I wanted to play some newer games on my HTPC hackintosh but I had an MSI RX 480 4GB that was aging and wanted to upgrade to a 5700 XT. Bought the Gigabyte Gaming OC 8GB version. Purpose of this post is to laugh at myself, jot some notes down, and help anyone in the future who has this motherboard or similar problems.
Specaroos
- CPU: Core i5 7600
- Motherboard: ASrock H270 ITX/AC
- RAM: TeamGroup DDR4-2400 16GB RAM
- Old Video Card: MSI RX 480 4GB
- New Video Card: Gigabyte Gaming OC 8GB
- PSU: Seasonic FOCUS Plus 650 Gold
- SSD macOS: Samsung 960 EVO 500 GB
- SSD Windows: SanDisk Extreme Pro 240 GB
- HDD Storage: Apple HDD 500 GB (salvaged from my Late-2014 Mac Mini)
- Case: Cooler Master Elite 130
- Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 120
- Wifi/Bluetooth: BRCM94360CS2 with a NGFF(M.2) Key A/E Adapter
Pre-work
- Had an already working OpenCore, USBMap
- Made sure kexts were up-to-date including Lilu and WEG
- Added the adgpmod=pikera boot flag
- Made sure I had a backup "known good" EFI on a flashdrive
What I should have done
- Install the new card
- Reset the motherboard CMOS
- Boot into Windows SSD and update the VBIOS from Gigabyte
- Used OpenCore's reset NVRAM function before attempting to boot into MacOS
What actually transpired
- First, after installing the new card, my motherboard did not detect anything in the slot. I was able to use IGPU in Bios/Windows. Swapping back to my RX480, system worked.
- Reset the CMOS! Short those jumpers.
- Finally able to POST with HDMI plugged in via video card
- Windows detects and installs card fine, able to play the game Control on High settings. Yummy.
- Booted into macOS
- I can see the initial boot apple logo progress bar, but when the display initializes I got only a completely black screen (different than my TV's "no display connected" error)
- Good thing I have a backup Macbook Air and Screen Sharing turned on, able to do some troubleshooting...
- Reset NVRAM with OpenCore
- Cool the card now outputs after boot and I can access my macOS desktop!
- Bad news bears: no video during post or reboots between OSes
- Weird audio hissing/popping/video stuttering
- YouTube videos, Twitch, files directly off of my NAS...
- Good grief what the heck! It's completely fine in Windows. What is going on here?
- There's some kind of weird audio clock issue. I have a wireless USB headset and microphone device, and my soundbar. I usually use a Multi-output device in the Audio MIDI Setup app to output audio to both devices so I don't have to switch manually. When I messed with the sample rate sometimes my audio would output at a lower pitch or get more poppy.
- I Changed my SMBIOS from iMac18,3 to iMacPro1,1
- Not sure if this was necessary, but I was changing lots of things to try to get rid of the audio problems
- One Day Later...
- Maybe the power table is messed up in Mac OS. Wait... you never updated the card's VBIOS!
- Boot into my Windows SSD and update the 5700 XT's VBIOS
- Gigabyte website says, on the new BIOS "Reduce the GPU temperatures by increasing the default fan speed." It fixed more than that for me!
- Audio problem solved!
- The card now outputs during POST and OS Boot as well as reboots in-between the OSes!
- Huzzah!
I also did a lot of other junk like disabling onboard audio and AppleALC.kext since I never really use onboard audio this seemed reasonable. Fiddling with the IGPU settings in BIOS, and many more useless things. All told, took me about 3.5 hours to figure everything out.
I hope someone in the future finds this to be helpful.
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