macOS 10.13 (17A405) - Intel i7-6700k - GTX 980Ti | 100% Success!

After a lot of grief, mainly with audio and graphics, I FINALLY got everything 100% on this machine. Thanks to Discord, a Redditor who has since deleted his account, and lots of Googling, everything works as well as a normal Mac, and it dual boots Windows!

Hardware

  • Intel Core i7-6700k

  • MSI Z270M Mortar

  • 32GB DDR4-2400 RAM

  • Samsung 850 Evo 250GB

  • EVGA GeForce GTX 980Ti Classified

  • Fenvi FV-T919 (for WiFi/Bluetooth/Apple Watch unlock/Handoff)

Setup

Using a vanilla setup was the difference between a troubleshooting nightmare and something that I could go in and tinker with. For those of you using Multibeast/Unibeast, DON'T USE IT. It's not that it's bad, you just don't know what's been added and edited, so you have a very hard time troubleshooting. It's nice for a quick and dirty Hackintosh, but if you plan to maintain it, do yourself a favor and build it vanilla. Tonymac has a thread on how to build the High Sierra USB stick using Terminal

Installed Clover, making sure to select Install for UEFI booting only and Install Clover in the ESP into the flash drive. Drivers64UEFI had EmuVariableUefi-64 and OsxAptivoFix2Drv-64 selected, even though we'll be replacing the last one with OsxAptioFix2Drv-free2000 once Clover has finished installing. As for kexts, AppleALC, FakeSMC, IntelMausiEthernet, Lilu, and USBInjectAll were placed in the Other folder. Finally, apfs was placed in the drivers64UEFI folder so Clover can see the APFS-formatted drives after the initial part of the install.

As for my config.plist, I have it set to these main settings:

Acpi

  • HECI to IMEI

  • HDAS to HDEF

  • FixShutdown_0004

  • DeleteUnused_400000

Boot

  • darkwake=8

  • -xcpm

  • dart=0

  • nada_drv=1

  • kext-dev-mode = 1

Devices

  • USB:

Inject

Add ClockID

FixOwnership

Kernel and Kext Patches

  • Apple RTC

  • AppleIntelCPUPM

  • KernelPm

  • KextsToPatch

  • AppleUSBSHCIPCI: Find 837d8c10, replace 837d81b

Rt Variables

  • ROM and MLB: I have no idea how I set these, I believe these are serial numbers you have to guess and check to find, but there is a thread out there about this

  • BooterConfig: 0x28

  • CsrActiveConfig: 0x0

SMBIOS

  • Product Name: iMac 17,1

  • Board Serial Number, SMUUID: again, serial numbers that have to be randomly generated.

System Parameters

  • Inject System ID

  • NvidiaWeb

Installation

Installation was pretty straightforward. Make sure the motherboard is set to all these settings:

  • VT-d, CFG-Lock, Secure Boot Mode, IO SerialPort disabled
  • OS Type to Other OS
  • XHCI Handoff to Enabled

Not every motherboard will have these settings, but make sure you've looked and/or tried to find something very similarly named.

Now boot into Clover, and select the USB. Go to Disk Utilities, and format the SSD to GUID. IF this is a reinstall of a High Sierra machine, in order to reformat the SSD, you have to unmount the main partition, usually named Macintosh HD , and then format the disk itself. Make sure to select Show all volumes in order to see this.

Once you're done with this, you can go and install macOS onto the SSD. Once it reboots, make sure to boot from the USB from the BIOS. In Clover, boot from the new disk that pops up that should have the Apple logo on it. IT WILL REBOOT AFTER THE INSTALL PROCESS STARTS. Initially I thought it failed as it rebooted pretty much a minute after the Install High Sierra screen popped up, but don't worry! Boot from the USB and the Apple partition again, and the install will continue.

Once this is done, it will restart again. Boot from the USB one more time, and this time, boot from the SSD's partition that should just be labeled macOS. You may see 2 other partitions along with a recovery one. I don't boot from them, don't know what they do, so just don't mess with them.

Set up your Mac, sign into iCloud, all the fun stuff. Once you get to the desktop, this is where the real fun begins.

Post-installation

Download Clover, and install it with the exact same setup as before. Open up the newly visible EFI partition, and install all the same drivers and kexts, except for AppleALC. We will use VoodooHDA instead. Download 2.9d10 from the SourceForge website, and place that into the Other folder. Install the .prefpane from the website as well if you want to fiddle with the settings. Then, download NvidiaGraphicsFixup.kext and XHCI-200-series-injector.kext and place that into the Other folder. Copy and paste the config.plist from the USB over to the EFI partition. Download Clover Configurator, and set CsrActiveConfig to 0x0. This will enable SIP, allowing us to install nVidia web drivers without any additional kexts. Reboot, and you should be able to boot from the SSD from the BIOS into Clover. Select the macOS partition, and it should boot into macOS. Now download the nVidia drivers and install them. It should make you go into System Preferences and allow a piece of it to install. Reboot, and you should have a Hackintosh with all the amenities and features of a normal Mac!

Troubleshooting

The main issue I ran into with this build is audio. Voodoo's version before 2.9d10 didn't have crackling issues on YouTube, but I lost audio after sleep. 2.9d10 fixes these issues, but it crackled only on YouTube (weird right?). My fix was to go into a macOS utilities app called Audio MIDI Setup. From there, I set my output to be 8ch 16-bit 192.0 kHz. This fixed my crackling issues. If you have static issues, the .prefpane will allow you to change the Input Gain for the speakers. Turn it down all the way to get rid of static.

I hope you enjoyed my write-up. For anyone following this guide for their own Hackintosh, THIS SHOULD ONLY BE USED AS A GENERAL GUIDE. Your system will vary, and may have/not have some flukes that I have. Post on /r/hackintosh, ask in the Discord, and Google around. We're all here to help!

submitted by /u/TechSwag
[link] [comments]