Clevo N131WU

This weekend project was born as a way to learn the system in depth both technically and in everyday use before buying real hardware. It turned out to last a whole month's worth of weekends but that was fun nonetheless, as I learned a lot of things.

I followed Dortania's OpenCore guide, spending 6 hours just reading and configuring the USB drive. I got a boot and then passed two weekends troubleshooting the biggest issues. Got a usable/working system and then I proceded to test a number of SMBioses (14.1, 14.2, 15.2, 15.4) to then settle for 14.1, which seemed the best middle ground between performance (tested in Geekbench) and stability. 15.4 works pretty well with somewhat better performance both in multicore and metal but, since Sonoma dropped support for Broadcom cards, I'll just stay with SMBios 14.1 and Ventura.

features and hardware:

• i5 8250u+uhd620
• 32gb ddr4 ram (two populated slots)
• double NVME and SATA storage
• 1080p screen
• hdmi+miniDP+2xUSB3.1+TB3+SD card reader ports
• intel ac9560 (not soldered and not bios locked!!) m.2 card
• 4g module slot (not populated in mine) with two antennas
• Realtek audio module with separated microphone and headphone jacks, can't remember the controller or the necessary alcid, I need to check my config.plist for that
• webcam with windows hello
• Realtek gigabit ethernet
• 36Wh battery

WORKING:

• USB 3.1 ports
• hardware encoding+GPU acceleration: this one was a pain to fix, it didn't work out of the box. After a week I discovered that I wrote a "-" as a "," in my config.plist. Then everything worked perfectly
• keyboard+trackpad
• audio
• HDMI: at first I had blurry pictures and poor colors, had to force rgb mode for my PA279Q as I learned that MacOS treats 2k screens poorly. HDMI audio works perfectly
• card reader
• ethernet: full speed
• usb-c port in regular 3.1 protocol: drives a sitecom/generic Chinese USB+ethernet+card reader hub/monitor stand that connects to my monitor via a dp to hdmi internal controller. I added it to my desk setup halfway through the build, it worked wonky but after a USB remap in windows everything worked as expected
• backlight
• webcam: ir windows hello hardware is obviously not working but webcam is, showing a good picture
• iMessage+FaceTime+siri+iCloud account
• NVME and SATA ports: NVME is seen as a regular internal disk with expected speeds, SATA port seem to be seen as a usb drive but works. Need to test the speed but I usually leave it unpopulated when testing hackintosh. The SATA drive is my main work NTFS wdrive so I can't risk it
• internal fan: was wonky and irregular (same as in windows, this is a common problem in clevo laptops) but after adding SSDT-SMBS-MCHC in post install it worked with a seemingly better curve
• sleep: at first is seemed to detect a closed lid but laptop remains turned on. After opening the lid again I was prompted to the login screen. Now sleep works correctly but laptop takes some time to get in sleep state. Could be because I just used pmset lidwake 0 (and then 1) on terminal as per the "fixing sleep" section of the guide, who knows.

SOMEWHAT WORKING:

• wifi+bt: works thanks to AirportItlwm.kext. wifi works perfectly, bt does not. AirPods Pro 2 are detected but not working unless I change microphone input in settings, but sound is distorted. Can't connect via bt to external speakers or other devices. handoff works one way as expected, sometimes with buggy notifications. Will maybe buy a BCM card in the coming months but that's not a dealbreaker. I installed hackintosh to familiarize myself with macOS and anything technical I'd need to know before buying an M3 pro Mac.
• battery: correctly detected in both the upper bar and system info (with cycle counts, capacity and voltage correctly stated) but the barrel plug charger isn't. When plugged it states the correct 100% battery but does not show any plugged icon/state (also verified in system info). When unplugged, the battery reads 1% (sometimes forever sometimes for a brief moment before going back to 100%) but works without turning off. This breaks clamshell mode as the laptop thinks it's always on battery power and make it go sleep when the lid gets closed. Is that an ACPI patching issue?
• internal screen: works perfectly after a cold boot, but sometimes does not show anything after a reboot (while visibly turned on with backlight working). I have to use the external monitor in these cases. Either closing the lid to force a sleep state or a shutdown and reboot with usb-c hub unplugged usually fixes the problem. I then plug the hub back after logging in. This happened with every SMBIOS I tested. May be an incorrect config.plist configuration for my iGPU, both reddit and the various forums seem pretty confused about the parameters to use with the UHD620. I'll investigate in the coming days, trying alternative values
• find my network: phone and AirPods detected, phone gets notification+sound when played, AirPods don't play any sounds, hackintosh not detected. This is hardware dependent iirc, a compatible Broadcom card should fix it easily
• Internal keyboard: some swapped keys compared to standard Italian layout but that's a minor annoyance as I use an external keyboard anyway

NOT WORKING:

• 10bit color in my monitor via HDMI both native and via DP to HDMI connection: could be either port/cable dependent as it doesn't work in windows too or ycbcr protocol dependent as MacOS incorrectly detects some monitors as TVs. I forced RGB with an EDID override tho and srgb+argb native monitor modes are correctly detected now. Works perfectly in windows via native miniDP
• nothing else major for the time being, maybe boot chime but I didn't add it yet

NOT TESTED:

• thunderbolt 3 port: not detected in system info. I don't have a thunderbolt hub/egpu anymore to test it/map it. My hub is stated to be thunderbolt but I suspect it acts as a regular usb3 hub when not powered. Don't have a pd charger to test this, I'll test it again sometime in the future
• miniDP
• Dualbooting: as this was a first time build, I used a spare kingston nvme drive for testing purposes. I won't try dual booting as, for the time being and before I buy an actual Mac, this is my main Windows work machine.