive is being used to back up my SSD which has the operating system. On this second drive, I'll install Chimera so I can boot from it if/when needed.

    I ran the first backup of my OS drive. It took about 37 minutes, 30 minutes of which was data transfer. So in the worst case (SSD completely full), I expect a full backup to take approximately 67 minutes (right now my SSD is only half full). That's significantly faster than a full backup to my low-power machine in the basement.

    I installed the Chimera bootloader on the backup drive, then booted from it by selecting it in my BIOS. It booted fine. It was slow as molasses compared to my SSD, but that was expected. What matters is that it works.

• August 7, 2012
  
  • My first hackintosh is now working essentially flawlessly. Sleep and wake work, my CMOS doesn't reset on reboot, and I don't have graphics power management issues. I would like to try AGPM again, to see if I can make my GTX570 run a little cooler much of the time. But at the moment, the machine works essentially exactly like a real Apple machine.

    As a result, I repartitioned my 500G drive that formerly contained my Lion installation, and will now use it as a data drive. I started transferring my music collection from my old FreeBSD desktop, and when it's done I'll pull the two 1G drives out of that machine to use for backups in the hackintosh. I moved my iTunes Media folder to the 500G drive.

• August 6, 2012
  
  • I discovered a new problem with sleep/wake. If I reboot after having sleep/wake cycles, the CMOS gets reset. The fix was in the forums:

    sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x75\x30\x89\xd8|\xeb\x30\x89\xd8|' /System/Library/Extensions/AppleRTC.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleRTC

    This basically just causes the code to jump over the checksum updates.

    I also bumped my turbo clocks to 42 on all cores. I rarely run my CPU hard, but when I do I want it to run at 4.2GHz. 4.2GHz is mild and safe, given that I have the Corsair H100. My Geekbench score is back to 15,144.

    I updated my VMWare Fusion to 4.1.3 in order to run it on Mountain Lion.

• August 4, 2012
  
  • So far, so good with Mountain Lion. I haven't yet had a problem with sleep/wake, as long as I don't overclock (turbo disabled). If I enable turbo in my BIOS, I sometimes get the 'Computer must be restarted' message coming out of sleep. However, I will play with it some more now that I've installed the AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset.

    One issue I haven't chased down and fixed... it appears that I don't really have power management of the GPU. HWMonitor is reporting it at above 50C all of the time. Duh, that's basically what I expect when using MacPro 3,1 as my system definition. I'm going to stick with it for now, since my sleep/wake is working better.

• August 3, 2012
  
  • I picked up the remaining 16G of Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz memory, bringing my total to 32G. All memory slots are now filled, so I don't have to worry about the slots getting dirty. This is also the maximum amount of memory I can put in the motherboard.

    I also picked up the Samsung 830 256G SSD and another 8G USB stick for UniBeast 1.5.1. I installed UniBeast, and proceeded to install Mountain Lion on the Samsung 830 256G SSD.

    I had a few glitches along the way, mostly with my DSDT not working initially. I think this was due to Safari not saving it properly (tonymac should ditch the stupid menu-only selection on the website). Obviously I had to install my SSDT to get SpeedStep to work correctly. I also had to install the AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset, else my CMOS would be reset at every reboot. And unlike Lion, I decided to use toleda's new patched AppleHDA and ALC889 for audio, which works just dandy.

    One very cool think about Mountain Lion... my GTX570 video card just works, without trying to install the OpenCL enabler from MultiBeast. It also appears to be glitch-free after sleep and wake. I hope this remains true, since I continued to have problems with wake from sleep under Lion.

• July 24, 2012
  
  • I installed Calibre so I can read my iBook content on my desktop or laptop. Don't ask me why Apple doesn't release an iBook application for OS X. The stuff I need to read from iBooks is free Apple content; it's damn silly that some of their programming documentation is only available via iBooks.

• July 23, 2012
  
  • The edge trim for my window cutout arrived today. I installed it. It makes my window cutout look much better.

    I've decided on my additional case lighting. I want the NFLS-SS-A300-1/2M-S (amber) and NFLS-SS-WW300-1/2M-S (warm white) from superbrightleds.com. The white strip will go on the top of the case and the amber will go in the bottom. I wouldn't mind having white in both places, but I don't think I want the brightness of the white hitting my eyes when I walk by my hackintosh.

    My APC Back-UPS XS 1300 continues to show 0 minutes of runtime, and I can't seem to find the cable for it. Not that it really matters; PowerChute isn't available for anything but very old versions of OS X, and from what I've read the APC units don't really work with OS X. The unit functions, in terms of the inverter coming on when I pull the plug from the wall, but I have no way of having my hackintosh shut down when runtime gets low. I've decided I'm going to buy a new CyberPower OR1500PFCRT2U from Amazon. It's a 2U rackmount, line-interactive with pure sine output, for a reasonable price ($410). Importantly, it has an HID-compliant USB port that works with OS X.

• July 22, 2012
  
  • I am now using the rolling platform, and I like it a lot. I moved my desk a bit and put the hackintosh to the left of my desk for easier access. I am still fighting some sleep issues, and I suspect the IOUSBFamily Rollback is part of the issue. Since that rollback had no positive effect for me, I'm going to restore my previous IOUSBFamily from Time Machine.

    I bought new batteries for my APC Back-UPS XS 1300. Normally I only use this to power my monitors, but right now I'm also using it to power the hackintosh. Despite the fact that its output is not a sine wave, it's better than taking the power bumps that seem to be frequent this month. I need to buy new batteries for several more of my UPS systems (all rackmounted systems). At the moment the important one is the Best Fortress 1425 that I normally use for my desktop. I need 4 batteries for it, the cost will be around $160.

• July 21, 2012
  
  • I put the third coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. This is the first coat that wasn't absorbed by the wood. Hopefully I won't need a fourth coat.
    Sleep/wake seems to be working again. I got it working by loading optimized settings in my BIOS and then didn't change my clock multiplier. We'll see how long it works.

    My iPhone wasn't being seen by iTunes. Per suggestion in the tonymacx86 forum, I tried the IOUSBFamily Rollback, but it made no difference. I am still loading the NEC USB3 driver. What does seem to work... using one of the powered USB 3.0 ports on the back.

    I put the fourth coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. This is the final coat. I wish I had something else that needed a finish... I had to destroy the lid on the can of polyurethane to get it open because it was glued shut, but it's still at least 2/3 full. At any rate... the platform is nothing special but looks nicer than I expected and is definitely highly functional. I almost wish the slots would be visible, since they're the most interesting looking feature.

• July 20, 2012
  
  • I ordered the 8507K61 edge trim from McMaster-Carr for my window cutout.

    I finished sanding the rolling platform and put the first coat of polyurethane on it.

    Just for kicks, I tried a system definition of MacPro 5,1 to see if it made any difference with my sleep/wake issues. I copied my original smbios.plist to ~/Hackintosh/smbios.plist.3,1 first. Good thing I did; the 5,1 smbios.plist caused a kernel panic. So instead I went back to 3,1 and no overclocking in my BIOS. For the moment, it seems to have resolved my sleep/wake issues. I doubt it will stay that way; I've done this before and eventually I had wake issues.

    I put a second coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. Blondewood plywood and poplar absorb finishes like crazy, especially if they've been sitting in your home for years. it'll need a third coat and possibly a fourth.

• July 19, 2012
  
  • I updated the BIOS from F10 to F12. No improvement in sleep/wake. I can sleep and wake once. On the second sleep, wake gives me a bit of snow on the first monitor and then a black screen.

    I assembled the wood part of a rolling platform using some scrap 3/4" thick blondewood plywood I had left over from making my bed years ago. I trimmed the edges with 1.5" x .75" poplar. Nothing special here, I tacked it together with my finish nailer and wood glue. I then plunge-cut 23 slots in it with my miter saw, spaced 1/2" apart, which is enough to allow some air to be pulled in from underneath the platform by the bottom intake fan and the power supply fan. OF course, the case has feet too, so it can draw air in even if I had not cut the slots. I rough sanded the top and sides, then installed the casters. I brought it into my office for a test fitment, it's near perfect. I'll finish sanding it tomorrow and start putting polyurethane on it. It'll be nice to have a reasonably good setup for cooling and maintenance.

• July 18, 2012
  
  • The two Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans for the front intake arrived. I had to modify them slightly to fit... they had protruding rings around each screw hole on the intake side of the frame that prevented them from snapping into the front panel of the Fractal Design Arc Midi case. I ground them down with my Dremel and installed them. The machine remains quiet, it is essentially silent when under my desk. The fans in my SLA 1 amplifier are much louder.

    I'm still debating what to do about the filtering of the radiator fans. It's really just obstruction since I'm using them as exhaust. If I change them to intake, it really messes up the whole air flow in the case. For now I'm leaving it alone, since my CPU temperatures are fine. I think my only reasonable option is to cut out the filter above the radiators, but I'm reluctant to do it because the filter material isn't removable from it's frame.

    Yesterday I bought some cheap casters to make my rolling platform. I need to get moving on a design for it. The easy thing to do is use plywood I already have, but I'm leaning toward using perforated stainless steel.

    I still have not completely resolved my sleep/wake issues. They may never be resolved for this motherboard. Probably serves me right for choosing a Gigabyte board and GTX570 video card. On the upside, it's really not unreasonable for me to just shutdown and restart. That will be even more true when I install an SSD. Since I power down my monitors at night, I don't need to be concerned about the power consumption there. And of course I never put my old FreeBSD workstation to sleep because it didn't have sleep functionality (server type motherboard).

• July 17, 2012
  
  • I received the 12"x24" sheet of 3/16" thick scratch-resistant polycarbonate (8707K122), black anodized binding posts (99024A312) and 13/64" drill bit from McMaster-Carr to make my side window. Unfortunately I can't find my edge trim, so I need to order some (McMaster-Carr 8507K61). However, I cut the window in the door and cut the polycarbonate to size, then drilled the holes for the binding posts and installed the window. I like it, it's much better than the hideous grill that was in the side door before and now I don't have a bunch of unfiltered air entering the case.

    I replaced the Corsair H100 fans with the Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans. My core temperatures look fine, and the machine is very quiet.

• July 14, 2012
  
  • I ordered a pair of Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans and a pair of Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans from Amazon.

    The Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans will replace the Corsair fans on the Corsair H100 radiator. The Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans are almost as effective as the Corsair fans, but much quieter and have a 150,000 hour MTBF.

    The Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans will replace the Fractal Design front intake fans. I don't really trust the Fractal Design fans to last very long, and I'm certain that the Xigmatek are quiet since I already have some in the case.

• July 13, 2012
  
  • On Wednesday I received an optical cable to connected the S/PDIF audio output of my motherboard to my Behringer SRC2496. It worked fine until this morning. Sometime last night I had a power outage, and it caused my SRC2496 to stop working.

    After much fiddling and head-scratching, I went back to using the analog audio output of my motherboard. I eventually found a post in a forum on how to reset the SRC2496: hold the EMPHASIS and COPY buttons while powering up. I'll be darned, that appears to have fixed it. However, I don't trust it long-term. I believe it's over 10 years old, I think I bought it in 1998. The DAC in it is really nothing special, and I know the analog stages are low-grade. The main reason I bought it way back when was for digital conversion, and to avoid induced noise on the cable from my PC by moving the DAC close to my pre-amp and amplifier. At the time I was using an m-audio Revolution 7.1 card (which I wish I could still use, it was a nice card for the price). In my current home office, I don't really have noise sources to worry about, so I could just use the analog output of my hackintosh.

    On an entirely different subject... I am stunned at how well everything has been working on my hackintosh. Doing roughly the same things I was doing on my FreeBSD desktop, I see SpeedStep keeping my CPU cores at 1.6GHz most of the time. That's with iTunes playing music, my usual plethora of browser and terminal windows open, etc. I see a good amount of RAM free most of the time. And obviously since my CPUs are running at low speed most of the time, my core temperatures are very low. The GUI is very responsive and I'm running HyperDock with window previews enabled and it's smooth as butter. I really couldn't be happier for what I spent. And now that I have TimeMachine working to one of my FreeBSD servers, I don't have to feel like it's all a temporary experiment.

    I am intending to build a rolling platform to hold my tower. It will have some venting to allow free movement of air into the power supply and bottom intake fan. Right now I have the case propped off of the floor because its feet sink into the carpet, rendering those intake fans useless.

• July 10, 2012
  
  • With a slight overclock in my BIOS (42X CPU multiplier), my geekbench score is now 15,088. Nice that SpeedStep works!

• July 8, 2012
  
  • I finished enough of the assembly to power up the system. I don't have a keyboard, mouse or display connected yet, but it powers up OK and all of the fans and the Corsair H100 are functioning. I believe I can attempt to boot it...

    I created the bootable OS X Lion USB stick using one of my old 8 gigabyte sticks. I need to pull one of my monitors from my current desktop, plug in a keyboard and see if the new system will actually boot.

    I bought a single-link DVI cable from BestBuy (otherwise known as your local rip-off store), and a Rocketfish USB to bluetooth adapter. Not sure the Rocketfish will work, but it's worth a try since it's the only thing I could find locally at 6:30PM on a Sunday. Time to hook things up and see where I get...

    Well, first hitch... UniBeast is not smart enough to emit an error when the target doesn't have a Master Boot Record. It reports success, but you have a USB stick that can't be booted. I repartitioned my 8G USB stick, and reran UniBeast. UniBeast took about half an hour; you can watch the progress by running df once in a while. I then ejected the USB stick from my MacBook Pro, and put it in one of the USB ports I have on the front of my case. Success! However, I had to fight a bit with keyboards and mice. I don't have a USB mouse that works with the bootloader, so I wound up using an old Unicomp USB keyboard with built-in pointing stick and mouse buttons.

    The first thing to do once it's possible: open Utilities->Disk Utility and format the new hard drive (use Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

    A long time later and some fumbling around, I have a basic setup working. One monitor (I haven't loaded the real 570 drivers yet, nor CUDA drivers). Sleep works, which is very nice. My Apple Magick Trackpad works with the Rocketfish USB Bluetooth adapter, though it takes a little bit to come to life after sleep. Dual monitors are working fine, and my Cinebench score shows 43 frames/sec for OpenGL.

    Next up is to see if I can get digital audio (I need to buy a new, long optical cable). For now, I moved the output of my digital equalizer to the output of my Rane BB 44X and plugged the analog output of my motherboard to the input of the Rane BB 44X and that works fine. I can button things up and put the Samsung 830 SSD on my list for a new install. Awesome!

    Next month I'll order a keyboard and the Samsung SSD. In the meantime I need to document all of my settings from Multibeast, including the latest SDST tweak that was needed to make my CPU cores run at the correct speed. My current geekbench score is 14,132.

• July 7, 2012
  
  • I bought many of the parts for my first hackintosh.

    I installed the Seasonic 660W power supply in the Fractal Design Arc Midi case. I also installed the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard and the Xigmatek XLF-F1453 case fans, one in the bottom of the case and one replacing the original Fractal Design fan in the rear. The Fractal Design case fan that was in the rear was moved to the front of the case so that I have two intake fans in the front. I did this because I'm pretty sure I'll eventually be replacing the Fractal Design fans; from what I've read, they don't last a long time.

    I installed the i7 2700K CPU on the motherboard.

    I installed the Corsair fans on the Corsair H100 radiator. I suspect I will eventually replace these fans with something else, but it depends on how well they hold up. I know they're going to be loud. But in the end I'll probably replace the whole H100 setup anyway; I'd like a thicker radiator and I'm leery of leaks.