May experiment with Paragon NTFS, which wasn't stable earlier, but may be now that I updated the SSD firmware.

Hey all, this is my first post on reddit (go easy, please not my face)! This community and all the resources have been super duper helpful in getting my machine rocking with Mojave! Thank you all so very much!

In this post, I will detail the process, the components, what I did and didn't do and how I solved it and hopefully some people might be able to glean some useful information if they eventually stumble on the exact same hardware components as I.

Background

Initially, I had a Windows^TM computer where I played around usually and did Windows-only things. I started missing what OSX could do with all the grunt and power of a PC (I had a MacBook Pro, but I do some graphic design and video editing on the side and prefer OSX for that). The logical solution? Spend a week building, buying and bettering my rig and turning it into a cross-platform brick-for-a-dang-week masterpiece.

The Build

Obligatory pic ('scuse the rat's nest of cables):

The hardware setup taken by a potato human (shot on an iPhone X)

Hardware acceleration is enabled (I think!)

Components

Component	Name	Comment
Motherboard	Asus ROG Strix Z370-F	No native WiFi
CPU	Intel Core i7 8700K Six Core LGA 1151 3.7 GHz	OC to 5 GHz
OSX GPU	Asus Radeon RX 580 Dual 8GB OC	Uses this in OSX
Windows GPU	Asus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ROG Strix 11GB	Old GPU that's not compatible in deference to the holy Apple gods.
RAM	Corsair Vengeance LED 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	OC on XMP
OSX Drive	Intel 600p Series 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive	Old drive that's more compatible with OSX
Windows Drive	Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive	New drive that I use with Windows
Other Storage	2 x Samsung 860 QVO 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive	Use these for storage and backup
PSU	Silverstone Strider Titanium 600 W 80+ Titanium Modular	I like to spend money
WiFi	Asus PCE-AC68 PCIe x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi Adapter	I didn't think this through, still works
Bluetooth	Some CSR 4.0 dongle	Will get fenvi-T919 in future
Case	Fractal Design Define R5 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case	Nice case, no USB-C :( or tempered glass :[
CPU Cooler	Corsair H100i RGB PLATINUM SE 63 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler	Nice cooler with RGB, got it on sale :)
Monitor	2 x Acer XB271HU bmiprz 27.0" 2560x1440 165 Hz Monitor	I love these monitors, so smooth!
Audio Codec	ALCS1220A	It's in the MB specs, but no harm in listing it here (layout 1 worked OOB for me)

link to PCPartPicker

Please note that although the bluetooth dongle works, it has trouble connecting. The WiFi seems to work perfectly well, so I lucked out since I bought it for my Windows side before considering Hackintoshing (has a Broadcom chip that seems mainly compatible). Airdrop, Handoff and everything else seems to work fine (even though I usually use an Ethernet wired connection).

Hardware Config

• PCE-AC68 in PCIE_X1_1.
• 1080 Ti in PCIE_X16/X8_1 (DP to DP cables for G-Sync).
• RX 580 in PCIE_X8_2 (DP to HDMI cables for compatibility/less configuration).

EFI and Kexts

EFI:

EFI and setup files

Kexts:

• AppleALC (1.4.1)
• FakeSMC (1800) (including all other sensor kexts)
• IntelMausiEthernet (2.5.0d14)
• Lilu (1.3.8)
• USBInjectAll (0.7.3)
• WhateverGreen (1.3.2)

BIOS

Settings mostly similar to lepus48's build.

Guides

I first followed the beautiful notes left by corpnewt's Vanilla Guide that stuff is better than crack really well-written!

There were a couple of things I had to do later which I wish I had done first:

• Read about similar installations and motherboards: lepus48's guide is a little outdated, but still useful (SSDT-USB.aml really helped out for making all my baby USB ports available)!
• Dual booting with Windows and Linux and still want to keep your NVidia card? See sidebar link for Mykola's guide. I chose option 4.

Post Installation Configuration

The only thing I had to do deviating from corpnewt's Vanilla guide was to strictly disable the PCI-E x16 slot that my 1080 Ti was occupying. I followed Mykola's guide (see above) so I could use NVidia on Windows and AMD on OSX.

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Disabling the NVidia GFX card. WARNING: This is specifically for Slot 1!

Things I thought would help but turned out didn't:

• Some config files I looked at had Halt Enabler fix enabled. This didn't seem to help so I left it alone.
• Following this guide for GPU recommendations: GPUs Compatibility, which linked to tonymacx86 Fl0r!an's Guide told me I needed RadeonDeInit, I found I didn't so I disabled it (but this may not be the case for you).
• I found blanket covering Inject NVidia and not targeting the specific slot caused some video errors.
• I keep getting gIOScreenLockState 3 for the NVidia card, but it doesn't seem to affect operation right now.
• AirportBrcmFixup was not required for my card, it somehow worked OOB.
• Initially I used the 19,2 SMBIOS definition but found 18,3 to be much more stable.

Problems and Solutions

Graphics patchy and glitchy during installation!

Since I had no experience with the scary Intel framebuffers and disabling GPUs, I sort of stumbled my way through a lot of screen tearing problems whilst going through initial Mojave installation. You should follow corpnewt's guide and use the -wegnogpu flag to disable NVidia cards during this step.

Freezes around one minute after booting!

Update SSD Firmware for Samsung 960 Evo Plus:

I had an older Samsung 970 Evo Plus which was not compatible with OSX firmware-wise. This often lead to crashes about one minute after startup, which happened randomly (sometimes I could get in and do things semi-stably). Unfortunately, this confused the heck out of me because I was not using OSX on this SSD, but rather the much stable Intel 600p , which most people had no problem with. The only clue I had was that the NVME IO crash would be in the stacktrace afterwards. Updating the firmware allowed OSX to mount this bad boy even though it was never used.

Steps to fix:

1. Download the firmware update: Samsung 970 EVO Plus Firmware Update.
2. Use a USB stick to burn/flash the ISO on your SSD, I use BalenaEtcher.
3. Flash that puppy onto the USB.
4. Backup your SSD and pray to Lord Electron that your SSD won't die.
5. Boot into the USB by pressing F8 on restart (or whatever you use to boot into UEFI).
6. Follow prompts.
7. Confirm with Samsung Magician that it's updated or is bricked
8. Celebrate if updated, cry if not.

Loud AF Fans:

Boy were my fans going at it! I tried to fix this firmly in BIOS, but it didn't seem to take hold after booting. The solution was to use MacsFanControl, which for some reason worked! It works best with FakeSMC which has more detailed SMC information to shoot back to MacsFanControl.

Fans only move when you do! SUPER HAWT.

USB Keyboard doesn't work!

This was mainly due to the dodgy USB hub controller on the Das Keyboard. Since it doubles as a HID device and a USB keyboard hub, even the motherboard has trouble finding and detecting it sometimes. Only solution is to replug it back in.

My screen is black on startup!

In my case it was because I used DP to HDMI cables (this is so I wouldn't have to constantly swap cables between OSX and Windows), so power-wake commands weren't being sent through. I just hit the monitor config buttons to wake them up manually.

Time machine and CPU-intensive tasks cause UI lag!

I heard somewhere that UI animations and graphics are actually offloaded to the iGPU, this will make it lag during CPU-intensive tasks, but usually isn't ever a problem if you also have dGPUs. This (in my case) was actually caused by some weird conflict between NVidia, the iGPU and bad BIOS settings. Make sure primary display is PCI, Multimonitor output is enabled and there's plenty of memory (64 M or above). Then make sure the devices for graphics are configured properly.

Final tips and notes

• Keep things minimal! Always tick or untick options in Clover or play around with kekts one at a time to determine if what you're doing is helping or not, this helps isolate the issue.
• Try not to use Clover's kext downloader, the latest kexts have probably already fixed a problem you're currently experiencing. Get your kexts here, which are automatically built when new releases come out.
• I almost asked for help but then I remembered that momma didn't raise no pussy there were forums out there and I hadn't exhausted all my options. The freezing problem related to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus was solved basically the day before this post when I found an esoteric post detailing the problem and then suspected the firmware. Praise the search engine.
• Also great and many thanks to everyone on the Hackintosh scene, special thanks to corpnewt for the Vanilla Guide. Going through this took some effort, but thinking about people working through this without even a guide?! Insane! Props to them for having that fortitude to go through with it and the magnanimity to share it, good on ya!
• Apologies in advance if there are any errors, please tell me about it!

Future Additions

• I'll be putting in a T919 to replace the ASUS PCE-AC68.
• May expand my memory to be more ridiculous.
• May experiment with Paragon NTFS, whcih wasn't stable earlier, but may be now that I updated the SSD firmware.