Finally finished my Film Editing Hackintosh running Mojave, Avid Media Composer 2019.12.1 2020.4 and Davinci Resolve 16!
I'm going to give an overview of the process in case it helps someone later.
Took a few weeks of preparation picking parts and reading guides - and 3 obsessive days of work with much help from Discord and the forums.
I followed the Dortania Guide - henceforth referred to as 'The Guide'.
My parts:
- Asus z370g WIFI Gaming motherboard
- I9-9900k CPU
- Corsair H60 AIO cooler
- BCM94360NG Wifi/Bluetooth card
- 2x Crucial P1 500GB Hard Drives
- 2x 16GB Crucial Vengeance DDR4 3000 RAM
- Corsair SF600 PSU
- Blackmagic Decklink Mini Monitor (HD)
My build:
All straightforward except I had to dismantle the built in wifi housing and remove the glued in Intel wifi card so I could replace it with the Broadcom chip. It was a 1 to 1 swap, no adaptors necessary.
Here is the WIFI housing disassembled
My EFI:
ACPI:
- SSDT-EC.aml (custom from Windows SSDTTime)
- SSDT-PLUG.aml (custom from Windows SSDTTime)
- SSDT-USBX.aml (prebuilt from The Guide)
Drivers (all from The Guide):
- HfsPlus.efi
- OpenCanopy.efi (aded later for OpenCore GUI boot screen)
- OpenRuntime.efi
Kexts (all from The Guide unless noted):
- AppleALC.kext
- IntelMausi.kext
- Lilu.kext
- NVMeFix.kext
- SMCProcessor.kext
- SMCSuperIO.kext
- USBPorts.kext (custom built USB Mapping after successful installation via Hackintool app)
- VirtualSMC.kext
- WhateverGreen.kext
Resources (optional, but I’m using for OpenCanopy boot selection GUI):
All the ones from OcBinaryData-master (linked in The Guide)
BIOS settings (this took the longest in some ways because I had to find everything, so here are the locations of what I could find):
- Boot/Fast Boot - Disabled
- Boot/CSM/Launch CSM - Disabled
- Boot/Secure Boot/OS Type - Other OS
- Advanced/CPU Configuration/SW Guard Extensions (SGX) - Disabled
- Advanced/CPU Configuration/CPU Power Management Control/CFG Lock - Disabled
- Advanced/CPU Configuration/Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) - Enabled
- Advanced/CPU Configuration/Hyper Threading - Enabled
- Advanced/System Agent Configuration/VT-d - Disabled
- Advanced/System Agent Configuration - Above 4G decoding - Enabled
- Advanced/PCH-FW Configuration/Intel Platform Trust - Disabled
- Advanced/System Agent Configuration/Graphics/iGPU - Enabled
- Advanced/System Agent Configuration/Graphics/DVMT - 64
Couldn't find in BIOS (if you know where this is let me know!):
- Execute Disable Bit (XD bit)
- EHCI/XHCI Hand-off
Overview:
Everything was pretty much plug and play, but there were some issues that I had to figure out.
First of all I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the OpenCore boot concept, though it didn’t result in any errors: First the machine boots the motherboard BIOS - then you tell it to boot from your USB install drive - then it essentially loads what I needed to think of as the OpenCore EFI BIOS from your USB stick - where you select with more specificity what you want to boot.
So you can do weird things like boot your finished OSX install from your USB stick EFI (which is really helpful if you fuck something up). Or You can use your OSX EFI to boot something off your USB stick.
So at first you want to boot the USB install using the USB EFI - then you want to boot OSX from the USB stick EFI - then you want to copy that EFI over to your Mac SSD and ultimately boot OSX from your Mac SSD EFI. Anyways, I got through the whole thing without understanding any of that, so don’t worry if that is the most confusing thing you’ve ever read.
Anyways, I feel like I had to reboot a few times during my first install to get my selections correct.
Install was otherwise totally straightforward.
After getting OSX up and running I copied my USB EFI over to my main HD.
And then I needed to do these small fixes:
To get DRM 4 working for the Apple TV app with the RX580, I had to add the shikigva=80 value in my config.plist. (Instructions are in The Guide)
To get AppleALC working the way I liked, I ended up going with layout 20 - so that it just registers three things: speakers, mic, and line in.
To get my USB ports all mapped correctly, I didn’t need any extra kexts. Just changed the XhciPortLimit in the config that is mentioned in the guide. I used Hackintool and simply plugged a usb3 drive into each port to map where it was located - then did the same with a usb2 device - then I labeled each one USB2 or USB3 - I labeled the bluetooth one internal - then I deleted the rest and did an export from Hackintool of the layout. Dropped that kext into the kexts folder and updated my OC snapshot, changed the XhciPortLimit back to false. And it was good to go.
Had to get my MAC address to line up - very easy, but thought I’d mention it.
Oh and for the record the Blackmagic card works the same as it did in my older Mac Pro - just install the Blackmagic driver/sofware and it’s ready to go.
And that’s it!
Software:
So I initially did all this in Catalina and it was working just fine, but Media Composer 2020.4 was crashing on launch. There were two plugins (MSP_AVCHD.avx and TSParser.acf) that it would hit that would just throw the whole launch process. I was able to work around this by holding option during the entire launch process and selecting ‘HW SDK’ for audio, but I didn’t like that I had to do that for every launch.
So I saved my whole EFI - copied it over to my usb stick and made a new installer with Mojave. Started by running Avid Media Composer 2019.12.1. No crash on launch. Update: But unfortunately I was getting redraw issues - the numerical values from trim mode wouldn't disappear when I'd go back to source/record mode. So I decided to try MC 2020.4, but on Mojave. This works perfectly so far (knock on wood). Getting really good playback on 3k files Prores4444 files in green 'full quality' playback mode.
My Cinebench score is around 4500 if that means anything to you. Curious to see how it looks with an overclock.
I did a Prores HQ export from Resolve and the 60s clip finished in 28 seconds. More than twice as fast as my older computer.
Todo List:
I have not yet done the security stuff like enable FileVault and all that. For some reason I feel like it’s going to make life more difficult down the road? If anyone has opinions on this part of the build I'd love to hear them.
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